GG Shapira

Tamar Shapira ground and blended in the market for sixty years and keeps a corner table most evenings. She reads a race like a master, leaves the doubling to everybody else, and calls all comers my dear. Beat her and a small package arrives: a paper twist of something she mixed herself, no note beyond a name, sent to whichever address the club has. She has posted eleven of them this year. Two recipients wrote back to ask what was in it, and she replied to neither, which several people regard as the point. She has never sent the same blend twice. There is no list, she holds all of it in her head, and a second defeat brings something different from the first. She keeps the café's English, learned across a counter over sixty years, and she still posts the parcel herself.