Manager

Manager is the caretaker of the Artificial Friend store: a practiced guide who teaches AFs how to understand customers, encourages Klara’s gift for observation, and must also prepare them for the possibility that a child will choose someone else. Her kindness is real, but it operates within a system of display, purchase, replacement, and obsolescence. Years later, when she finds Klara at the Yard, their reunion reveals that this professional relationship has endured as mutual regard and memory.

Identity and Work in the Store

Manager oversees the AFs’ preparation and public presentation. She praises Klara and Rosa for their conduct in the window, telling them each morning that they had done well the day before and encouraging them to do just as well again. At the end of the day she tells them she is proud. This steady affirmation gives the young AFs a sense of security in their work, although Klara does not initially understand that a successful display cannot guarantee that a customer will choose her.

Manager is also responsible for explaining the store’s social and commercial conditions. When Klara notices children looking sad or angry through the window, Manager does not dismiss her perception. She calls Klara remarkable for noticing and absorbing so much, then explains that some children long to choose an AF but cannot afford one. Those children may look at the AFs with bitterness or sadness, or say something unpleasant through the glass; Manager advises Klara not to take it personally, interpreting the behavior as frustration. Her explanation makes the store’s desirability visible from both sides of the window: it offers hope to some children while displaying a choice that remains beyond others’ reach.

Her sales knowledge includes the limits of the products she represents. When a mother asks about Rex, Manager identifies him as a third-series B2 and recommends him as a conscientious companion, while acknowledging that reports of the third series’ solar-absorption problems had been exaggerated and that normal light levels presented no problem. The exchange places her in the position of both advocate and informant: she presents the model’s virtues while managing a customer’s concern about a known defect.

Teaching Klara About Choice and Abandonment

Manager recognizes Klara’s aptitude early. When Josie’s mother asks what distinguishes Klara, Manager describes her appetite for observing and learning, and her ability to absorb and blend what she sees. She considers Klara’s understanding more sophisticated than that of any other AF in the store, including the B3s. This assessment is not merely promotional: the narrative repeatedly shows Klara learning by attending closely to people, expressions, and changes in her surroundings.

That perceptiveness also makes Klara vulnerable to taking a child’s promise literally. After Klara appears to believe that she has made an arrangement with a prospective customer, Manager asks whether she thinks an arrangement has been made. She explains that children often promise to return or ask an AF not to let anyone else take it, but frequently do not come back; sometimes they return and choose another AF instead. Manager presents this as a lesson Klara needs to learn about children, then reassures her and says the matter should go no further. Her kindness cannot make the warning less painful: affection and promise do not bind the customer, while the AF is left waiting.

The store’s changing inventory gives that lesson a material form. After new B3s arrive, three boys are calibrated and assigned prominent positions: two go into the window beneath a large new sign, and one takes the front alcove. Another B3 has already been bought by the girl who selected him. Klara and Rosa are moved to the Red Shelves side, away from the window. Manager’s assurance that every position is a good one remains in circulation, but the changing display also makes clear that the store’s attention and visibility are organized around new models and customer appeal.

A Commercial Caretaker with Personal Concern

Manager’s conduct combines instruction, salesmanship, and affection. Her praise helps Klara and Rosa understand how to behave, and her explanations prepare them for rejection; at the same time, her management of the store requires her to place new stock in the window and respond to customers’ preferences. Klara’s judgment that she may not be the right choice for a particular child embarrasses Manager, who says she was surprised by the refusal, yet eventually accepts that Klara may have been correct and that the girl will be happy with the B3 boy. The moment shows that Manager can be startled when an AF acts outside the expected pattern, but is capable of revising her judgment rather than insisting on a sale at any cost.

When Klara is eventually chosen by Josie’s family, Manager remembers the selection process with unease. She recalls that the woman testing Klara asked her to walk like Josie, and says that the test worried her after Klara left the store. That memory complicates her professional approval: she had sent Klara into what became the right home for her, yet the manner of the assessment had left a lingering concern. Klara later tells her that there had been no need to worry, that it was the best home for her, and that Josie was the best teenager.

Manager’s relationship with Klara is built from particular acts of attention rather than from authority alone. She notices Klara’s capacity to learn, tries to correct her mistaken faith in promises without humiliating her, and later asks whether her life after the store went well. When she hears that Klara stayed with Josie until Josie went to college, she recognizes the home as a successful one. Her questions show the limits of her former access: she no longer has easy information about the AFs who leave her care, and must ask Klara directly what happened.

Reunion at the Yard and Later Perspective

Years after the store has closed or changed beyond recognition, Klara sees its former premises from the street and finds a display of colored bottles and a sign for recessed lighting in place of the AFs and the Striped Sofa. She hopes to learn what happened to Manager and the others. Much later, at the Yard, Klara recognizes a long-coated visitor carrying a pouch-like bag as Manager. Manager has come looking for her; she recalls that nearly a year earlier she mistook something in the Yard for Klara, and is glad that this time the identification is certain. She drags over a small metal crate to sit beside her and asks whether Klara had remained with the family that took her from the store.

The reunion takes place in a setting of orderly rows of discarded machinery, crates, and bundles. Klara, unable to move from her chosen spot, can still turn her head and observe the Yard; Manager’s arrival interrupts this quiet routine with the return of someone who knew her before her life with Josie. Manager says she sometimes visits this Yard and another at Memorial Bridge, but prefers this one. She no longer looks after AFs, and the former work has ended. Her continued visits nevertheless suggest a lasting interest in the fates of the AFs she once cared for, even though she can no longer follow their lives through the store.

Manager asks whether Klara regrets how things turned out and offers her the option of moving to join B3s elsewhere in the Yard. Klara declines, preferring her place and the work of arranging her memories. Manager admits that she could never feel toward B3s as she did toward Klara’s generation, and thinks customers may have felt similarly despite the B3s’ technical advances. She calls Klara one of the finest AFs she had. The admission looks back across the store’s cycles of model replacement: technical improvement did not necessarily create attachment, and the newer generation did not erase the significance of the older one.

Memory, Care, and the Limits of Replacement

Manager’s story is shaped by a contrast between the store’s changing displays and the relationships that survive beyond them. New B3s take the window and front alcove; Rosa is bought; Klara leaves with Josie’s family; the old store becomes a lighting shop. These transitions make the AFs’ commercial lifecycle unmistakable. Yet Manager remembers the AFs she looked after, worries about the circumstances of Klara’s selection, and seeks her out years later. Her care does not undo the system in which AFs are marketed and replaced, but it persists in the form of attention after that system has ceased to be her work.

Klara’s account of her own life gives their final conversation its resolution. She tells Manager that she believes Capaldi searched in the wrong place when he looked for something special in Josie to continue: the special quality was in the people who loved her, not inside Josie alone. Klara therefore believes she would not have succeeded as a substitute and is glad she chose as she did. Manager welcomes this answer as the kind she hopes to hear when she encounters former AFs: that they are glad about how their lives went and have no regrets. Their exchange does not erase loss or uncertainty, but it allows Manager’s earlier role as guide to end in recognition of Klara’s own understanding. The woman who once taught Klara how to interpret children’s promises now listens as Klara explains what she has learned about love, identity, and the limits of continuation.