a draft
So... I've been writing a novella. For a novella class I'm taking. It's due Monday, and there's so much more I want to have done, but I don't think I'll be getting a lot farther than this. Just no time. But here's the draft of what I have, for those interested (mostly for Mike <3). Divided into chapters because of LJ's post size limitations.
I
The ad in the newspaper said remarkably little: Wanted: shop clerk. Must know how to operate a cash register. Must have people skills exceeding the shop keeper’s own. Expected to handle sales, stock shelves, take inventory, answer phone. No experience necessary. An address and phone number followed, but no name was listed for either the shop or its owner.
It was peculiar, maybe even a little shifty-a no questions kind of situation that probably should have raised a red flag or two. But as long as the muddy waters clouded both banks, he figured it would work in his favour. Not that he was shifty-just your standard college dropout, adrift in the vast sea of confused unemployment. A graphic design major at the Kansas City Art Institute for two years, it had taken him only half that time to find that art was not something he enjoyed nearly as much as he had thought before entering college. In fact, once those two years were up, he had built up a healthy distaste for the subject and anyone who showed more than a passing interest in it-Art People, moony-eyed and pretentious, were not his crowd.
His mother had done a poor job of hiding her relief at his renunciation of the art world. “Oh, Jonathan,” she’d sighed into the phone when he had first broached the subject of leaving, “that’s too bad. That’s really just too bad. I suppose you’ll have to move back home.”
Home was a population-of-300, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it pit stop a few hours east of Kansas City, and he had no intention of returning there to be cajoled by his mother into working with her at the one gas station standing between the city limit signs. No, it was off to Ashwick Chase for him-a hub halfway between nowhere and the city that would, he figured, offer him a handful of brainless minimum wage jobs he could weather while he determined what his newfound disdain for art had left him with.
Though she made a fuss about it, his mother helped him with the deposit and first month’s rent on a one-bedroom apartment on the south end of town. She also insisted on buying him a carload of groceries and a few pieces of cheap furniture, complaining the whole while as though these purchases had been made at his prompting rather than hers.
That had been three weeks ago. It was the beginning of November now. With the month’s rent paid and last month’s utilities covered, Jonathan was forced to acknowledge that he was running uncomfortably low on cash. Bills loomed from the dark closet of the future like a pair of puffed-up parachute pants, waiting for the right time to fling open the door and declare triumphantly, “Thought you could forget about me, eh!” Car insurance, cell phone, internet-all would need to be paid up before the 30th. Especially the internet-already living on the edge, a daring young man with no health insurance, it was vitally important that WebMD be accessible at all times.
With a population nearing 75,000, Jonathan never imagined Ashwick Chase would be so devoid of work. He harboured no delusions of finding a career there or being too good to man a drive-through window or stock shelves at Wal-Mart. Convenience stores, gas stations, restaurants, data entry gigs, factory work-he sent out applications indiscriminately. Even the ads requiring work experience were answered provided Jonathan thought he could fake it well enough. But nothing panned out. Not a single place, from Subway to Walgreen’s to the seedy 7-11 a block from his apartment, returned his calls or visits with good news. Most weren’t hiring at all, and those that were somehow managed to fill every open position right around the time he handed in his application.
So it was with a pitiably small hope that Jonathan sat at his kitchen card table and contemplated the strange ad over coffee. Maybe this time, he thought, but was far from convincing himself as he flipped open his phone and dialed the number in the newspaper. It rang several times, uninterrupted by warm human voice or grainy automated message, and he was nearly ready to heave a sigh and resign himself to trying again later when he heard the distantly familiar click of a handset being lifted from a base.
“Yes?” It was a man’s voice, not warm at all, but gruff as though the ringing phone had taken him away from something important. For a moment Jonathan said nothing, realizing with a brief, irrational dread that he had no idea who was meant to be on the other end of the line. He looked to the ad for help but was dismayed to find it hadn’t changed.
“Uh,” he ventured, and the man’s impatience began to seep through the receiver like cold coffee through the bottom of a paper cup. “Jonathan,” he blurted. “Jonathan Stillwell. I’m calling about the want ad in this week’s paper-about the clerk position? There was no name, maybe this isn’t the right-”
“Yes,” the voice repeated, “I need the position filled immediately. Be down to the shop by ten o’clock.” The voice left no window for protest. With the beginning wuh of wait on Jonathan’s lips, the line clicked and went dead. He was baffled. It sounded like he’d been given an interview, but the call was just a one-minute blur of noise in his short-term memory. And he still didn’t have a name.
He closed his phone, and the blue glow of the front screen told him it was already 9:26. Of course it was, he thought dismally, but that made up his mind on whether or not he would change into something more respectable. There was no time, and he assumed it would be better to be punctual in jeans than tardy in dress slacks. Hoping desperately for the small mercy of light morning traffic, Jonathan left his apartment, taking the newspaper with him.
Situated near the river, the neighbourhood was not new. There was an old cynicism beaten into the pavement, something Jonathan felt oozing up through the floorboard as he drove, something that made the soles of his feet tingle in his sneakers. The buildings were all squat and crowded and weathered, quiet beige and clay-red with flat, even roofs and narrow windows. They looked like ancient, square-shouldered sentinels, watching the city sprawl up successfully around them and disapproving haughtily of the whole affair.
The shop, perched on the corner of Riverside and Holmes, was no exception. The brick was worn and dark, the corners all softened and round with age, but it was well taken care of. There was no graffiti, no chips or cracks, no missing bricks like gaps in an otherwise perfect smile. The wide, clean front windows and the door were framed with a somber green molding that made the inside of the shop look darker than he suspected it was. It looked neat. Respectable. Almost quaint. To the left of the door, painted in tall, slanted letters that matched the molding, was the word CURIOS. Behind it, as well as in the opposite window, were big displays of junk, garbage, and various useless knick knacks. So, he thought as he pushed the door open (“Come in!” invited the sign, “We’re open!”), it’s a pawn shop.
A bell mounted over the door chimed cheerily to announce him, and a man’s voice accompanied it. “You’re late, Mr. Stillwell,” it observed. It was no friendlier in person than it had been over the phone, but Jonathan’s immediate impression was that the man to whom it belonged could have sounded no other way.
He was, Jonathan determined quickly, odd. Bent over the front counter with a jeweler’s glass to his eye, he was examining something cradled carefully in one hand-an old pocket watch, Jonathan thought at a glance. He felt, somewhat inexplicably, that the man himself belonged to the same class, something outdated but steady, fatally dependable. A dull grey sweater vest was layered carefully over a tie and a milk white shirt, and all three held themselves across his chest and shoulders as stiffly as he held himself above the counter. He didn’t look at Jonathan when he spoke but turned the watch over in deft, latex-covered fingers.
Having no waiting face toward which he might direct his reply, Jonathan addressed his excuse awkwardly to the crown of neat, dark hair bent toward him. “Er-yeah, sorry. They were doing some work over on Buchanan, traffic was down to one lane.”
“No matter,” came the clipped answer. He went on with the watch, letting a silence take root between them, and Jonathan was left feeling helpless. It would be rude to interrupt the man’s work, but he was expected, wasn’t he? And he wasn’t more than five minutes late, which he felt was damn good considering the short notice he was given and the road construction that followed. He shifted his weight from hip to hip and tried to summon up courage enough to be assertive. He ought to interrupt, he reasoned. The man had been rude enough and strange enough to him already with their exchange over the telephone. He made up his mind several times to say something, to push the meeting forward, but each time the words shrank and shriveled as they rose in his throat. He knew he was being ridiculous, but breaking the silence was as impossible for him as interrupting his father in his office used to be when he was nine.
“Well?” intruded the man’s voice. He had removed the loupe, replacing it with a pair of round, wire-rimmed glasses, and was pulling off the powdered gloves. “Don’t just linger by the door there.” His face, now visible, was considerably younger than Jonathan had expected. Though all seriousness, it was practically free of wrinkles-a little creasing in the forehead, maybe, but Jonathan could hardly make out any laugh lines or crow’s feet. He had been preparing himself quietly for some obstinate, world-weary fifty-year-old, but the man couldn’t have been a day over thirty-five.
Jonathan hastened to oblige, moving toward the counter and the proprietor’s scrutinizing gaze. He felt like that pocket watch, suddenly thrust under a glass to make even the tiniest flaw glaringly apparent. He felt keenly the uneven part of his hair and the bit in the front that stuck up even when wet, felt the gently crooked row of his bottom teeth where they butted against his lower lip. Imperfections. He tried to remind himself that this was a minimum wage clerk job in downtown Ashwick Chase, but it didn’t feel convincing.
The man came around the counter, glanced down at Jonathan’s shoes, then met his eyes for the first time and said, “Lucas Lowsley.” Jonathan thought he saw the man’s hand start forward in offer of the customary introductory handshake, but then it wavered and drew back again, thinking better of it.
“Nice to meet you,” said Jonathan, barely suppressing a “sir.”
“Can you operate a cash register?” Lucas asked.
“Yes.”
“I don’t have one of those machines-the card readers. Just the register. Cash only.”
“Yes.”
“And checks. Local.”
“Yes.”
Lucas nudged the wire-framed glasses up his nose with a knuckle. His nose, Jonathan decided, was the only thing out of place about him. Where the rest of him was all neatness and clean, straight lines, his nose was slightly crooked, arched off center as though it had been broken when he was a boy.
“Well,” said the man, dropping eye contact with Jonathan and resuming his position behind the counter. “The shop is open from nine to six during the week. Hour for lunch. Eleven to four on Saturday. Closed Sunday.” He ducked out of sight beneath the counter and rose back up a moment later with a fat, leather-bound ledger that landed beside the register with a muted wumph. “You’ll take down sales in here. I update it weekly with newly acquired pieces, and I’ll show you the next time I-”
“Wait,” Jonathan said suddenly, and Lucas was wide-eyed at the interruption. Shock melted quickly into irritation, and Jonathan found himself apologizing impulsively. “I mean, sorry, but-you’re hiring me? I got the job?”
“Of course you got the job,” Lucas replied curtly, hefting up the ledger and returning it to its cubby. Catching the beginnings of confused protest in Jonathan’s furrowed brows, he kept on briskly. “You’ve got all your limbs, you can work the register, and you don’t appear to be a complete imbecile, though I’m withholding final judgment for at least a week. You don’t want the position?”
“No, no, of course I do!” he affirmed. “It’s just-just like that? I mean, don’t you want me to fill out an application or prove I’m a U.S. citizen or-”
“Look,” Lucas said testily, locking eyes with Jonathan, “you read the ad, didn’t you? No experience necessary. If you want this job, you’ll quit gaping and get behind the counter. Otherwise, get out.”
The silence that followed verged on painful. Jonathan, sweating where he stood, full of unwarranted butterflies under Lucas’s statuesque glare, heard the faint ticking of a clock. Was it the pocket watch? It sounded as though it were counting down to something, marking each tense, molasses-slow second that passed as he stood there trying (and failing) to find something to say. Without a word, Jonathan rounded the counter, shuffled past Lucas’s straight-backed figure, and stood before the register.
“Good,” Lucas said, and Jonathan felt his whole body uncoil, muscles going liquid. He felt like the accused declared innocent of his crime, not the fortunate college dropout jubilant at landing a job. “No haggling. No returns. All prices and sales are final. No small children. If something is broken by a customer, the customer buys it.” Lucas moved out from behind the counter. “Record each sale in the ledger. Put our copy of the receipt in that drawer there beneath the register. I’ll take care of them when we close.” He turned his back to Jonathan and made to vanish into the tall, junk-lined shelves when the new clerk felt the prickling sting of alarm. He wasn’t going to be left to man the whole shop alone right after being hired, right?
“Wait,” he called in a voice two octaves higher than usual. Lucas turned and fixed him with an impatient frown that made Jonathan’s stomach tighten. “Where are you going?”
“Downstairs,” came the brusque reply, “to work. If you need me, use the phone’s intercom.” And again he showed his back to Jonathan, disappearing a moment later into the forest of trinkets, antiques, and useless scraps. Jonathan heard a door open, then close, and he was left without even the ticking of a clock to keep him company.
The first day did nothing to prepare him for the job. There was no training video, no to-do list he might look to, and no further instructions from his new employer. True to his word, Lucas went down into the basement to work (whatever that meant) and did not reemerge once all afternoon. All Jonathan heard from him was a static-laced bark from the intercom at noon asking Jonathan if he wanted to go to lunch. Feeling as though it would look somehow irresponsible to leave the shop on his first day, Jonathan pressed the phone’s microphone button and meekly declined. He had no appetite, anyway. How could he think about food when the pressure of inexperience weighed so heavily in the pit of his stomach? It didn’t matter what the ad said; what would he do the first time he needed to call Lucas upstairs because he didn’t know where the limited edition plates were kept or couldn’t find a certain reserved china doll or the price tag had come off an old typewriter? He was already anticipating nightmares.
The worst part was that he didn’t understand why his nerves were so overactive. It was only a sales job, and he’d held down plenty of those through high school and college. Customers no longer intimidated him as they had when he landed his first cashiering gig back home. He learned how to handle even the most disgruntled buyers years ago. He knew how to do what the boss man said when and how he wanted it and how to right his mistakes, cover them, or grovel until they were forgiven.
But one look from Lucas Lowsley made him feel like a child ashamed of his untied shoes. That man had a presence, and Jonathan had very little idea how to contend with it. Just being in the same room with him made Jonathan feel overwhelmingly self-conscious, certain his fly was open or he had something hanging out of his nose. And they had only spent half an hour together. He was so determined to avoid error, to prove he was capable-no, worthy of selling old junk to those who sought it that he didn’t move from behind the counter once, not even to relieve himself (not that he knew where the bathroom was). He stood uncomfortably, settling his weight on one hip and then the other, crossing his arms over his chest and then pushing his hands into his pockets, walking the small space between the counter and the wall. No customers jingled the bell over the door with their entrance. It was just Jonathan and the endless shelves, their shadowed contents mocking him with strange, unfamiliar shapes.
By the end of the day, when the sky outside had gone warm orange and pink-streaked between the hard lines drawn by surrounding buildings, Jonathan had become absorbed in a staring match with one long row of shelves. Though he was mostly sure nothing stared back, he awarded himself a victory every time he could identify one of the objects cradled there. Having been at it for two hours already, he was dismayed by his measly two points: The vase was large and positioned right at the edge, well in sight, and the candelabra sat where the tarnished silver caught the light well.
So engrossed he was, his curiosity blooming like slow algae across the still pond of his paranoia, that he jerked forward against the counter in fright when the intercom again crackled into life.
“Are you still here?”
“Y-yes,” Jonathan croaked over the mic.
“What the hell for? It’s 6:30, go home.”
And he did.
The following morning had Jonathan showing up at the shop a half hour before opening with the intention of making a good impression. He had, in fact, been plagued by a handful of bad dreams during the night, the most memorable of which had found him breaking the oldest, most expensive pieces in the shop with a timid glance or a carelessly vigorous exhalation. He had been jarred awake around six o’clock and had spent a disoriented half hour practicing the art of gentle breathing with a feather duster held to his mouth. Following had been a decidedly more lucid half hour of feeling intensely stupid.
Lucas was already established inside, sitting straight-backed on a stool drawn up to the front of the counter. Jonathan opened the door as quietly as he was able, but the overhead bell pealed joyously to draw attention to his arrival. Lucas ignored it.
“Good morning,” Jonathan ventured, and Lucas ignored that as well. The inventory ledger was spread open before him and he appeared rather absorbed in making entries, looking from the book to a scrap of paper in his hand and back again. In the quiet, Jonathan imagined he could make out the previous day’s ticking, the steady heartbeat of a timepiece pounding out the seconds. Almost against his will, he began to count them out, his mind designating each solid beat with a number. It quickly took the shape of an old rhyme he only half-remembered: One for sorrow, two for mirth; three for a marriage, four a birth. Where had he heard that before? It had something to do with counting crows. Five for laughter, six for crying; seven for sickness, and eight for-
The closing of the ledger jarred him and he lost the beat. “You’re early,” Lucas accused, employing precisely the same tone used the day before to note Jonathan’s tardiness. Jonathan looked up from the hole he had been staring into the floor. “What?” The meaning trickled in a pace after the words and he shook his head to reconcile the two. “Yeah. I thought maybe I could-”
“Fine. I’ve something particular for you to do today.” He stepped down from the stool and thrust a pocket-sized notebook at Jonathan. “Familiarize yourself with the shelves this week. The cases are numbered, starting on the left side of the shop, one to twenty-three. Each row of merchandise is lettered, the very top being A and the bottom F. There’s a schematic.” Jonathan thumbed open the notebook. There was. “I want you to learn it well enough you’re able to tell when something’s out of place. Pieces are grouped the way they are for a reason, but God knows customers have no consideration for order.”
Jonathan considered asking after the reason, then figured it would become apparent once he started and the question would only make him look foolish. He nodded instead. Privately, he was a little excited over the task. Yesterday’s staring game had done more to whet his curiosity than satisfy it, but the fear of rebuke had kept it firmly in check. This, while a perfectly logical request for any new hire, was to Jonathan an invitation to snoop. It didn’t matter that the antiques were there to be purchased, to be raked over by endless pairs of eyes and fondled by the hands of so many strangers; Jonathan felt there was something very private about the contents of those shelves.
Lucas, apparently satisfied that he had met the morning’s quota for human interaction, gave Jonathan a narrow-eyed glance and headed down to the basement.
Seven miles away, Mrs. Miranda Collins was being laid to rest in Riverview Cemetery. Despite the name, the grounds offered no view of the river-a fact about which the living often complained but the dead didn’t much notice-but remained a very nice place to be interred. Things were green and well-groomed, the grass clipped short and kept free of clover and dandelions and any other weeds children might mistake for flowers. Chicory and black-eyed Susans bloomed with fierce disregard around the front gate, and Mrs. Collins’s funeral party marched past them with no appreciation for their daring. A sign full of rules was nailed to a post just inside: 1. No glass, 2. No planting, 3. No alcohol, 4. No buried objects.
How strange it was to Emily Collins, who was not Mrs. Collins’s daughter but was sad all the same, that a cemetery should frown upon burial. A tentative wind snaked under her skirt and rattled the branches of the birches that lined the walkways, which the party had just abandoned to tromp through the grass toward Mrs. Collins’s plot. Emily’s heels sank into the soft earth with each step, and while she was sad, she was also very irritated by the impracticality of funeral dress.
Mr. Collins, who was Emily’s father and now a widower, walked behind the casket with his mouth clamped so firmly shut he appeared to have lockjaw. He sweated in his dark suit and clenched his fists and was sickly, and Emily did not look at him.
The ceremony was quick and unimpressive. The pastor said the same things he said over every dead body, pulled out the same tired lines of scripture he always relied on to give solace to the mourners in their stiff collars and their new panty hose, and people wept in varying degrees. Mr. Collins did not weep, though his eyes were red-rimmed and shone with standing water. Emily pictured the marker as it might look at the head of the grave: twining ivy, a long-winged bird, and Miranda Jane Collins, Loving Wife and Devoted Mother. January 1963 - November 2010. No buried objects.
She and Mr. Collins stayed until the casket was lowered into the ground. Mr. Collins, at the mercy of his grief, let go a violent, ugly sob and dropped a lily on the lid six feet below.
I
The ad in the newspaper said remarkably little: Wanted: shop clerk. Must know how to operate a cash register. Must have people skills exceeding the shop keeper’s own. Expected to handle sales, stock shelves, take inventory, answer phone. No experience necessary. An address and phone number followed, but no name was listed for either the shop or its owner.
It was peculiar, maybe even a little shifty-a no questions kind of situation that probably should have raised a red flag or two. But as long as the muddy waters clouded both banks, he figured it would work in his favour. Not that he was shifty-just your standard college dropout, adrift in the vast sea of confused unemployment. A graphic design major at the Kansas City Art Institute for two years, it had taken him only half that time to find that art was not something he enjoyed nearly as much as he had thought before entering college. In fact, once those two years were up, he had built up a healthy distaste for the subject and anyone who showed more than a passing interest in it-Art People, moony-eyed and pretentious, were not his crowd.
His mother had done a poor job of hiding her relief at his renunciation of the art world. “Oh, Jonathan,” she’d sighed into the phone when he had first broached the subject of leaving, “that’s too bad. That’s really just too bad. I suppose you’ll have to move back home.”
Home was a population-of-300, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it pit stop a few hours east of Kansas City, and he had no intention of returning there to be cajoled by his mother into working with her at the one gas station standing between the city limit signs. No, it was off to Ashwick Chase for him-a hub halfway between nowhere and the city that would, he figured, offer him a handful of brainless minimum wage jobs he could weather while he determined what his newfound disdain for art had left him with.
Though she made a fuss about it, his mother helped him with the deposit and first month’s rent on a one-bedroom apartment on the south end of town. She also insisted on buying him a carload of groceries and a few pieces of cheap furniture, complaining the whole while as though these purchases had been made at his prompting rather than hers.
That had been three weeks ago. It was the beginning of November now. With the month’s rent paid and last month’s utilities covered, Jonathan was forced to acknowledge that he was running uncomfortably low on cash. Bills loomed from the dark closet of the future like a pair of puffed-up parachute pants, waiting for the right time to fling open the door and declare triumphantly, “Thought you could forget about me, eh!” Car insurance, cell phone, internet-all would need to be paid up before the 30th. Especially the internet-already living on the edge, a daring young man with no health insurance, it was vitally important that WebMD be accessible at all times.
With a population nearing 75,000, Jonathan never imagined Ashwick Chase would be so devoid of work. He harboured no delusions of finding a career there or being too good to man a drive-through window or stock shelves at Wal-Mart. Convenience stores, gas stations, restaurants, data entry gigs, factory work-he sent out applications indiscriminately. Even the ads requiring work experience were answered provided Jonathan thought he could fake it well enough. But nothing panned out. Not a single place, from Subway to Walgreen’s to the seedy 7-11 a block from his apartment, returned his calls or visits with good news. Most weren’t hiring at all, and those that were somehow managed to fill every open position right around the time he handed in his application.
So it was with a pitiably small hope that Jonathan sat at his kitchen card table and contemplated the strange ad over coffee. Maybe this time, he thought, but was far from convincing himself as he flipped open his phone and dialed the number in the newspaper. It rang several times, uninterrupted by warm human voice or grainy automated message, and he was nearly ready to heave a sigh and resign himself to trying again later when he heard the distantly familiar click of a handset being lifted from a base.
“Yes?” It was a man’s voice, not warm at all, but gruff as though the ringing phone had taken him away from something important. For a moment Jonathan said nothing, realizing with a brief, irrational dread that he had no idea who was meant to be on the other end of the line. He looked to the ad for help but was dismayed to find it hadn’t changed.
“Uh,” he ventured, and the man’s impatience began to seep through the receiver like cold coffee through the bottom of a paper cup. “Jonathan,” he blurted. “Jonathan Stillwell. I’m calling about the want ad in this week’s paper-about the clerk position? There was no name, maybe this isn’t the right-”
“Yes,” the voice repeated, “I need the position filled immediately. Be down to the shop by ten o’clock.” The voice left no window for protest. With the beginning wuh of wait on Jonathan’s lips, the line clicked and went dead. He was baffled. It sounded like he’d been given an interview, but the call was just a one-minute blur of noise in his short-term memory. And he still didn’t have a name.
He closed his phone, and the blue glow of the front screen told him it was already 9:26. Of course it was, he thought dismally, but that made up his mind on whether or not he would change into something more respectable. There was no time, and he assumed it would be better to be punctual in jeans than tardy in dress slacks. Hoping desperately for the small mercy of light morning traffic, Jonathan left his apartment, taking the newspaper with him.
Situated near the river, the neighbourhood was not new. There was an old cynicism beaten into the pavement, something Jonathan felt oozing up through the floorboard as he drove, something that made the soles of his feet tingle in his sneakers. The buildings were all squat and crowded and weathered, quiet beige and clay-red with flat, even roofs and narrow windows. They looked like ancient, square-shouldered sentinels, watching the city sprawl up successfully around them and disapproving haughtily of the whole affair.
The shop, perched on the corner of Riverside and Holmes, was no exception. The brick was worn and dark, the corners all softened and round with age, but it was well taken care of. There was no graffiti, no chips or cracks, no missing bricks like gaps in an otherwise perfect smile. The wide, clean front windows and the door were framed with a somber green molding that made the inside of the shop look darker than he suspected it was. It looked neat. Respectable. Almost quaint. To the left of the door, painted in tall, slanted letters that matched the molding, was the word CURIOS. Behind it, as well as in the opposite window, were big displays of junk, garbage, and various useless knick knacks. So, he thought as he pushed the door open (“Come in!” invited the sign, “We’re open!”), it’s a pawn shop.
A bell mounted over the door chimed cheerily to announce him, and a man’s voice accompanied it. “You’re late, Mr. Stillwell,” it observed. It was no friendlier in person than it had been over the phone, but Jonathan’s immediate impression was that the man to whom it belonged could have sounded no other way.
He was, Jonathan determined quickly, odd. Bent over the front counter with a jeweler’s glass to his eye, he was examining something cradled carefully in one hand-an old pocket watch, Jonathan thought at a glance. He felt, somewhat inexplicably, that the man himself belonged to the same class, something outdated but steady, fatally dependable. A dull grey sweater vest was layered carefully over a tie and a milk white shirt, and all three held themselves across his chest and shoulders as stiffly as he held himself above the counter. He didn’t look at Jonathan when he spoke but turned the watch over in deft, latex-covered fingers.
Having no waiting face toward which he might direct his reply, Jonathan addressed his excuse awkwardly to the crown of neat, dark hair bent toward him. “Er-yeah, sorry. They were doing some work over on Buchanan, traffic was down to one lane.”
“No matter,” came the clipped answer. He went on with the watch, letting a silence take root between them, and Jonathan was left feeling helpless. It would be rude to interrupt the man’s work, but he was expected, wasn’t he? And he wasn’t more than five minutes late, which he felt was damn good considering the short notice he was given and the road construction that followed. He shifted his weight from hip to hip and tried to summon up courage enough to be assertive. He ought to interrupt, he reasoned. The man had been rude enough and strange enough to him already with their exchange over the telephone. He made up his mind several times to say something, to push the meeting forward, but each time the words shrank and shriveled as they rose in his throat. He knew he was being ridiculous, but breaking the silence was as impossible for him as interrupting his father in his office used to be when he was nine.
“Well?” intruded the man’s voice. He had removed the loupe, replacing it with a pair of round, wire-rimmed glasses, and was pulling off the powdered gloves. “Don’t just linger by the door there.” His face, now visible, was considerably younger than Jonathan had expected. Though all seriousness, it was practically free of wrinkles-a little creasing in the forehead, maybe, but Jonathan could hardly make out any laugh lines or crow’s feet. He had been preparing himself quietly for some obstinate, world-weary fifty-year-old, but the man couldn’t have been a day over thirty-five.
Jonathan hastened to oblige, moving toward the counter and the proprietor’s scrutinizing gaze. He felt like that pocket watch, suddenly thrust under a glass to make even the tiniest flaw glaringly apparent. He felt keenly the uneven part of his hair and the bit in the front that stuck up even when wet, felt the gently crooked row of his bottom teeth where they butted against his lower lip. Imperfections. He tried to remind himself that this was a minimum wage clerk job in downtown Ashwick Chase, but it didn’t feel convincing.
The man came around the counter, glanced down at Jonathan’s shoes, then met his eyes for the first time and said, “Lucas Lowsley.” Jonathan thought he saw the man’s hand start forward in offer of the customary introductory handshake, but then it wavered and drew back again, thinking better of it.
“Nice to meet you,” said Jonathan, barely suppressing a “sir.”
“Can you operate a cash register?” Lucas asked.
“Yes.”
“I don’t have one of those machines-the card readers. Just the register. Cash only.”
“Yes.”
“And checks. Local.”
“Yes.”
Lucas nudged the wire-framed glasses up his nose with a knuckle. His nose, Jonathan decided, was the only thing out of place about him. Where the rest of him was all neatness and clean, straight lines, his nose was slightly crooked, arched off center as though it had been broken when he was a boy.
“Well,” said the man, dropping eye contact with Jonathan and resuming his position behind the counter. “The shop is open from nine to six during the week. Hour for lunch. Eleven to four on Saturday. Closed Sunday.” He ducked out of sight beneath the counter and rose back up a moment later with a fat, leather-bound ledger that landed beside the register with a muted wumph. “You’ll take down sales in here. I update it weekly with newly acquired pieces, and I’ll show you the next time I-”
“Wait,” Jonathan said suddenly, and Lucas was wide-eyed at the interruption. Shock melted quickly into irritation, and Jonathan found himself apologizing impulsively. “I mean, sorry, but-you’re hiring me? I got the job?”
“Of course you got the job,” Lucas replied curtly, hefting up the ledger and returning it to its cubby. Catching the beginnings of confused protest in Jonathan’s furrowed brows, he kept on briskly. “You’ve got all your limbs, you can work the register, and you don’t appear to be a complete imbecile, though I’m withholding final judgment for at least a week. You don’t want the position?”
“No, no, of course I do!” he affirmed. “It’s just-just like that? I mean, don’t you want me to fill out an application or prove I’m a U.S. citizen or-”
“Look,” Lucas said testily, locking eyes with Jonathan, “you read the ad, didn’t you? No experience necessary. If you want this job, you’ll quit gaping and get behind the counter. Otherwise, get out.”
The silence that followed verged on painful. Jonathan, sweating where he stood, full of unwarranted butterflies under Lucas’s statuesque glare, heard the faint ticking of a clock. Was it the pocket watch? It sounded as though it were counting down to something, marking each tense, molasses-slow second that passed as he stood there trying (and failing) to find something to say. Without a word, Jonathan rounded the counter, shuffled past Lucas’s straight-backed figure, and stood before the register.
“Good,” Lucas said, and Jonathan felt his whole body uncoil, muscles going liquid. He felt like the accused declared innocent of his crime, not the fortunate college dropout jubilant at landing a job. “No haggling. No returns. All prices and sales are final. No small children. If something is broken by a customer, the customer buys it.” Lucas moved out from behind the counter. “Record each sale in the ledger. Put our copy of the receipt in that drawer there beneath the register. I’ll take care of them when we close.” He turned his back to Jonathan and made to vanish into the tall, junk-lined shelves when the new clerk felt the prickling sting of alarm. He wasn’t going to be left to man the whole shop alone right after being hired, right?
“Wait,” he called in a voice two octaves higher than usual. Lucas turned and fixed him with an impatient frown that made Jonathan’s stomach tighten. “Where are you going?”
“Downstairs,” came the brusque reply, “to work. If you need me, use the phone’s intercom.” And again he showed his back to Jonathan, disappearing a moment later into the forest of trinkets, antiques, and useless scraps. Jonathan heard a door open, then close, and he was left without even the ticking of a clock to keep him company.
The first day did nothing to prepare him for the job. There was no training video, no to-do list he might look to, and no further instructions from his new employer. True to his word, Lucas went down into the basement to work (whatever that meant) and did not reemerge once all afternoon. All Jonathan heard from him was a static-laced bark from the intercom at noon asking Jonathan if he wanted to go to lunch. Feeling as though it would look somehow irresponsible to leave the shop on his first day, Jonathan pressed the phone’s microphone button and meekly declined. He had no appetite, anyway. How could he think about food when the pressure of inexperience weighed so heavily in the pit of his stomach? It didn’t matter what the ad said; what would he do the first time he needed to call Lucas upstairs because he didn’t know where the limited edition plates were kept or couldn’t find a certain reserved china doll or the price tag had come off an old typewriter? He was already anticipating nightmares.
The worst part was that he didn’t understand why his nerves were so overactive. It was only a sales job, and he’d held down plenty of those through high school and college. Customers no longer intimidated him as they had when he landed his first cashiering gig back home. He learned how to handle even the most disgruntled buyers years ago. He knew how to do what the boss man said when and how he wanted it and how to right his mistakes, cover them, or grovel until they were forgiven.
But one look from Lucas Lowsley made him feel like a child ashamed of his untied shoes. That man had a presence, and Jonathan had very little idea how to contend with it. Just being in the same room with him made Jonathan feel overwhelmingly self-conscious, certain his fly was open or he had something hanging out of his nose. And they had only spent half an hour together. He was so determined to avoid error, to prove he was capable-no, worthy of selling old junk to those who sought it that he didn’t move from behind the counter once, not even to relieve himself (not that he knew where the bathroom was). He stood uncomfortably, settling his weight on one hip and then the other, crossing his arms over his chest and then pushing his hands into his pockets, walking the small space between the counter and the wall. No customers jingled the bell over the door with their entrance. It was just Jonathan and the endless shelves, their shadowed contents mocking him with strange, unfamiliar shapes.
By the end of the day, when the sky outside had gone warm orange and pink-streaked between the hard lines drawn by surrounding buildings, Jonathan had become absorbed in a staring match with one long row of shelves. Though he was mostly sure nothing stared back, he awarded himself a victory every time he could identify one of the objects cradled there. Having been at it for two hours already, he was dismayed by his measly two points: The vase was large and positioned right at the edge, well in sight, and the candelabra sat where the tarnished silver caught the light well.
So engrossed he was, his curiosity blooming like slow algae across the still pond of his paranoia, that he jerked forward against the counter in fright when the intercom again crackled into life.
“Are you still here?”
“Y-yes,” Jonathan croaked over the mic.
“What the hell for? It’s 6:30, go home.”
And he did.
The following morning had Jonathan showing up at the shop a half hour before opening with the intention of making a good impression. He had, in fact, been plagued by a handful of bad dreams during the night, the most memorable of which had found him breaking the oldest, most expensive pieces in the shop with a timid glance or a carelessly vigorous exhalation. He had been jarred awake around six o’clock and had spent a disoriented half hour practicing the art of gentle breathing with a feather duster held to his mouth. Following had been a decidedly more lucid half hour of feeling intensely stupid.
Lucas was already established inside, sitting straight-backed on a stool drawn up to the front of the counter. Jonathan opened the door as quietly as he was able, but the overhead bell pealed joyously to draw attention to his arrival. Lucas ignored it.
“Good morning,” Jonathan ventured, and Lucas ignored that as well. The inventory ledger was spread open before him and he appeared rather absorbed in making entries, looking from the book to a scrap of paper in his hand and back again. In the quiet, Jonathan imagined he could make out the previous day’s ticking, the steady heartbeat of a timepiece pounding out the seconds. Almost against his will, he began to count them out, his mind designating each solid beat with a number. It quickly took the shape of an old rhyme he only half-remembered: One for sorrow, two for mirth; three for a marriage, four a birth. Where had he heard that before? It had something to do with counting crows. Five for laughter, six for crying; seven for sickness, and eight for-
The closing of the ledger jarred him and he lost the beat. “You’re early,” Lucas accused, employing precisely the same tone used the day before to note Jonathan’s tardiness. Jonathan looked up from the hole he had been staring into the floor. “What?” The meaning trickled in a pace after the words and he shook his head to reconcile the two. “Yeah. I thought maybe I could-”
“Fine. I’ve something particular for you to do today.” He stepped down from the stool and thrust a pocket-sized notebook at Jonathan. “Familiarize yourself with the shelves this week. The cases are numbered, starting on the left side of the shop, one to twenty-three. Each row of merchandise is lettered, the very top being A and the bottom F. There’s a schematic.” Jonathan thumbed open the notebook. There was. “I want you to learn it well enough you’re able to tell when something’s out of place. Pieces are grouped the way they are for a reason, but God knows customers have no consideration for order.”
Jonathan considered asking after the reason, then figured it would become apparent once he started and the question would only make him look foolish. He nodded instead. Privately, he was a little excited over the task. Yesterday’s staring game had done more to whet his curiosity than satisfy it, but the fear of rebuke had kept it firmly in check. This, while a perfectly logical request for any new hire, was to Jonathan an invitation to snoop. It didn’t matter that the antiques were there to be purchased, to be raked over by endless pairs of eyes and fondled by the hands of so many strangers; Jonathan felt there was something very private about the contents of those shelves.
Lucas, apparently satisfied that he had met the morning’s quota for human interaction, gave Jonathan a narrow-eyed glance and headed down to the basement.
Seven miles away, Mrs. Miranda Collins was being laid to rest in Riverview Cemetery. Despite the name, the grounds offered no view of the river-a fact about which the living often complained but the dead didn’t much notice-but remained a very nice place to be interred. Things were green and well-groomed, the grass clipped short and kept free of clover and dandelions and any other weeds children might mistake for flowers. Chicory and black-eyed Susans bloomed with fierce disregard around the front gate, and Mrs. Collins’s funeral party marched past them with no appreciation for their daring. A sign full of rules was nailed to a post just inside: 1. No glass, 2. No planting, 3. No alcohol, 4. No buried objects.
How strange it was to Emily Collins, who was not Mrs. Collins’s daughter but was sad all the same, that a cemetery should frown upon burial. A tentative wind snaked under her skirt and rattled the branches of the birches that lined the walkways, which the party had just abandoned to tromp through the grass toward Mrs. Collins’s plot. Emily’s heels sank into the soft earth with each step, and while she was sad, she was also very irritated by the impracticality of funeral dress.
Mr. Collins, who was Emily’s father and now a widower, walked behind the casket with his mouth clamped so firmly shut he appeared to have lockjaw. He sweated in his dark suit and clenched his fists and was sickly, and Emily did not look at him.
The ceremony was quick and unimpressive. The pastor said the same things he said over every dead body, pulled out the same tired lines of scripture he always relied on to give solace to the mourners in their stiff collars and their new panty hose, and people wept in varying degrees. Mr. Collins did not weep, though his eyes were red-rimmed and shone with standing water. Emily pictured the marker as it might look at the head of the grave: twining ivy, a long-winged bird, and Miranda Jane Collins, Loving Wife and Devoted Mother. January 1963 - November 2010. No buried objects.
She and Mr. Collins stayed until the casket was lowered into the ground. Mr. Collins, at the mercy of his grief, let go a violent, ugly sob and dropped a lily on the lid six feet below.