CHAPTER EIGHT
Plaster in the
Air
During the winter
break of my junior year at Emerson, I helped in the store, as I had
every holiday season since I was ten. This was one of the few times
of year when it actually made sense to me that my father carried
porcelain figurines and pen-and-pencil sets. While I would never
have gone to a card store for these kinds of things (though
honestly, I wouldn’t have gone anywhere for these kinds of things),
the citizens of Amber buzzed in here to buy every trivial
knickknack we could offer. From mid-December until the
twenty-fourth (Christmas Day being the one day of the year when my
father closed Amber Cards, Gifts, and Stationery) there would be
customers in the store at all moments. Sometimes there would be
dozens at a time. My father seemed incredibly happy during these
periods, less I think because of the money that this activity
generated than because it reminded him that the community wanted
and needed him.
This didn’t mean that
I actually liked working in the store during these times. The
rushes kept me occupied and there was always something to do, which
made the hours go faster. And it was charming to see my otherwise
understated father exchanging pleasantries with the customers. But
it still seemed like a chore to me, something I was doing to be a
dutiful son rather than anything I would have ever chosen to do.
And now that these sessions took place during my winter break, I
found myself thinking about all the friends who were back in town
from college and what I could be doing with them instead of being
here.
I would have assumed
that Chase would be feeling this way even more than I did this
season. It was his first Christmas with Iris and Amber could be a
romantic place during the holidays. Surely, he would have preferred
a sleigh ride with her out on Pearson’s Farm. Or perhaps Mexican
hot chocolate and pumpkin bread at the lavishly decorated Tavern on
Russet. Or browsing with her through the thousands of handmade
ornaments on display at Celebrations. Or cuddling under a blanket
to stay warm while listening to the carolers in the park. I know
that if I had a girlfriend like Iris to spend this time with, I
would resent my dad tying me down.
But if Chase minded,
he gave no indication of it. A huge rush had ended a few minutes
before, and while I stood behind the counter with my head propped
up on my arm, he was at a display good-naturedly haranguing my
father because he felt the toy selection had gone stale. He pointed
to a grouping of stuffed animals and called them “stuffy animals,”
suggesting that they weren’t at all what kids wanted as gifts. My
father listened carefully to what Chase said and gave it the
careful consideration that he always did, while at the same time
mentioning that we’d just sold a “stuffy animal” in the last flurry
of activity. Chase laughed and said that this actually proved his
point, as the animal had gone to an older man who probably had no
idea what his grandchild really preferred.
The debate continued
for a few more minutes, Chase teasing my father for “fossilizing”
while my father jokingly suggested that he should bow to Chase’s
“decades of experience.” I had just rung up a sale and was counting
out change when Chase came behind the counter, grabbed fifty
dollars from the cash register, and continued out the
door.
“I think you’ve just
been robbed, Dad,” I said.
My father laughed.
“Assaulted maybe, but not robbed. He’ll be back, though God knows
what he’ll be back with.”
Without the sideshow
of Chase and my father sparring, the next couple of hours dragged.
Business ebbed and flowed, but it didn’t seem as crisp or
stimulating as it did when Chase was there chatting up people in
line, running madly to find some piece of merchandise, making
incongruous gift suggestions to those who were naive enough to ask
him for one. My father asked me to straighten a display and to
rearrange the copper candlesticks to make them appear less picked
over (for some reason we’d had a run on these earlier in the day)
and I took to the tasks, only once slipping away to the phone to
set up a drinks date with some friends that night.
About an hour after
Chase left, Tricia, that era’s manager, arrived for her shift. She
was a sophomore at MCS and had been working for my father the past
couple of years. I’d gone out with her and her boyfriend a couple
of times when I was in town.
“What’s it been like
here today?” she asked.
“The usual,” I
answered.
“Where’s
Chase?”
“One of the mysteries
of the moment. He gave my father a dissertation on the marketplace,
then grabbed fifty bucks from the cash register and disappeared. My
father seems to think he’ll be back. I think he’s buying chocolates
for Iris.”
Tricia laughed. “What
was he telling Richard he was doing wrong this time?”
“Kid’s
stuff.”
She nodded knowingly.
With Tricia there, I’d at least be able to catch up on gossip and
find out if anything interesting was happening while I was in town.
I couldn’t have these conversations with Chase while we were in the
store because he was always in the middle of something else. Tricia
did a good job for my father, but she also understood that what we
were doing required minimal concentration.
An hour later, Chase
returned with a large plastic bag from the Toys “R” Us in the mall.
He called my father over and produced a couple of handheld
electronic games, a plastic velociraptor that made “authentic”
dinosaur noises from a sound chip, and three stuffed animals: one
round yellow thing that bleated and stuck out its tongue when
squeezed, one purple and green alien with spikes on its arms, and a
bald guy with a hatchet in his head. He proceeded to pull the Toys
“R” Us tags off of the merchandise and remark the pieces with our
price tags. My father pointed out that it was difficult to make a
profit when you bought something retail and charged the same amount
for it. Chase countered that buying these things wasn’t about
making a profit, but rather showing that the store was on top of
the market enough to carry them in the first place.
“I’m with Chase on
this one, Richard,” Tricia said. “Love the raptor, by the way.” To
punctuate this, she pressed the button to activate the sound chip
and the raptor squealed. This drew the attention of a young boy who
had just entered the store with his mother. I just shook my head as
the kid told the woman that this was the dinosaur he wanted and as
she asked Tricia to hold it aside for her while she finished her
shopping. As they walked to the back of the store, Tricia and Chase
high-fived while my father took the other items and put them on
display.
“That was purely
coincidental,” he said, grinning. He stopped and looked accusingly
at Chase. “You set that up, didn’t you?”
Chase held up his
hands to express his innocence.
“I’ll talk to the
distributor about getting some of this stuff in January,” my father
said, grinning.
The process of taking
the back wall of the store down to replace it was even more
excruciatingly slow than described in advance. Since it was a
load-bearing wall, the contractor couldn’t simply knock it down and
put up a new one. Instead, he had to strip it down to its beams.
This meant days of plaster in the air, footprints on the carpet,
and dust on the cards in spite of the plastic we’d put up to
segregate the work area. Given that the tourist season wasn’t yet
in full swing, it was just about as good a time as any for the
store to go through this.
It was not, however,
a good time for Howard Crest to bring a potential buyer to
visit.
I was standing in the
back of the store surveying the work the carpenter was doing when I
heard Howard’s halting voice.
“Oh, there you are,
Hugh. Can I have a bit of your time?”
I turned around to
see him approaching me with his hand outstretched. He was a
fragile-looking man who seemed to vibrate slightly as he talked. My
father knew him from the Chamber of Commerce and was certain of his
competence, even though I’d seen little evidence of this in my
first few meetings with him. I knew Howard was well aware of the
repairs we were doing at the store, as I had called him about them
myself. I shook his hand and then eyed him warily when I saw that
someone was with him.
“Hugh, this is Mitch
Ricks. He’d like to take look at the store. Can you give us some
time?”
“Sure,” I said,
casting another glance at Howard. He clearly wasn’t as concerned
about doing this under these circumstances as I was. The man walked
past me and up to the plastic covering behind which the carpenters
worked.
“What’s going on
here?” he asked.
“We had a pipe
explode on us. It did a lot of damage, but we’re doing the repairs
now.” I looked over at Howard again. “All of it will be finished
before any new buyer comes in.”
The man looked down
at the floor and scuffed up a streak of plaster dust.
“Carpet,
too?”
“We’re replacing the
entire back portion,” I said.
The tour was off to a
rousing start. I took Ricks through the store, telling him as much
as I knew about traffic, turns, and the strongest revenue streams.
Howard said nothing the entire time other than mentioning that he’d
bought his granddaughter one of the kites we had on sale. Since the
back office was unavailable, we settled behind the counter and I
answered some more of Ricks’ questions. They weren’t particularly
probing and he seemed preoccupied with the sounds coming from the
other end of the store. Fifteen minutes after he’d arrived, he was
gone. I was relatively certain I wouldn’t see him again. When
Howard shook my hand as he was leaving, I still wasn’t sure that he
understood that he should have at least given me some advance
warning.
For the rest of the
morning and into the early afternoon, I remained miffed at the
broker. My situation was frustrating enough without being
complicated by the bungling of this man.
By 3:00, I was still
peeved. Even Tyler’s buying me a caramel brownie at the bakery
across the street (a place I’d come to think of as Iris’ bakery)
didn’t make me feel better. I finally decided that I needed to go
see Crest.
Howard’s office was
on River Road, the other major commercial street in town, and the
one that led directly to the Pine River Bridge. This was a funkier
spot, with a number of bars and ethnic restaurants scattered
between office buildings. The company Howard worked for dealt in
both commercial and residential real estate, and Howard was the
head of the commercial division. I’d never been in this office
before, and as I drove over to it, I half expected to find it
disheveled and uninviting, with cigarette-burned desktops,
coffee-stained floors, and a couple of distracted brokers
ineffectually shuffling through piles of papers. Instead, the place
was crisply appointed, with each broker’s work area partitioned by
glass bricks, and original local art on the walls. I think the
biggest discrepancy between my image of the business and reality
came when I arrived at Howard’s mahogany-accented office off the
main floor. He sat in a high-backed leather chair, speaking on the
phone in his clipped manner when I entered his doorway. He gestured
me in and then held up a finger to indicate that he would be
finished shortly.
“I had a feeling I
might see you today,” he said after he hung up. “I was planning to
give you a call, but things got crazy.” Even in this environment
that attested to his success, he seemed unusually
skittish.
The setting threw me
off for a minute, but now that I had Howard in front of me, my
irritation returned.
“I assume your client
wasn’t interested,” I said.
“I don’t think so,
no.”
“Howard, you knew
about the work going on in the store. What made you think you
should just drop in like that?”
He reached for a can
of Diet Coke, took a sip, and then shook his head.
“I know,” he said.
“You told me about all of the water damage and I should have come
in to see it myself before I brought anyone with me.”
“Or at least called
to let me know you were coming so we could clean things up a
little.”
“You’re right. It was
stupid. But when this man came in and told me what he was looking
for, he seemed so right for your father’s store. I have to admit
that I leaped at the opportunity and did it without even thinking.”
He looked down and then took another sip from his can. “There
hasn’t been much activity on this.”
“All the more reason
to be careful about how we present it when we get
some.”
He held up his hands.
“You’re right. Completely. I just really want to do this for your
dad.”
It was difficult to
continue to be angry with Howard when he was being this contrite. I
simply shook my head. “Why has there
been so little activity. Is the market slow right
now?”
“No, the market isn’t
slow at all. Like I said, things have been crazy around here. It
usually is. But when people think of buying a business on Russet
Avenue, they think of galleries or jewelry stores or gourmet
shops.”
“But the store has
been doing okay, hasn’t it?”
“It’s been fine by
all indications. Not sensational, but fine. But if I can be honest
with you, Hugh, stationery stores aren’t exactly what people dream
about owning.”
“Tell me about it.”
Howard Crest was perhaps the last person on the planet I wanted
underscoring this point for me. I’d come into his office charged
with annoyance. Now I felt as drained as a Duracell that had been
sitting in a child’s toy for ten years. “Are there any other
prospects?”
“Nothing at the
moment. You never know, though. That’s one of the good things about
this business.”
I nodded. I didn’t
want to take up any more of Howard’s time. But I also really didn’t
want to go back to the store after this soul-sapping conversation.
When it was clear that Howard didn’t have anything more to say to
me, I stood up, shook his hand, and left. Before I got back into my
car, I took a walk down River Road, looking into the shops. So few
of the storefronts were the same as they were when I was last
there. A restaurant menu seemed interesting and one of the bars had
live blues on the weekend. At some point, it might be worth going
to one or both of them.
Considering how long
it might take Howard to sell the store, it seemed wise to
re-familiarize myself with the area.
I didn’t say anything
about the episode with Howard to my father that night. We ate
dinner on tray tables in the den, as my parents did every night
now, while The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer
played. My mother didn’t even suggest eating in the dining room any
longer, and the sofa bed was open all the time.
When we finished
eating, I helped my mother bring the dishes into the
kitchen.
“We struck out with a
potential buyer for the store today,” I said while she loaded the
dishwasher.
“Too bad,” she said,
concentrating on her task.
“Howard brought the
guy into the store while the carpenters were banging away and there
was plaster dust everywhere. He picked the worst possible
time.”
“Howard knows what
he’s doing.”
She moved over to the
stove to get a pot. My mother had been stiff and disengaged since
I’d come back to town. I assumed that this had something to do with
my father’s illness. But she had rarely made eye contact with me
since his return from the hospital and I was starting to take it
personally. I’d begun to wonder if this was a response to my
refusal to take over the store. In this context, she would of
course have little sympathy for how Howard’s error scuttled my
day.
“He might know what
he’s doing most of the time, but he certainly didn’t know what he
was doing today. The store is a mess. If he had given me some
warning, I could have at least made the place look reasonably
presentable.”
She continued to wash
the dishes without saying a word. I brought a mixing spoon and
another pan over to the sink for her. When she was finished washing
these, she shut the water off and turned in my
direction.
“You know,” she said,
looking past me rather than at me, “I don’t think we’ve ever had a
pipe burst in that store before.”
I understood the
implication and decided not to get into it with her. If she was
angry with me for making the only appropriate decision I could
make, she was going to have to work this out for herself. I left
the kitchen and went up to my room, planning to go out for a drink.
I picked up the copy of Couples I was
reading. It was now obvious to me that I would indeed finish all of
Updike’s novels before the store sold. Perhaps months before the
store sold. Maybe I’d move to the Faulkner canon next.
I put the book back
on my dresser and headed out the door.