On Monday morning, Mary Bliss realized she must have made it through the weekend. But she couldn’t remember how. She was feeling vague and unfocused—right up until the air conditioning repairman gave her an estimate of fourteen hundred dollars to install a new chiller/condenser.
After he’d left, Mary Bliss emptied the silverware drawer in the dining room. The pieces clanged against the top of the mahogany sideboard as she slipped them out of their mothproof bags and counted them out. The final total was impressive. She had twelve place settings of Frances I sterling silver, a dozen assorted serving pieces, including one strange five-pronged fork she’d never figured out a use for, and ten demitasse spoons.
She ran her fingers slowly over the smooth silver surface of the spoons and knives, held the cool bowl of a soup spoon against her neck. As she traced the whorls and lines of the design, she remembered the first Christmas she had opened one of the pink-wrapped boxes sent by Parker’s aunt Lily, who lived in Charleston.
Aunt Lily wasn’t a real aunt. She was Parker’s godmother, widowed and childless. Together, she and Eula had decided it was a scandal that Parker’s young bride had never registered for a silver pattern. Eula and Lily had picked out Frances I as being suitable for a modern young couple. And every Christmas, right up until her death, Aunt Lily, who Parker said was so rich she couldn’t move without tripping over sacks of money, sent Mary Bliss exactly one place setting of “her” silver. The silver came in the same thin wrapping paper, accompanied by a Christmas card that Aunt Lily recycled by whiting out the previous sender’s name and substituting her own.
For her birthdays, Eula gave Mary Bliss the serving pieces. Frances I was not a pattern Mary Bliss would have chosen. And in the early years of their marriage, when money was so tight, Mary Bliss had gotten nauseous at the sight of the pink box under the Christmas tree, thinking of how much sterling silver cost, and what she could have done with the money instead.
But Frances I had stood by her—through inexorably long visits from Aunt Lily, through the dinner parties and buffets she and Parker had hosted over the years.
She felt a pang as she slid the forks and spoons back into their gray silver-cloth compartments. She would miss Frances I. But she had a perfectly serviceable set of stainless steel to eat off of. And although she’d always intended for Erin to inherit her wedding china and silver and crystal, Erin, at least at this age, had zero interest in the finer things of life. Given the choice, her daughter would definitely have chosen a new chiller/condenser over twelve place settings of Frances I.
With a chiffon scarf tied over her hair and dark sunglasses, Mary Bliss barely recognized herself in the sun-visor mirror.
Incognito, she thought. She was going incognito.
She’d passed Citizen’s Pawnshop many times on her way into downtown Atlanta. It was tucked in the corner of a strip shopping center on Ponce de Leon, between a vacuum cleaner repair shop and a Hispanic grocery store. There were pawnshops closer to her house, but Mary Bliss had a horror of being recognized.
A dark-skinned Mideastern-looking man stood behind the counter of the pawnshop. He was polishing the lens of a large camera and muttering to himself in some foreign language. The shelves of the store crowded in around her, lined with musical instruments, amplifiers, televisions, stereos, computers, even a large, badly tarnished brass bed-stead and a hideous crystal chandelier as big as a bathtub.
“Yes?” he said, glancing up at Mary Bliss only briefly before returning his attention to the camera.
She cleared her throat. “You, um. You buy things as well as sell them, is that how it works?”
“Yes? What you got?” His eyes swept over her, and she felt her face redden.
“Silverware. Sterling silver flatware. Frances I. There are twelve place settings, and some serving pieces, and ten demitasse spoons, and, of course…”
“Show me,” he said, setting the camera down.
“Well,” she said, hesitating.
“You don’t want to sell, forget it.” He picked the camera back up and muttered to himself again.
Mary Bliss hoisted her canvas tote bag onto the counter with a loud thud.
She heard a long, low growl and felt hot breath on her ankle.
“What in heaven’s name?”
A huge German shepherd placed its muzzle directly on top of her shoe and looked balefully up at her.
The pawnshop man glanced over the counter at the dog. “BooBoo!” he said sharply.
The dog’s ears pricked up, but he didn’t move. He was still staring at Mary Bliss.
“Get off, BooBoo,” the man called. “Stupid bastard.”
The dog stood up slowly, swished its tail, and wandered to a far corner of the shop.
“Stupid bastard,” the man repeated. “Oh,” he said, seeing the look on Mary Bliss’s face. “Sorry. My ex-wife’s dog.” He pulled the tote bag toward him. “Let me see what you got.”
He unwrapped the silver-cloth bundles and started taking the pieces from their compartments, holding each one up to the light, turning it this way and that.
It took him fifteen minutes to examine all of Mary Bliss’s silver. Occasionally he would stop and write something down on a scratch pad of paper. When he was done, he looked at the pad, did some addition, and sighed.
“Business sucks,” he said. “Nobody wants silver. Nobody wants to polish it. People eat off plastic. They want to throw things away, not polish them and put them back in a drawer. I give you twelve hundred dollars.”
She felt like he had slapped her across her face. Tears rose up in her eyes. “This is very fine sterling silver,” Mary Bliss said, feeling defensive. “People will always want lovely things in their home. Southerners, especially, love silver. Why, this silver would cost at least five hundred dollars a place setting, even at an antique shop.”
“You love it so much, why don’t you keep it?” he asked, shoving the bundle back at her.
“I have to have fifteen hundred dollars,” Mary Bliss said, gritting her teeth. “I looked it up in a reference book. This is Frances I. Five hundred a place setting is what it sells for. That doesn’t even take into account the serving pieces and the demitasse spoons.”
“Too bad,” the man said. He picked the camera up and looked through its lens.
“You’re saying you won’t buy it?” She felt a surge of panic. The temperature in the kitchen had been eighty-six degrees when she went downstairs in the morning. By that night, when Erin got home, the place would be like an oven.
“I told you, business sucks.”
“How much?” Mary Bliss repeated. “Surely you can do a little better than twelve hundred.”
He picked up the five-pronged serving fork, pinged it with a fingernail.
“Say…thirteen hundred.”
“Thirteen-fifty.” Mary Bliss could not believe she was standing here, in this cheesy pawnshop, dickering over her wedding silver.
“You’re nuts.”
But he got a clipboard with a sheet of paper on it and gave it to her. “Fill this out,” he told her. “And take off the glasses and that scarf.” He nodded toward a small wall-mounted camera on the wall behind him. “For business purposes. We like to see our customers, you know?”
“It’s not stolen!” she cried. “Is that what you think, that I stole this silver?”
He shrugged. “Lady, I don’t know you. You don’t know me. And that’s a lotta expensive silver you got there.”
She felt her shoulders sag as she removed the glasses. “It was a wedding gift. And a Christmas and birthday gift. For a lot of years.”
“You love it so much, why you sell?”
Mary Bliss filled out the blanks with precise block lettering. “I need the money.” She looked right at the camera then. “There’s been a death in the family.”