6

LOIS SAT in her deep chair behind the register craving a cigarette. On the desk beside her notepad a small fan blew warm air directly at her face, though every spring and summer Marianne would nearly beg her for air-conditioning. That was the last thing fine furniture needed. What it needed was a consistent lack of moisture from the five dehumidifiers Don had placed throughout the shop. Their constant humming had become as familiar to Lois as her own breathing, and she leaned back and watched Marianne up front helping a woman decide whether or not she should buy and ship back to Ohio a Biedermeier gilt mirror. Lois was asking $4,500 for it, which would leave her an $1,800 profit, which would be a good Sunday indeed. The woman was pushing sixty, and she was handsome the way wealthy women get, her hair newly done and stiff-looking, her alligator-skin handbag hanging from one wrist like some kind of pesky financial decision. Lois didn’t like her, and she was glad Marianne was dealing with her.

The only other customer in the store was a young man in shorts and a polo shirt studying a Wyandotte circus truck from the late 1930s. Its bed was surrounded by a lacquered wooden cage for lions, and it had tiny lettering painted along the top rails that read: The Greatest Show on Earth. It also had spoked wheels and had come from an original set, and it was fairly rare. She’d gotten it on eBay for $350, but she wasn’t letting it go for less than $450. This boy couldn’t be more than twenty-five, a first-time uncle, maybe. That polo shirt of his looked thin at the collar, and she doubted he had the money, so she stayed where she was.

She kept eyeing the pack of Carltons in the folds of her handbag at her feet. She’d had two with her coffee, but it was still only late morning and she liked to have one after lunch, then another two with her wine at the end of the day, and her final one watching TV after dinner. She had to wait.

Out the window past the hot shade of the portico, Oak Street lay fully under the sun. A woman and a teenage girl crossed the asphalt, making Lois think of Susan, and she opened her email again. But there was nothing. She checked her sent file to make sure she did, in fact, answer her this morning, and there it was, that sweet lie. But it wasn’t all a lie. She hadn’t seen Suzie since Christmas in St. Pete. With her husband Bobby and his bald head and that chaotic jazz music Lois hated. But the way he looked at Susan always put Lois at ease, and he could cook, too, his savory turkey the best she’d had, really. It was a shame they were having trouble, but when did that girl not have trouble with men?

“Pardon me.”

Up close, the young man looked a bit older, a worn look around the eyes. “How much are you asking for this?”

Not how much is this, but how much are you asking? Which meant antiquing wasn’t new to him, and he was prepared to negotiate.

“Five hundred dollars.”

“Seriously?”

“As a heart attack.”

“It’s strange you say that.”

“Just an expression.”

“My grandfather—” The young man looked away, his eyes on the woman from Ohio, though he didn’t seem to see her. “My grandfather’s sick, he—”

Oh, here it comes. Lois leaned forward.

“His mind is gone, and he only plays with toys.”

“That’s an expensive toy, honey.”

“Can I give you two hundred for it?”

It sometimes came as a surprise to Lois how her body would slip into gear before she’d even made a decision about someone, but here she was up and out of her chair, grabbing the circus truck from the young man’s hand and striding behind him to the toy shelves and placing it back beside a Rin Tin Tin Fort Apache play set. From here she could see a stain on the man’s front shorts pocket, the kind that comes from carelessness and sloth, but she’d stood a bit too quickly and the floor of her shop felt like a boat on open water. She took a breath and talked right through the swells.

“Save your sob story for someone else, all right? Five hundred means five hundred.”

It was the way he blinked at her with both eyes that made her think she might have been wrong about him. Or maybe he just wasn’t used to being so easily seen for what he was, a picker or shop owner himself, in from one of the coasts and trying to steal a deal for a handsome profit later. The Sunday after every Fourth Saturday Antiques Fair, there were always stragglers doing that kind of thing, though Lois’s Fine Furniture and Toys was the only shop in town worth poaching. No other owner dared to have the word “Fine” over their doors because every other store in Arcadia sold cheap bric-a-brac, the overwhelming heap of it under $300. It’s the first thing her fellow antiquers began to resent about her.

“That’s cold.” The young man shook his head and walked out the front door. The shop righted itself again. Lois settled back into her chair and pictured an old man her age, his liver-spotted hands fumbling with toy soldiers and cars and trucks. Yes, she may have been mistaken this time, but she shrugged it off. It was always better to come off too hard rather than too soft. Always.

Marianne leaned the mirror up against the wall and began to tell the good woman from Ohio all about the Biedermeier period, how it wouldn’t have come about if Prince Metternich of the Austrian Empire hadn’t cracked down on artists and writers and musicians in the early 1800s.

“So, you see, the creative community turned itself to safer subjects, like the domestic arts and this lovely gilt frame.”

Marianne was good, and Lois knew she was lucky to have her. Twenty years younger than Lois and twenty years older than Susan, she was about the age Linda would have been now, sixty-one or -two. Marianne had been married for forty years to the same man, a retired cattle rancher who’d given her a good life in a large post-and-beam house on eight hundred acres of land. They’d raised two sons, one of whom was a lawyer in Miami, the other a musician in Los Angeles, both married with happy kids, and every spring Marianne and Walter flew to Europe and stayed there for a month. Italy one year, Spain the next. Last year it was the French countryside. Marianne, like Lois, had no college, but she was a reader, and whenever Lois acquired something new from an estate or an auction or online, Marianne would do research on it on the Internet. She’d even drive into Tampa or St. Petersburg and check out books from their libraries. It’s the thing she said she loved the most about selling objects from the past, how much they taught her about human history.

Lois couldn’t disagree with this. She, too, had grown to appreciate what her antiques could tell her. Like her 1920s Sue Herschel collection of marionettes. They were on shelves beside the tin toys across from Lois’s desk, and she found herself staring at them quite a bit. She owned eleven of them, six men and five women, the men in wool pants with suspenders, or baggy three-piece suits and straw boaters. Her women, on a shelf of their own, were all flapper girls with gloved hands and cigarette holders and cloche hats. Just before the Depression, Herschel wrote and directed plays but got tired of putting up with drunk actors, so she started making puppets and ended up years later running a crew of over fifty artists who made close to three thousand Herschel marionettes. They were used by dozens of theater companies around the country and even performed at the White House for Dwight D. Eisenhower. But most of them got lost along the way, or burned, or eaten by beetles and termites, and there were only a few left, and they were the first “fine” things Don had acquired for Lois’s Fine Furniture and Toys.

“Wonderful, I’ll just wrap this up for you, then.”

That a girl.

Marianne brushed a strand of gray from her eyes and carried the Biedermeir mirror past Lois, winking at her on the way to the back room and the bubble wrap and tape. Lois nodded and closed her laptop. She waited for the woman from Ohio to make her way to the register, though she was taking her sweet time doing it. It’s what antiques did to people. Whether you thought you were interested or not, they were as hard to ignore as your own aging face in the mirror. The woman’s handbag hung at her side. She was running two fingers along the oilskin surface of a walnut plantation desk. It was made sometime during the Civil War, and its back had secret cubbyholes, and there were still scorch marks beneath the varnish from the candles its owners used while writing letters late into the night. Lois’s shop was filled with hundreds of these objects, and how many hours and hours over the years had she sat alone with them? She had bought this business to make a living for her and Suzie, but she never could have known that old things would give her far more than a sale here and there. For years it was just enough to get by and build her collection one piece at a time, but then word finally spread and she had to hire Marianne to help, and even when real money started coming in, it was something else altogether that Lois enjoyed: Sitting in the heart of her pedestal tables and Viennese armchairs, her Biedermeir chests and nightstands and side tables, her ebonized commodes and miniature vitrines, her walnut writing trumeaus and hand-carved nesting tables and rosewood settees, her shelves of children’s toys loaded with Kilgore trucks and Schoenhut dark horses, a Cox Shrike gas-powered tether car, cast-iron wagons and horses and a windup musical doghouse made in Switzerland, it was like sitting in front of a fire while someone old and strong told you one story after another, each as good as the one before it, each different but somehow the same, too. And how many of these beautiful things had been made during times of war? In times of mass sickness and death and floods and droughts? And yet, men and women still made them. That did something to Lois. She wasn’t sure what it was, but that thought always stopped her, and often after closing she’d linger in her chair behind the register in no hurry to go home, especially when Susan was a teenager, especially then. For here, surrounded by so many fine things made by the dead, Lois could for once breathe easy, and she no longer felt afraid.

“To whom do I write the check?”

It was living people who ruined everything.

“No checks. Cash or credit only, please.”

The woman had been pulling a leather-bound checkbook from her purse. She paused and raised her eyes to Lois. “Pardon me?”

“We don’t take checks. Cash or credit.”

Lois could hear her own tone, and she knew she should warm it up or she could very well lose this sale, but she did not like this woman from Ohio. She didn’t like how the emerald studs in her ears matched the emerald pendant over her sun-freckled chest. She didn’t like her manicured nails or her gold bracelets, and she certainly did not like how new it seemed for this lady to be denied anything.

“But, I assure you—”

“Cash or credit only.”

The woman pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes slightly. In her scrutinizing presence Lois felt just like what she was: coarse, uneducated, and a little cruel. She also felt fat and old and without a man, which was how it would probably always be now, wouldn’t it? She also felt right, and she wasn’t budging.

“Very well, then.” The woman pulled out an alligator-skin wallet and opened it to a compartment holding ten or twelve credit cards. She slid out a platinum one and handed it to Lois just as Marianne came around the corner from out back, the Biedermeier mirror completely taped up in bubble wrap.

“Here you are.” Marianne was smiling widely, a sheen of sweat along her hairline.

“But won’t you be shipping it?”

Does this look like the post office? Those were the words in Lois’s head, but she was running the card through, and an $1,800 profit didn’t come every day. She could feel the blood go tight in her veins, though, her mouth go dry, and she wanted that Carlton right now. Marianne was explaining that we’re not set up to do that kind of thing. “But there are two UPS stores in Port Charlotte about twenty miles south of us. Do you have a GPS?”

“Of course I have a GPS. I just thought for what I’m spending, shipping was included.”

Lois could feel her heart beating in her earlobes. “Nope.” She ripped the receipt from the machine and pushed it and a pen to the woman. “’Fraid not.”

The woman, whose name on her credit card was Anne Langely, glanced down at the receipt as if Lois were displaying something obscene.

I don’t work for this rich bitch. If I lose this sale, then I lose this sale.

Anne Langely snatched up the pen and scribbled her name and put her hand out for her credit card. Lois handed it to her, smiling.

Anne Langely stuffed it back in with the others. “I don’t like your tone.”

“That makes two of us.”

Again the pursed lips and slightly narrowed eyes. Would she or wouldn’t she? Then Anne Langely hooked her alligator-skin bag over one shoulder. She turned to Marianne and lifted the wrapped mirror with both hands and held it close to her chest like a good schoolgirl. She said to her: “You shouldn’t have this woman working for you. She’s a disgrace.”

“It’s my shop, not hers.” Lois grabbed her Carltons. “You have a nice day, now.” She brushed by Marianne, through the back room and outside. The heat smelled like grill smoke, and as she lit her cigarette she could hear tinny mariachi music from two or three blocks over. Anne Langely could very well reach her car with that Biedermeier mirror then change her mind and bring it back and cancel her purchase, but so what? It had been a good month. Marianne would lose a commission, but who else in town paid their help 10 percent commissions in the first place? Nobody. So Lois would have to take a loss and then write Marianne a check for $180, big deal. But she’d be damned if she was going to get patronized by anyone.

You scare people away, Lois. You act like they’re barging into your house. Don again. It’d been years since she visited his grave. He was buried in the Lamson family plot up north in Ocala, a depressing spit of land under some mangy pine trees, his big body wedged into a box just a few feet from his mother and father who he swore despised one another their entire sixty years together. His little brother Arthur was buried there, too, killed in Vietnam, that war the whole country was fighting about when Lois was raising Paul and Linda. It saddened her that that’s where Don wanted to be, but where else could he go? In back of their house under her oaks near Bone River?

And where was she going to go? Not in Ocala, and not beside her lousy ex-husband up north, nor beside her mother and father. No, it would be with Linda. It would be where her daughter went, though just the thought of those ocean waves lifted the ground beneath Lois’s feet, and she had to sit quickly in her lawn chair under the rusted iron landing above.

Resting on one of its flaking steps was the empty coffee can she used as an ashtray. Lois stared at it, saw her husband Gerry wading into the surf in his suit, that obscenely small can under his arm. She shook her head and flicked her ash. Across the dirt lot, smoke drifted through the hickory trees, and she could smell grilling pork or brisket, the mariachi music changing over to that Tejano all the Mexicans here liked. It had accordions in it and electric guitar too, a woman singing in Spanish, and then an engine revved, one of those low-riding trucks the young kids would work on when they weren’t picking citrus out in the groves. When she and Suzie got here thirty years ago, there were only a handful of Mexican pickers and their families, but now Lois and Marianne and most of the white shop owners here were a minority, especially on a Sunday, the only day the Mexicans didn’t work and Arcadia became a Mexican village and Lois didn’t like it. Don said she was a racist, but he was wrong. Lois was afraid they’d scare away deep-pocketed customers, that’s all. Other shop owners were, too. They’d had meetings about it. Don had argued that the only crime here was between white ranch hands shooting at each other when they were drunk. Lois couldn’t disagree with that, really.

But that Soto boy. Gustavo Soto. His high cheekbones and dark eyes and scuffed, pointed boots. He’d come to their house only once. It was a Sunday, and he’d pulled up in a battered El Camino. He wore a straw cowboy hat, his best western shirt tucked into his jeans, a single blue violet between two fingers, and when he stepped up to their front door he took his hat off and held it low in front of him, his chin down but his eyes on the door for Suzie.

Susan was sixteen but looked twenty. She’d started wearing sundresses, which nobody her age wore. She’d let her brown hair grow long, and she wore too much eye makeup and too many bangles on her wrist, and she’d been sitting in the den with one of her books, chewing gum and acting like it was normal to be all dolled up on a Sunday. Lois opened their front door before Suzie did.

“How old are you?”

He didn’t say a word. Just looked at her the way you would look at a dog you weren’t sure was about to bite or not.

“Do you speak English? I asked you a question.”

“Yes, he speaks English, Lois. Jesus Christ.” And Susan was stepping past her and hooking her arm in Soto’s, taking the violet from him as he turned and nodded once at Lois and put his hat back on as they hit the ground, and he might as well have been that big ugly boy in a red Himalaya suit jacket holding Linda in the arcade, his eyes on Lois over her daughter’s shoulder, and— No. Just no.

Lois’s blood began to hum. “Hey! Where do you think you’re going?”

Lois was in her mid-fifties then, heavy and smoking heavy, but she was running around the hood of the El Camino before the boy had started his engine. She reached inside and tried to yank the keys from his hand, but he held on tight and Suzie was screaming, “Let go, Noni! We’re just going for a fucking ride!”

“No you don’t.” Lois had both hands on his wrist, but he was strong and jerked free of her and she almost fell on her rump as the engine sprang to life and shot into gear and the El Camino drove off, spitting dirt and dead pine needles under its tires onto the county road.

It was war after that.

One exhausting battle after another.

Lois inhaled deeply on her Carlton. She was sweating and thirsty and knew her blood pressure was up. She was also still tired. It had been a good morning. Maybe she’d close early for the day. Give Marianne her bonus and just go home for lunch and a nap.

“Lois, can I talk to you about something?”

Oh, Jesus, what now? “Was I too much of a bitch to that bitch?”

“Well, . . .” Marianne folded her arms beneath her breasts. She wore a yellow-and-white-striped blouse with pearls, and today she looked old.

“Marianne.” Lois exhaled smoke. “I’ve had to work my whole life. I won’t have some tourist from Ohio talking down to me in my own shop.”

“I didn’t think she was that bad.”

“Well, she was.”

“But, Lois, that was my sale, and—”

“You know I’d pay your bonus anyway. Haven’t I done that before?”

“It’s not just that. I—”

“Come out with it.” Lois stubbed her cigarette out on the step and dropped the butt into the coffee can.

“People talk.”

“So let them.”

“But Lois, our rating has dropped from four stars to two, and it’s—”

“Look.” Lois braced her hands on the arm of the chair and stood slowly this time. “I’m pooped from yesterday, and I need to rest. If you want to stay open, feel free.”

“Lois.” Marianne still had her arms crossed. She looked frustrated and disappointed, and, truthfully, she was probably Lois’s only real friend.

“Our business isn’t down, is it?”

“No, but—”

“Enough said. I’m going home.”

Somewhere in the neighborhood off Oak Street a man and woman were laughing. The Tejano singer seemed to be singing a ballad now, her voice nearly breaking with sadness, and Lois knew she should congratulate Marianne on her sale today, but she moved by her without saying another word. She didn’t like being scolded. She never had. But once she was back in the old-wood-smelling dimness of the shop, she hoped Susan really would come visit this time. She hoped that she wasn’t just talking.