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My favorite customer, Myrtle Ledford, was telling me about her husband, Roy, when the bell over the door jangled. I looked up and saw a most peculiar man sporting a pencil mustache and a fedora. Nothing like my usual customers. He closed the door behind him and searched furtively with beady eyes. Then he spotted what he came for, and it wasn’t piccalilli.
Nigel had just come from the backroom, where we’d been cutting a large wheel of Parmesan into wedges. The odd little man met him at the cheese counter. Nigel blanched, and I knew Fedora spelled trouble.
Nigel jerked his head toward the back in a most un-Nigel-like way, as though he’d been watching too many film noir. But of course he hadn’t been watching them—he’d been living them during those years before we’d met. Now I could only stand by as he reclaimed his old way of life.
“What is it honey?” Myrtle asked, her voice warbly from a botched medical treatment over in Murphy.
I shuddered. “Oh, just one of those twists that life throws at you when you think everything is going swimmingly.”
She chuckled at my old-fashioned word. “Well, be grateful you’ve had a stretch of swimmingly. Can’t say I remember one.”
Myrtle’s hardscrabble life included too many heartaches to recount. They’d dealt with lifelong poverty, the death of a child, and a lengthy separation when Roy, her husband, went “up the river for moonshine.” Myrtle uprooted herself to follow him to a small apartment near the Ohio federal penitentiary. Now Roy was in the hospital following his second heart attack, and Myrtle had stopped by to pick up a few of his favorites. As she hoisted her bag of groceries, I tossed in some Scottish oatmeal cookies I knew he liked.
“On the house. And please tell Roy I look forward to seeing him back at the store.”
“More like on the bench out front,” Myrtle said with mock irritation. Yes, Roy was of that generation of men who let the womenfolk do all the shopping and cleaning and birthing and, well, you name it. He and an ever-changing gaggle of men sat out front on the beautiful bench Abit had crafted, carving along the back the silhouettes of men who’d sat with him all those years ago. Before Roy got sick, he held court out there, jawing while Myrtle shopped. But she seemed to love him dearly, and I hoped they would still have times together that did go swimmingly.
When she left, I walked to the back. Nigel stood outside, alone, smoking a cigarette and looking for all the world like he wished he were somewhere else. I’d never seen him smoke before.
I joined him and asked to bum one. “I’ve quit,” I added.
“Me, too,” he said. We laughed.
He lit my cigarette, and I drew on it deeply. “Who was that funny looking guy with the fedora?”
“Oh, just some bloke I shared a drink with.”
“What’s his name?”
“Er, uh, one of those double names so popular in these parts. I believe he said Johnny Ray.”
I knew he was stalling. “Making friends, eh? Though he doesn’t seem like your type.”
“Well, you know how it is, not too many of my type, as you put it, round here.”
“Plenty with your heritage, but you’re right. I’m glad you’re settling in and meeting some people.” As he started to say something, I interrupted. “Hey wait a minute, where’d you get a drink?” I knew our county didn’t have much to offer in that department. They let stores like mine sell wine and beer, but bars around here were scarcer than a big paycheck.
“Oh, there are ways. And places.”
I let that go. “So how long do you plan to lay low in Timbuktu?”
“Oh, who knows? You’re not trying to get rid of me, are you? I’m rather enjoying myself, and I believe sales are up since a dashing bloke from the Old Country started selling cheeses and wines—and lagers.”
He was right. Now that Nigel was ensconced at Abit’s, I could truly appreciate having him around—just when I needed help.
We’d finished chiseling that Parmesan into small pieces by the time Abit came to take Nigel home. He walked in with questions of his own. “Who was that guy with the lousy muffler, Nigel? It sounded like a tractor pull from inside the house.” He was smiling so I knew he was just giving Nigel a hard time.
“That would likely have been Johnny Ray, right?” I added, piling on.
Nigel frowned. I did too. I knew trouble begets trouble, and we had no shortage of that in Laurel Falls.