SECOND LIFE ANTIQUES
NICO
Iwas dying again.
Other people dreamed about being chased. I dreamed about being too late.
There were always horses. I could hear them screaming off to my right, though I never saw them. The ground was tilted, or I was, and a full moon hung low and close, closer than a moon should hang, through a haze of smoke that stung my eyes.
The first impact came under my ribs. The second came through my shoulder.
A man ran toward me. I couldn't see him clearly through the smoke, but I felt the ground shake under his weight, and I heard him shouting before he reached me.
He dropped to his knees beside me. His hands came down wet against my face, and he kept saying the same word, over and over, a word I could never quite place.
It could have been my name. It could have been a prayer.
His eyes.
That part stayed with me into the morning, every time.
He was crying. I had never once seen him cry, not in any of these dreams, not until now. He pressed his mouth to my forehead and said a word I almost understood, and then I woke up.
I woke with a start and checked myself before I checked anything else — chest, ribs, shoulder — feeling for wounds that were never there.
My skin was wet, but only with sweat. The sheet had wound itself around one leg.
My pillow lay on the floor a few feet from the bed, thrown there sometime in the night.
I sat up, dragged a hand down my face, and breathed through my teeth until my heartbeat slowed enough that I could count it without effort.
A small black shape sat at the foot of the bed, watching me.
“Don't,” I said.
Drake did not stop watching me. He never did.
Thirteen pounds of black cat with one chipped fang, nine years old, and the settled disapproval of an animal twice his age.
He believed in food, in sitting on top of whatever paperwork I needed most, and in watching me from the foot of the bed at four in the morning like he was taking notes for later.
“The building could catch fire and you'd sit right there. You'd watch it happen. You'd think, well, my human's having a rough one, guess I'll observe.”
He blinked at me, slow, unimpressed.
“Yeah. Exactly.”
I swung my legs over the side of the bed.
The floor was cold — it was always cold in spring, because the building was old and the radiators ran on a schedule that had nothing to do with the actual temperature outside.
I sat on the edge of the mattress with my elbows on my knees and waited for the parts of me still caught in the smoke to catch up with the rest.
At that hour, before the day had a chance to talk me out of it, I let myself want the things I kept locked down the rest of the time.
Not anything specific. A person on the other side of the bed who hadn't ended up there because they needed money, or a favor, or somewhere to hide.
I gave myself about ten seconds of it, because ten seconds was the limit I'd set a long time ago, and I still kept it.
“Okay,” I said, to no one. “Okay.”
I fed Drake and made coffee.
The apartment was small. I'd bought it cheap and bullied it into shape over one long broke summer, and it still showed the marks.
The chair by the window sat half-stripped, waiting on a finish I never got around to, because every free Saturday turned into fixing other people's antiques instead of my own.
Drake yelled at me from the kitchen counter while I rinsed his bowl, so I rinsed it slower, because he was being rude.
“You are a small, unwell person in a fur coat.”
He did not deny it.
I poured my coffee into a thermos, shouldered the tool bag, and tipped Drake into the soft carrier he hated less than the hard one, zipping it most of the way while he gave me the look of an animal who considered himself kidnapped by a man he'd nonetheless decided to keep.
I took the stairs, since the elevator had been working through its own emotional issues for six months.
The sky over Astoria was flat and gray, low enough that it seemed to sit right on top of the buildings.
The bodega on the corner was already open, and Sami gave me the same nod through the glass he'd been giving me for four years without looking up from his phone, and I returned it.
The N was running on time, which I did not trust. I rode it across the river with Drake voicing his opinion of public transit the entire way, muffled through the canvas, and I got off at my stop and walked the four blocks to the shop.
Second Life Antiques sat between a shuttered tailor and a Vietnamese place that did the best pho in a six-block radius and had no business being as cheap as it was.
The sign over the door was hand-painted, and the gilt had begun to flake at the edges in a way I told myself was charming.
The bell over the door was salvaged brass, pulled out of a confessional in a Bushwick church before the building went condo.
It rang as I shouldered in.
“You look like a haunted Victorian orphan again,” Evie said, without turning around.
“Good morning to you too.”
“I left coffee on your bench. The good shop, not the bad shop. I love you.”
“I have coffee.”
“Yes, but the stuff in your thermos is what you made, which means it tastes like sadness.”
“You are terrible,” I said. “You should go work somewhere else.”
“I have applied.”
“Where?”
“Nowhere. I just want you to feel insecure.”
She turned, finally, in the green sweater she'd worn two days a week for as long as I'd known her. At first glance, Evelyn Sato looked as if she'd wandered into the wrong building and simply decided to stay. She'd been my best friend since the second year of art school.
She squinted at me. “Bad one?”
“Average.”
“Average for you is a bad one for everybody else. You want to talk about it.”
“No.”
“Good. I didn't want to.”
She held a hand out for Drake. I unzipped the carrier, and Drake stalked out across the front counter like the counter had been disrespecting him personally, and Evie scratched him under the chin in the one spot he allowed exactly two people in the world to touch.
“Hi, my king,” she said. “Hi, my small terrible son. Did the haunted Victorian orphan make you suffer?”
“He's fine.”
“I wasn't asking you.”
I went to the back while they fawned over each other.
The shop was long and narrow, deep instead of wide; the front was the showroom and the back was my workshop, and the wall between them had a doorway with no door in it, just a heavy curtain that Drake liked to sit on top of.
The smell back there was the smell I'd built my adult life around.
The bench had my coffee on it, with a Post-it stuck to the cup.
Frame. Mrs. Adler. Thinks it's mahogany. It is not mahogany. Be nice.
I almost smiled. I drank the coffee and went back to work.
The frame was not mahogany.
It was mahogany-stained pine, late nineteenth century, with a gesso layer that had cracked along the inside of the rabbet and a corner joint that had given up some time ago.
Mrs. Adler had inherited it from an aunt who had inherited it from a husband, and she'd been told by someone with more confidence than knowledge that it was worth several thousand dollars.
Evie had been right that I was going to have to be nice about it.
The frame was worth about three hundred dollars to the right buyer, and the labor to stabilize the corner would cost more than that.
I'd do the work anyway, because Mrs. Adler was eighty-one and lived alone and the frame held her aunt's painting, and I'd undercharge her for it the way I always did — because despite a lifetime of trying not to be this way, I still couldn't bring myself to charge people what a job actually cost when the job mattered more to them than to me.
Evie wandered back with her own coffee around ten thirty.
“Park called.”
“Tell her the Eastlake's done, but I want to do one more pass on the oil before she takes it.”
“I told her that. She wants to come in on Saturday and 'just look.'”
“Tell her she can look on Tuesday after I sign off on it.”
“Already did. She said you're mean.”
“I am mean.”
“I know, baby. I told her.”
I worked until lunch. The shop bell rang twice while I was in the back, and Evie handled both. I heard her flirt-laugh once, which meant a regular she liked, and then her you-can-look-but-don't-touch-me-or-the-furniture voice, which meant a tourist.
By twelve thirty the corner joint was clamped and curing, and that was when the bell rang again.
“Look who decided to grace us,” Evie said.
I came around the curtain, wiping my hands on a rag.
Remy stood in the middle of the showroom with a paper bag from the place on Steinway in one hand, and on his face, the same bright, forced smile he'd been deploying since he was nine years old.
“There he is,” he said. “There's my big brother. I brought lunch.”
I didn't say anything yet. I looked at him the way I'd learned to look at him over the years — his shoes, his jacket, the way he was standing, the size of his pupils in a room that wasn't that bright.
He held the bag up. “It's the food from the place you like. Don't even pretend you're not hungry.”
I wasn't, but I crossed the shop, took the bag from him, and set it on the counter without opening it. He always brought food when he wanted money, or something he could sell.
“Hey, Evie. You look good today. Did you—”
“My hair is in a knot, Remy. It's the exact same hair you've seen in this shop nine times this year.”
“Fair. Fair enough.”
“You look mean today,” she said, mostly to me.
“I am mean today.”
Evie picked Drake up off the counter and looked at me over the top of his head. “Drake and I are going to go discuss his crimes in private. Excuse us.”
I waited until the curtain fell shut behind her, then leaned my hip against the counter and looked at my brother.
“How much do you need?”
“Wow. No hello. No how's it going.”
“Remy.”
“I'm serious, you didn't even let me put the bag down before you—”
“How much?”