Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Phoebe
Jay texts me a picture of several boxes in front of the main house’s front door Monday morning before I’ve even left my apartment.
Jay
Saw this coming back from a run. That’s a lot of tea sets.
Phoebe
IS IT? Are those tea sets? No. Do not want.
Jay
Didn’t look but thought I’d better warn you
Ugh. The butler’s pantry is going to run out of room for those soon, and I still haven’t had any brilliant ideas about what to do with them. So far, my best plan is to make it an interview question for the curator candidates as a “hypothetical” situation to test their problem-solving skills. You are in possession of eight donated tea sets and the number grows weekly. What do you do about this?
When I get to work, I set my things in the library and head out front to see what I’m dealing with. I find a stack of five medium-sized boxes, all repurposed, all sporting different brand markings from apple juice to motor oil, all scuffed and a touch ragged. The top one has a piece of lined paper from a yellow legal pad taped to it, labeled only “Museum.”
I open it to find a block-printed note, short and to the point. I read it, do a double take, and read it again before I call Jay.
He picks up after the first ring. “Need help moving tea sets?”
“No, but you do need to come look at these boxes.”
“Be right over.” A few minutes later, he jogs around the side of the house.
“What’s up?” he asks when he reaches me.
I wave the paper at him and clear my throat before reading it aloud. “Since it was Abigail Martin who put Cyrus Willard out of business, might as well be the Martins who deal with the leftovers.” I look up from the letter. “That’s it. It’s signed Willard. I met a Willard at the apothecary, but I thought it was his first name.”
“Can I see it?” Jay asks, holding his hand out for the note. “If he was old, you met Abel Willard. If he was really old, you met his father, Boaz Willard.”
“It was Abel,” I say, remembering the man referring to his father.
“It was a distant Willard cousin who talked a Martin into the ‘curative water’ business way back then.”
“They’re still holding a grudge?” I’ve never run into a real-life generational family feud.
“Not really,” Jay says. “The Willards have been legitimate for a long time but on a much smaller scale. You’d have to go back past living memory in their family line to find someone still bitter about the Martins pulling out of the business.” He looks down at the note and gives a short laugh. “Or maybe not.”
I pull two pairs of gloves from my pocket. “Got these while I was waiting for you. Shall we?”
He accepts a pair and pulls them on. “Let’s.”
We pick a box and open the flaps to reveal wires, wood, glass, gauges, and coils that seem to belong to several different devices, packed as neatly as possible, still bewildering. I pull one from the top, some kind of machine set on a wooden base about four inches by four inches.
“I’m not sure what I’m looking at,” I say as Jay leans closer. It has a curved metal gauge next to a small black metal piece about the size of a domino on its side, both secured with brass screws. Two fibrous wires extend from holes beside them, ending in brass-colored cylinders that look like metal jump rope handles.
“Image search?” Jay asks.
I angle the device so he can take a picture with his phone.
Within a few seconds, he shows me his screen. “Something very similar on an auction site. It’s an ‘induction coil vintage medical device,’ but it doesn’t say what it treated.”
“Let’s try another one.” I set it down and pull out a wooden chest the size of a medium jewelry box. Inside we find more coils and wires but in a different configuration. “Pay dirt. Original directions.” I turn it so Jay can see the heavily yellowed and stained paper glued to the inside lid.
“Directions for using home medical apparatus number five,” he reads aloud. “J.H. Bunnell Company.”
“These are all antique quack medical devices,” I say. “Let’s check the other boxes.”
An inspection of the other four reveals one full of posters and handbills for old medicines, one containing empty bottles and tins with labels boasting cures for everything from gout to “all men’s problems,” and two more boxes holding devices .
“This first box looks like devices that required electricity, and these other two are full of devices that didn’t.” I look at Jay, grinning. “This is so much cooler than tea sets. I know what I’ll have the new curator work on first.” Possibilities for an exhibit chase through my brain, like one examining where traditional herbal healing and quack medicine diverge and exploring the history of both in Serendipity Springs.
“Butler’s pantry?” he asks.
“No, let’s—oh, look. I was going to say I’ll have Zee bring them over to the shed when she gets here, and there she is.”
Zee parks in the drive and hops out. I introduce her to Jay and explain where the boxes need to go. “I’ll probably have you bring several tea sets from the butler’s pantry that way too.”
“Sounds good. I’ll take care of that, then get to work on the things Terry pointed out last week unless you have other jobs you need done?”
“No, Terry gave you a great list to tackle. Let’s go get your keys.”
“Can I talk to you for a second before you do that?” Jay asks.
“Sure. You remember where to find the library, Zee?” She nods and heads into the house. “What’s up?”
“I’ve been thinking about everything you told me last week. Your idiot ex-boyfriend and the tension with Catherine. I’m glad you told me about it. And it made me wonder …” He trails off.
The contractor’s truck pulls in and stops behind Zee’s. This day is officially in full swing, but I want to know the end of that sentence. “Made you wonder what?”
He looks over at the two men climbing from the truck and shakes his head. “I’ll get out of your way, but if I promise to have real food, would you be up for coming to the cottage for lunch? ”
“I can do that.” But my stomach knots. “Is this something about me?”
“No,” he says. “Sorry, should have led with that. It’s about me.”
I nod. “See you at lunch.”
Do I wonder about what he wants to tell me through three Zoom interviews with archivist candidates? Yes. But I do my job somehow, and by the time I’m done scheduling my top two choices for interviews with the panel, it’s lunchtime, and I force myself not to jog to the cottage.
“Hey,” Jay says when he opens to my knock. “Come on in and have a seat on the sofa.”
I give him a questioning look when I notice he has a ring light set up and aimed at a stool set in front of the curtains, but I sit.
“You asked about this backdrop the other day, but I felt dumb explaining it, so I said it was a blackout curtain. It’s not.” He sighs and pulls a knit beanie from his back pocket. “You might as well see this.” With that, he hands me his phone and pulls the beanie on before he slumps into an armchair.
The screen is on TickSnap, a video sharing platform, and it shows Jay, dressed exactly as he is right now. The number of likes climbs in the couple of seconds it takes me to process this.
“Go ahead. Watch it.”
I press play, and Jay in the video starts talking, but it’s not the Jay I’m used to. Jay in the video says, “Someone hit me up with a question about the Third Amendment, and I don’t know, dude. It’s like when you’re playing Minecraft, and the pillager scouting parties come and want to attack you, but you can’t kill them or they’ll attack neighboring villages, and you can’t attack them directly, so then you …”
I listen to him explain the concept of quartering soldiers in a disinterested way, like he’s too bored to invest in the conversation, and yet, less than two minutes later, he’s broken down the need for the Third Amendment succinctly and correctly. Or at least as much as I understand the basic idea of Minecraft. A comment floats up the screen from someone calling themself VidKid saying, “That makes way more sense than the way the sub explained it in class. Thx.”
I look at Jay. “What is this?”
He holds out his hand for his phone and slides it into his shorts pocket before pointing to his beanie. “This is my influencer costume. I have an account called Gaming History where I explain historical events using video game analogies.”
This is not at all what I expected him to tell me when he asked me to come over. “That’s creative. Does it do well?”
He pulls the beanie off his head and shrugs. “I have over a million subscribers to my channel.”
“Whoa. The Sutton only has around 150,000. That’s …”
“Embarrassing,” he says. “It’s embarrassing. My dad convinced me it would help me professionally, and it does, but only as a content creator.”
When he doesn’t continue, I ask, “You don’t like doing it?” It’s a stupid question. If he enjoyed it, he wouldn’t call it embarrassing.
“It pays the bills.”
“Doesn’t your trust fund do that?”
He gives me an amused look. “Martins don’t get their trusts until we’re sixty-five. My fourth great-grandfather set them up like that because he says that’s when people have enough sense to handle being rich. Every Martin after that has agreed and kept the terms.”
“So this is your job?”
“Plus books and speaking fees. I’ve got some good sponsors, and the account is how I get booked for talks and lectures. ”
“I don’t think that’s embarrassing.”
He shrugs. “I like that kids are learning about history. But this isn’t what I saw myself doing when I was neck-deep in my dissertation.”
“Do you want to focus on writing full-time?” I’ve assumed this whole time that those books are his job, that he is already doing what he wants to do.
He shakes his head. “No, or at least that’s not all I want to do. I love teaching. I’d like to do both. Teach college and write history books. But my dad convinced me that creating this whole persona would make me stand out when history departments are shrinking or getting folded into other majors. Instead, it’s getting in my way.”
He gets up and heads toward the kitchen. “I got salads. I’ll tell you the whole story over lunch if you want to hear it.”
By the time we’re finished eating twenty minutes later, I have a fuller picture of Jay. I would almost say it’s a surprising picture, but the more I listened to him talk, the more sense it made. That charm of his allows him to assume the gamer bro persona so easily and make complicated historical events digestible.
“Why did you tell me all this like a confession?” I ask. “You’re getting views other influencers would kill for.”
“Come on, Phoebe. You know why. I’m barely credible to you as a historian because my books have snappy titles.”
My cheeks feel warm. “That’s fair. I underestimated you, which is hypocritical because you’re doing the thing I was always trying to do at the Sutton. You’re making history relevant for a whole new set of learners.”
He sighs. “I know. And even though my account won’t change anyone’s life, if it helps some kids to become more curious about history, that feels pretty good. But I also know this isn’t the kind of thing other historians respect. ”
“That part surprises me,” I say. “I pegged you as a free-spirit type who doesn’t care what the establishment thinks.”
He shakes his head. “I’m about tradition to my bones . Of course I want to be respected by my peers, except they’re not even my peers because the dumb nicknames precede me and hiring panels don’t even want to bring me in for interviews.”
“Nicknames?”
He waves his hand like it’s nothing, but his neck gets kind of red. “Like the Hot Prof thing. I don’t get taken seriously, and I want to be. That’s the gist. The end.”
I consider this for a few seconds. “Why tell me all this? I’m glad you did, but what made you decide to bring it up?”
He stands and gathers our plates. “Like I said, I’ve thought a lot about what you shared with me last week. We’re friends. Seemed fair for me to share too.”
“Then I’ll share that I think colleges are dumb for not considering you. You have excellent research and reasoning skills, and undergrad students would love your classes.” Maybe more than a few of those undergrads might fall under the spell of his stupidly hot face, but I bet they’d still learn some things about history too.
He turns on the faucet and begins washing the plates. “Speaking of research, when are we going to check out the newspaper archives? My dad asked me to go out and help with a couple of things, and I don’t want to commit until I can schedule them around the Smitten Kitten hunt.”
“Don’t make your dad wait. Just go.” I grab a dish towel and take the clean plate to dry it. I feel guilty that he’s been waiting for me to get moving on the search when I’ve been putting it off because I was avoiding him.
“It’s not an emergency. It’s boat maintenance we do every year. It’s just a tradition to do it together before the Fourth of July. ”
“So you need to go this week?” The Fourth is a week from Friday.
“Ideally.” He trades me the wet plate for the dry one and puts it away, then leans against the counter while I finish off the second one.
“Tomorrow,” I say. “I’ll meet you at the Spring Brook College library when it opens. However long it takes, I’ll make it up on Saturday.”
He snorts. “Phoebe, you don’t have to do that. If we count all the time you spend thinking about this job when you’re not here, I bet you’re working seven hundred hours a week.”
“Maybe a little under that.” I hand him the second plate.
“I’ll meet you in the morning, and please don’t come here on Saturday. Go do something irresponsible.”
“Like start a TickSnap account where I do get-ready-with-me videos and sneak in facts about the Industrial Revolution between mascara strokes?”
He spins from the cupboard and lunges for me, but I jump out of reach.
“Stay in your zone, friend!” I call on my way out of the cottage.
But I know the warning is really for me.