Aubrey
“…Now I know this site isn’t exactly what you said you were looking for but I think once you see how charming the interior is you’ll want to give it a big old hug,” Camille Yates, owner of Pioneer Properties, expounded as she hustled me down a side alley off Main Street in Chance, Colorado.
“It used to be a basket shop-slash-tattoo parlor but the owner, Winifred Porter, passed away while in the middle of doing some inkwork for Billy Hewkins. Just fell right over dead with the gun in her hand. Poor Billy. To this day he’s walking around with an incomplete image of the twenty-five pound bass he pulled out of Frank Lancaster’s cow pond.
He says to give it a tail would sour the memory of Winifred. ”
I paused halfway down the alley to gape at the lean woman with a bright red beehive that would give Effie Trinket hair envy.
“Wait.” I glanced down the narrow alleyway. “You’re going to show me a shop where someone died?”
Camille sighed wearily then began tapping the toes of her pump.
“Yes, I was because it’s been sitting empty for ages and it’s in your price range.
Also, Percival Hoots, who lives outside of town and has astral projections weekly, walked through the shop just last month and claimed it free of otherworldly things.
Also, he sprayed for ants. So the place is free of any ghosts and those little piss ants that like to come in uninvited in the spring. ”
I took a moment to absorb all this then pushed my glasses up my nose. “So Percy Hoots is a psychic exterminator?”
“He is. Summoning the dead from their eternal rest is a hit-or-miss occupation so killing bugs pays the rent. The shop is just down here.” She waved a manicured hand at the alley. “Since we’re almost there why not just peek inside?”
“Okay, sure, let’s peek.” I followed in her perfumed wake like a lonely little duckling.
I’d been hoping to get a storefront on the main drag but those were all taken, or if empty out of my price range.
Gee-Gee had left me a nice sum but not a fortune.
It would get me a house and a shop if I were frugal.
I’d found a little bungalow on the Pioneer Properties website that Effie—I mean Camille—was going to show me after lunch.
Morning shops, afternoons houses. Living from a hotel room wasn’t ideal but it was better than living in the same apartment with Hank.
Just thinking of my ex made me mad then sad then mad again. Cheating bastard.
“…could find lots of ways to tidy up the place. And there are shelves and an apartment above the shop you could rent out for extra income. Oh, and look at these windows!” She motioned toward the grimy plate glass windows like a model showing off a new car on a game show.
“They’re a little dusty but just imagine all of your books lined up all pretty.
Do you sell smutty books? I know I asked already but you know how small-town minds are.
Not that I’m interested in reading those bodice rippers of course. ”
“No, of course. I do plan to sell romances, obviously, as they’re wonderful and the best-selling genre of books worldwide, but I also will carry a wide range of novels, poetry, and perhaps even some calendars.”
“Oh splendid.”
I turned from Camille to inspect the windows. They were huge, and while covered with soapy penises and spider webs, would be amazing for displaying all the books I so loved.
“Let’s peek inside now.” She pulled a ring of keys from her purse and unlocked the heavy wooden door.
Stepping into the musty old basket shop-slash-tattoo parlor I had what my Gee-Gee would have called a resonance.
Gee-Gee liked to tell of stepping off a tour bus in Canada and feeling as if the land had been her home for ages.
That was how I felt walking into that cramped, empty space.
The shop was everything I had ever dreamed of owning one day all rolled up into one dusty mess.
Big windows, oodles of shelves, and a certain ambiance of history.
“Are we sure the place isn’t haunted?” I asked as I walked about, running my fingers over dark cherry wall units scattered with dead spiders and flies.
“Percy gave it a good go-over after he sprayed for creepy crawlers and in my experience once a Hoot says a place is clear of otherworldly incriminations then that place is cleansed. I could call Percy to see if he would be willing to come out once more to give the shop a deeper purge but that might cost a few hundred dollars as he would have to buy more of his mentally acute sage and willow bark dust.”
“No, no, I’m sure it’s fine.” I slid behind an old wooden counter where I could see a new POS system set up next to a display of tiny books filled with poems and drawings of frilly paper doilies.
How to tell the world you’re gay without saying a word.
Set up a display of poetry books about afternoon tea and tatting doilies.
Hank would have called me a queer little queen for even mentioning something so feminine.
Well fuck Hank. He was back in Lucky Falls—which hadn’t been so lucky for me since he’d cheated on me and broken my heart—and I was here in Chance.
A fitting name for a town where I was taking the biggest chance of my life.
Living alone, buying a house and a shop…
Yikes. Talk about playing the odds that generally were not in my favor.
Still, nothing ventured nothing gained as Gee-Gee liked to say before buying her bingo cards. “Can we look upstairs?”
“Of course!” Camille smelled a sale. I could tell in the way she hustled me through the back room—a storage area—and out back to a creaky set of steps.
“Just up here.” She led the way to a dull little area littered with old flyers and a tattoo chair as old as the hills.
“That chair can be taken out obviously but it’s heavy and might require you to find a big, strong man to carry it out. ”
Ouch. Sure, I was kind of skinny, kind of nerdy, and very much nearsighted, but I could surely lift a chair.
“The previous owner worked and lived here for a few years. There’s a small bath that way, a bedroom, and this was the ink shop and living room.
” I looked around, gave it a nod, and stuck my head into the various rooms. Small yes, but with good bones.
A single man could live here nicely, and the rent would help offset the cost of the shop.
“So, what do you think? Isn’t it just perfect? ”
“It’s pretty perfect. I think I’ll take it.”
She beamed. “Excellent! It’s so you, Audrey!”
“Aubrey. With a B.” It was a common mistake. Every time I got a takeout coffee the name on the cup was Audrey. And I corrected it every single time to no avail.
“Right, yes, sorry. It’s such a unique name for a man.” She smiled widely.
I nodded. There was no point in going into how I was named for my grandfather, a British pilot who’d won the heart of a little American lass who’d been with family in the UK throughout the war.
The name was quite British if what Gee-Gee told me was right.
It was quite the romance. Gee-Gee loved to talk about him.
I missed my grandmother so badly it stole my breath.
She was all the family I’d had and now she was gone…
“Now, let’s move onto the bungalow out on the Milly Moth Road,” Camille said, breaking into my moment of utter despair.
“It’s only ten minutes from the shop! You could ride a bike in the summer.
” She led me past the old chair back down the unsteady metal steps, through the back door of the shop, and then out the front.
“We’ll work on the paperwork for the shop and the bungalow after we return. ”
“I’ve not said I’d take the bungalow,” I reminded her but she was off, click-clacking down the alley in her high heels, talking a mile a minute about the little house with the picket fence that was just perfect for me.
I’d seen the images of the cabin online already and had fallen in love with the tiny place tucked back amid some towering Ponderosa pines.
The windows were round, the fence white, and the exterior stone.
It reminded me of a home for a hobbit in many ways right down to the smoke rising from the rock chimney and the tiny garden filled with potato plants.
“Oh you will. It’s perfect for a man of your refinement and education.”
Refinement? I peeked down at the old sweater I’d pulled over a worn tee with a stack of books on it, a pair of corduroys, and my favorite scuffed leather boating shoes even though we were thousands of miles from the sea.
My brown hair was overgrown, out of shape, and in need of a comb I never could seem to find.
She spoke like I was a university professor and not just a dude with a bachelor’s degree in American literature with a heavy concentration on American Western poetry.
But hey, if she wanted to think of me as a Rhodes scholar then who was I to tell her otherwise?
It felt good to have someone think well of me now Gee-Gee was with her flyboy once again.
Maybe moving here to start over would be just the thing my tender heart needed after all.
Oh yeah, this little bungalow was perfect. Perfectly perfect.
Not only did it resemble—in my mind at least—a fairy-tale cabin looking out from the pines to see a crystal blue sky, it had a pond.
A pond! Not a big thing. No, just a small one that could hold a pair of koi once it was redone.
An expense that would cut into the inheritance from Gee-Gee but one I was fully prepared to spend.
Who needed socks? I’d get blisters if I could have an enchanted pond.