Chapter Four
FOUR
Callahan
No. Nope. This will not do.
“Um. Hi. Sorry to interrupt your, uh…this,” I say loudly enough to cut through a rather operatic high note as I gesture to encompass the entire situation.
“But you need to get down. And go eat in the office. There’s no food allowed in the main part of the store.
” My eyes narrow, as if calling me out on my own lie.
I force them to open wider again and tilt my chin down.
Annie’s mouth clamps shut and she stares at me for a moment before taking a large, provocative bite out of her sub.
Marinara sauce clings to the left edge of her full lips and a dot of it paints her nose.
She should, by all accounts, look ridiculous.
Yet instead, she manages to look like a lioness enjoying her latest kill, eyeing me as if I may be next.
I gulp as she slides off the counter, the hem of her skirt inching up and up, just to the edge of something black and lacy before she stands and adjusts it down again.
Carefully, she reswaddles the sandwich in its aluminum foil and takes it in hand.
Her wide hips sway as she and her unconventional breakfast march toward the small hallway leading to the back of the store.
Only when she’s out of sight do I feel like I can breathe properly again.
I know this is only the second day of this whole arrangement, but I’m already certain it is not going to work.
I had low enough hopes for it to start with, when Harold first told me he’d asked his niece to come help out in his and Inés’s absence.
It isn’t like I have the time or patience to orient someone to how we do things around here right now.
So my plan was to keep her distracted with low-effort, independent tasks—cleaning, organizing, drafting a few social media posts.
If those weren’t enough to occupy her, I’d invent some errands or have her inventory the entire store.
I figured it wouldn’t be that difficult to keep Annie out of the way while I attempted to run the shop normally while also dealing with this goose suddenly on my plate, so to speak.
Except, the moment she walked in yesterday, I knew I was completely screwed.
The idea of ignoring her presence seemed immediately laughable.
Not only is she objectively gorgeous with her curves and bee-stung lips and wavy brown hair, but Annie has this quality about her that reminds me of a pre-Raphaelite painting of a woman biting the blooms off a sprig of violets I once saw: soft and fierce and vivid all at the same time.
And that was before she opened her mouth and unflinchingly put me in my place.
She’s made it very clear she is not someone I can push to the side or pretend isn’t there. Annie is a presence. A force. She’s like gravity—a constant pull that sometimes feels more like a push when all I’m trying to do is desperately keep my footing steady until things settle down.
I admit that I could be handling things better.
For one, I should have been kinder to her from the beginning.
But frankly, I was flustered. Am flustered, still.
She overwhelms me in a way I usually feel only in the presence of something like a scenic view or an authentic Hepplewhite chair in mint condition.
That’s not something I can afford to feel for four weeks straight, especially when I have a business that needs maintaining while two-thirds of its employees are out of the country, and, perhaps more importantly, a contraband stuffed goose is stashed upstairs in the corner of my living room.
So I went with my first instinct, which was, as usual, to be a bit of an ass.
I intended to apologize this morning. I really did.
I was going to attempt to reverse course, tell her I’m sorry and I’m just a tiny bit on edge because Harold and Inés left so abruptly and also for other reasons I cannot discuss, and that I really am grateful for her willingness to drop everything and come here all the way from…
wherever it is she’s from. New York? New Jersey? Something like that.
But then she was on the counter.
Singing an aria.
To a meatball sub.
And why the hell is that the most arousing thing I have ever witnessed in my whole life?
It must be the lack of sleep. I only managed three hours last night. When I wasn’t lying there thinking about how to address my goose problem, I was ruminating on how to remedy my Annie problem. The former needs my attention, but the latter is very much trying to absorb every spare morsel of it.
Which is why she cannot be gorgeous and on my counter first thing in the damn morning.
Absolutely not. If I have to be a jerk about it, oh well.
At least my continued surliness might encourage her to keep her distance over the next month so I can retain the focus necessary for finding out how that stupid goose wound up in Nicole’s great-aunt’s attic.
Not that I can do any further research at the moment, since the computer is in the office. Which is where I banished Annie and her meatball sub.
Instead, I spend the twenty minutes until we open reviewing the photos she took around the shop yesterday and emailed over to me.
I have to admit, she did a nice job with them.
Not surprising, as one of the things I looked up last night was her online storefront.
I was both intrigued and horrified by the original work for sale there—a pair of bergère chairs reupholstered in hot pink velvet, an Empire-style dresser decoupaged with samples of vintage wallpaper, old metal teapots transformed into birdhouses.
I can’t wrap my head around the impulse to further destroy things of value to make something new out of them instead of trying to restore them as closely as possible to their previous condition.
Regardless of how I felt about her creations, she does undeniably have an eye for capturing images that speak to both the overall piece and its details, which is an underappreciated skill in this line of work.
Hm. Maybe I can have her redo all of the photos of our inventory for the website. That will take a while, and the only time we’ll have to interact will be if she needs help moving something.
Annie emerges from the back of the shop. A tiny fleck of sauce still lingers on her bottom lip, and I guess she spots me staring at it because the tip of her tongue darts out and swipes it away.
Suddenly, I’m hyperaware that it has been well over five hundred days since I have had sex.
I shake my head, clearing it. No. No, no. What I will not do is be both rude and creepy toward this woman. Just because I can’t recall ever feeling this sort of intense attraction toward someone this quickly doesn’t give me an excuse to be fucking weird about it.
“The pictures you took yesterday…” I start, finding my words coming out slightly gruffer than I intended.
“What about them?” she asks, hands on her hips, already standoffish.
“They’re really good, is all.”
Annie pauses for a moment as if trying to search for some hidden meaning in the compliment. Finally, and still with a tinge of suspicion, she says, “Thanks.”
“I was hoping you’d take more, for the website. That way we can update our inventory there.”
I slide my trusty yellow legal pad over and jot down a to-do list that’s the same as yesterday’s, except I replace taking photos for social media with taking photos for the website, then tear off the sheet and hold it out to her.
“I already dusted and vacuumed this morning when I got here,” she says, staring down at the paper. “That’s why you gave me a key last night, remember? So I could start coming in earlier to get the cleaning out of the way before we open?”
“Right.” I glance around, hoping to see an obvious spot she missed so I can make her redo it and give myself a bit of time to go back to the office and delve into the article I found on the history of taxidermy to see if I can at least figure out how to tell in which century the goose was stuffed.
But everything here looks pristine. “Well, good. Then you can start on the photos,” I say.
“Prioritize glassware. We sell more of that online since we can ship it easily. But do not try to move anything without talking to me first. Certain pieces are extremely fragile.”
I catch her eye roll as I begin to turn to leave. But then, to my surprise, her fingers gently touch my elbow. The heat of the contact, despite being feather light, seeps right through the cotton of my sleeve.
“I actually had an idea I wanted to run by you,” she says. “For the front window.”
“What about it?”
“Well, right now it’s just chairs.”
“And?”
“That’s…boring?”
“Chairs are not boring, Ms. O’Neill. I mean, maybe if you don’t know anything at all about them…” She frowns and I realize how harshly that came out. “What I mean is—” I start, but she cuts me off.
“The current display gives off the impression that Virtu is cold, impersonal, and haughty.” The way she spits this makes it clear that this is also what she thinks of me.
Haughty, I will give her; a lot of Graham’s time and money went into giving me the knowledge and cultural capital to make me feel more comfortable around the types of people who make up our clientele, and I’m proud of the man he transformed me into.
But impersonal? I’m not impersonal. Would you call it impersonal to remember and greet every repeat customer by name?
And cold? Sure, I guess sometimes I come across that way, especially with Annie.
I would argue, though, that there’s a difference between being cold and being intensely awkward.
And I’m quite solidly in the second category, thank you very much.
Especially when not sleeping well and faced with the first person I’ve been genuinely attracted to in recent memory.
“Virtu is none of those things,” I argue, then pause. “Or, rather, some of those things, maybe, depending on who you ask. What’s your point exactly?”
“That you are missing out on customers by not being more approachable. More accessible. People walk by and they see three fancy chairs and they think, I can’t even afford to step foot in that place. But if the window was more inviting, charming…”
“And what exactly would make it inviting and charming?” I ask. This conversation is taking entirely too long. I swear I can hear a faint honking drifting down from my apartment upstairs, like some sort of absurdist take on “The Tell-Tale Heart.”
She looks as if she’s about to present a product to a group of investors as she drags a cardboard box out from behind the counter.
“I have a bunch of these shattered pieces of porcelain. Don’t worry, it isn’t from here; I brought it from home.
Last night I drilled holes into them and painted the edges gold.
I was thinking if we hang them up on fishing line, like this…
” Annie pulls out a clear length of wire with various shards of porcelain—pretty patterns, but nothing of obvious value—strung on it, knots keeping them in place.
“Imagine a bunch of these, hanging behind the chairs. Wouldn’t that add a bit of fun? ”
“It would look kitschy,” I say.
“Fun and kitsch are close cousins.”
“Our customers aren’t particularly interested in either.”
“This whole neighborhood exudes the attitude of a dive bar on an art school campus, Cal. Maybe your existing customers aren’t that into kitschy stuff, but surely the people who walk by are.
Imagine the foot traffic you might bring in if passersby thought there was something here for them too.
” She lifts the box onto the counter. “Just because someone is drawn to things on the less serious side doesn’t mean they don’t have money to spend, you know. ”
“I do know,” I admit. Graham himself wasn’t all that serious, and he had enough extra cash lying around to send me to Boys’ Latin for the last two years of high school, then to an Ivy League college. He probably would have even paid for my master’s if I hadn’t received full funding.
I’ll also admit that we are a bit of an oddity on the Avenue, which has transformed from a strip of slightly quirky, longtime local restaurants and shops in a white, working-class section of the city into a more diverse, offbeat-meets-chic neighborhood that attracts everyone from the upscale clientele who frequent our store to families and whatever word we’re using to describe hipsters these days.
And with the influx of visitors who come to check out the Miracle on 34th Street’s over-the-top light displays over the course of the holiday season, perhaps Annie has a point about the window.
Her eyes—which are the exact shade of mahogany as the counter behind her, actually, now that I see her standing beside it again—go softer.
“I noticed one of the store’s accounting documents up on the computer while I was eating.
Seems like the shop is in the black but…
just barely. And it’s been that way for quite a while, from what I could see.
Maybe it’s time to make some changes around here? ”
The suggestion, however carefully couched in a tone of concern, feels like a physical slap, Annie’s words hitting me with the sting of blasphemy spoken inside of a sacred place.
Any concessions I might have made dissipate from my tongue, her opinion no longer something I want to consider as possibly valid.
“You shouldn’t have looked at that,” I snap.
“It’s confidential information. And…a-and we don’t need to make changes.
” Rising emotion causes me to stumble over my words.
“The thing that makes Virtu special is its endurance. An appreciation for tradition. We’ve done things the same way since before I started working here.
This is how Harold and…and Graham intended it to be, and they knew what they were doing.
You might see a small business that is barely hanging on, but what I see is one that’s survived.
Recessions, unrest, a global pandemic, embezzlement by a cougar—any of those could have put an end to us, but they didn’t.
The old ways have worked just fine for us for many, many years, Annie.
I don’t need you storming in here, trying to fix things that aren’t broken, okay?
This is my life, not one of your cute little Mod Podge projects. ”
My pulse hammers in my fingertips, in my neck.
I feel like I’m all heart, and incredibly exposed.
I’m overreacting. Being unfair. She’s simply hit a nerve, is all—a particularly raw one.
I close my eyes until I’ve managed to calm myself down.
“I’m sorry. But if you want to be helpful, just…
just take the pictures, like I asked,” I say softly.
“I’ll be in the back if you have any questions. ”
And then I head down the hall to the office so I can work on ridding myself of at least one of my recently acquired burdens.