Chapter 5 Hollis Hardware
BIRDIE has worked at Hollis Hardware for three years, and in that time I have convinced an entire town that I cannot be trusted with a Phillips screwdriver, a level of theater I’m honestly a little proud of.
Earl Hollis owns it, and Earl is sixty-two and built like a filing cabinet and speaks in a dialect composed mostly of grunts and the occasional devastating sentence.
He hired me off the strength of one interview in which I dropped his pen, apologized to it, and then reorganized his entire fastener wall by accident while we talked, which he pretended not to notice and has never once mentioned, and which is the closest Earl has ever come to telling me he sees more than he says.
“Vance,” he said that morning, from behind the register, which is Earl for good morning.
“Morning, Earl.” I put my bag under the counter. “I brought you a muffin, it’s the pumpkin kind, don’t make the face.”
He made the face. He ate the muffin.
Marcy was already there, which Marcy always is, because Marcy arrives places the way weather arrives.
Marcy Petit is my best friend and the single most informed human in Halford County, a motor-mouth with a heart the size of the parking lot, and she had approximately four hundred words loaded before I’d gotten my apron on.
“Okay so you did not hear it from me,” she began — how you know you are about to hear it from Marcy — “but the Kowalskis sold. To the harbor people. Full asking, cash, gone by fall, Deb told me at the Kroger, she’s already looking at a condo in Florida like she’s a widow, which, she’s not, Ron’s fine, Ron’s just excited about a lanai.
And—” she pointed a box cutter at me for emphasis, which, put the box cutter down, Marcy, “—that’s three houses on your block now.
Your block, Birdie. They are coming for the Flats. ”
“Ren got a letter,” I said, because Marcy trades in information and it’s rude to come empty-handed.
“With a number?”
“With commas.”
Marcy sat down on an upturned bucket, what Marcy does when the news is good enough to require sitting.
“This town,” she said, with relish and real worry braided together, which is the exact Halford emotion.
“First that fire on Delaney, now this. My cousin says it wasn’t even a real kitchen fire, she says the marshal was out there for hours, that new one, the quiet good-looking one—”
“He’s not—” I started, and stopped, because I did not need to have an opinion on file about whether the county fire marshal was good-looking. I have rules. That’s a rule.
“He’s a little bit,” said Marcy. “In a haunted way. Anyway.” Off she went.
I hid in the plumbing aisle for a while, restocking flappers, a task that requires no thought and therefore lets me do the thing I’m not supposed to do anymore, which is think. Three houses. A fire. A marshal spending hours on a kitchen. I straightened the shelf and made myself stop.
The store filled up like it does on a Saturday, the whole cast of my small good life trooping through in ones and twos.
Pastor Dave came for a toilet flapper and stayed twenty minutes talking about the rec center roof.
A woman I’d taught to caulk a tub, badly, on purpose, so she’d think she’d learned it herself, came back beaming to report the tub had held.
Old Mr. Petrakis shuffled in for birdseed and told me, in the roundabout Petrakis way, that the harbor people had offered him a number too, and that he didn’t know, his knees didn’t know, the beagle didn’t know, and I told him not to sign anything and to come talk to Ren, and he patted my hand and called me a good girl, which I am not, but which is the correct thing for Mr. Petrakis to believe.
I love this store. I want that understood.
I built a fake woman to keep a real life, and the life got real anyway when I wasn’t looking, which was never the plan.
Then a man came in with a list.
He was nobody I knew, which in Halford is itself a small event, thirties, work jacket, a face that had decided a while ago not to expect much.
He put a torn-off piece of paper on the counter and Earl handed it to me with a jerk of his chin — Earl for you take this one — and I took it, and I read it, and Birdie’s dithery patter came up automatically in my mouth while some older, quieter part of me read the list a second time and went very still.
It wasn’t the individual things. Every single item on that list is a thing a normal person buys at a hardware store for a normal reason on a normal day.
That’s what I need you to understand, and what I understood standing there, and what made my mouth keep going oh sure, that’s aisle four, and the whatsit’s over by the paint while the back of my neck cooled.
It wasn’t any one thing. It was the shape of them together, the sequence of them.
Read one way, the list was a man fixing a fence; read the way I used to read for a living, it was a man assembling the boring, legal, over-the-counter front half of something that has a back half I will not describe and did not want to be standing near.
I could be wrong. I told myself I could be wrong, hard, in Birdie’s voice. People buy things. Farmers buy things. It’s a hardware store, buying things is the whole event.
But I found myself doing the old arithmetic without permission — noting his hands, his boots, the truck I couldn’t quite see through the front glass, how he didn’t small-talk, the way his eyes did the one slow pass of the store that most people don’t do and that people who think about how buildings work always do.
I rang him up. I dithered. I dropped his change and apologized to the counter and made him wait while I chased a dime, and I used the extra six seconds to read the partial plate on the truck outside, white, older, a ladder rack, mud over the county line’s kind of clay.
“You have a good one,” I said, sweet as pie, the jumpiest woman in Halford.
He grunted, which around here counts as manners, and left.
I stood at the register and I buried it.
I want to be honest that this is a choice I made, on purpose, that morning, as I make it every morning: I took the list-shaped thought and the plate and the slow pass of the store, and I put them in the deep drawer with the card and the box, and I shut it.
Not my problem. Not the calm one anymore.
Somebody official can notice things now.
I retired from noticing. I’ve got a whole town that will swear I did.
“Vance,” said Earl, watching me over the register in that way he has of seeing more than he says. “You alright?”
“Course,” I said. “He gave me a scare, is all, stone-faced fella. You know me.”
Earl looked at me a second longer than the sentence needed, then grunted and went back to his crossword.
That afternoon, two blocks the other way from the first one, one block closer to Larch Street than the last, a shed behind a rental on Kossuth went up, and the trucks came again, and Marcy stood in the doorway of the store watching the smoke smudge the sky and said, in a voice with no relish in it at all, “That’s two now, Birdie,” and I said, “I know,” and did not say the third thing, the one I was actually thinking, which is that whoever was doing it was walking the block toward my street, one house at a time, learning it.