Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
“I found a new supplier.” Leslie was practically jumping up and down. Her braid was doing a dance of its own.
“That’s nice.” I hadn’t heard from Adam in four days. I was seriously bummed, which was stupid. Obviously, he’d just been being nice when he’d visited. Checking up on his patient. The whole thing about Angelica babysitting had been bullshit. He probably said that to keep James happy.
“Zoe, did you hear me?” Leslie said louder. “I found someone new. He’s going to rock your world. Pun intended.”
“He’s not that great,” Ernie protested. “And think about the cost of shipping. Nobody is going to pay that.”
“Damn right they will.” Leslie spun around to give her co-worker the evil eye. “Can’t you just be positive about something for once in your life? People are going to go apeshit over this stuff. What I can’t believe is the amount of inventory he has.”
“And where are we going to put it?” Ernie grumbled.
“This deserves some window space, and I know just the piece we photograph for the first page on our website.”
That got my attention. Putting something on the first page of our website was a really big deal. Whatever the product was, it had to be exceptional.
“Show me,” I demanded.
Leslie grinned. “I thought you’d never ask.”
She ran over to the register area, bent over, and hefted something up from behind the counter.
Ernie hadn’t been kidding when he’d said it was big.
And Leslie hadn’t been kidding when she said it was exceptional.
I walked over to the sculpture, like it was luring me.
It was somewhat abstract, but not really.
I had to touch it. Feel it beneath my fingers. My hands. Stroke it.
“Alabaster, right?” I asked Leslie.
“Peach alabaster,” she confirmed. “Isn’t it stunning? It looks like intertwined flames.”
“Or arms intertwined, and at the very top, their fingers pointed to the sky,” I whispered.
“Holy hell, Zoe, did I just hear you say smarmy shit?” Ernie asked.
I was so entranced by the piece, I didn’t care what in the hell he said. “Tell me about the base.”
“It spins. It’s battery operated, so no messy cords. Here, I’ll show you.” Leslie flipped a switch, and a soft light illuminated the sculpture from below, and the base began a slow twirl, as the arms and hands reached ever upward.
“My God, Leslie. Who made this, and how much is he selling them for?”
“That’s the thing. His wife finally got sick of not being able to park her car in the garage, because it was filled with all of these sculptures. She showed them to their granddaughter, Alex Sharp.”
“I know Alex. She comes in every week like clockwork to check out our latest selection of earrings and belts.”
“That’s her. She asked if we could sell them for her Pop-Pop. She brought in this one and one other, as well as dozens of pictures. About fifty percent are carved out of sandstone and are recognizable as animals or nature, the other fifty percent are abstract like this.”
"Here’s a soapstone one. Look."
Leslie left the alabaster piece on the counter, then reached behind the register and lifted out something wide and low.
A clam shell, carved from soapstone, the glaze a deep muted olive-green that shifted from rich olive along the ridged curves to something almost bronze in the deeper grooves.
And nestled between the two open halves, resting in the hollow like it had always lived there, was something that simulated a perfect, smooth pearl.
"Oh," I said softly.
"Right?" Leslie set it on the counter between us.
I reached out and ran my fingers along one of the ridged shell halves. The stone was silky, almost waxy, the way good carving felt when someone had taken the time to get it exactly right. "The same man made this?"
"Yep. Pop-Pop has range."
"No kidding." The pearl itself wasn't soapstone. I crouched down and looked. It was a river stone, tumbled smooth, warm grey-pink that sat against the green of the shell like it had grown there. "He put a real stone in it."
"Alex said he finds them in the creek."
I took a moment to step back and admire both pieces.
"Ernie," I said, without turning around.
"What?"
"Talk to me about pricing."
A pause. I could hear him calculating against his will. "The shell is a touch-buy. Somebody's going to pick it up, fall in love with it, and not put it down until we've run their card. Retail, I'd say six-fifty easy. We take forty percent, so we net two-sixty. Pop-Pop walks with three-ninety."
"And the alabaster?"
The silence that followed was longer. More pained.
"That's your window piece," he said finally, like he was confessing a crime.
"One of a kind. Rotating lighted base, peach alabaster, probably eighty to a hundred and twenty pounds of stone before he carved it down.
You factor in the raw stone, freight, the base, abrasives, polishing, a foam-lined crate just to ship the thing—" He exhaled.
"His hard costs alone could run anywhere from six-fifty to fifteen-hundred dollars.
And that's before you count a single hour of his labor. "
"So, what do we sell it for?"
"Twenty-eight hundred," Ernie said flatly. "We keep eleven-twenty. Pop-Pop gets sixteen-eighty."
Leslie let out a noise that was half gasp, half victory crow.
I opened my mouth to agree, then stopped.
I did the math again. Slowly this time.
Sixteen-eighty to Pop-Pop. Minus up to fifteen hundred in hard costs.
Which left the man possibly—possibly—walking away with a hundred and eighty dollars.
On a piece that could have taken him a hundred and fifty hours to carve, sand, polish, wire, base-build, and fuss over until his wife lost her mind about the garage.
"No," I said.
Ernie blinked. "No?"
"Run it again. Forty-five hundred retail. Seventy-thirty split in Pop-Pop's favor."
Ernie was quiet for a moment. I could practically hear the calculator running behind his eyes. "Pop-Pop gets thirty-one-fifty. We get thirteen-fifty."
"And after worst-case materials, he nets somewhere around sixteen hundred dollars." I looked at the sculpture. The slow rotation. The arms reaching. "That's still not minimum wage for the hours he put in, but it's not an insult either."
"We just cut our own take by almost three hundred dollars," Ernie said.
"Yep."
"On a piece we haven't sold yet."
"Yep."
He was quiet for a beat. "...Fine."
Leslie was grinning so wide I thought her face might split. "So let me get this straight," she said, doing her best Ernie impression, which was terrible. "We do the right thing and we still make thirteen hundred and fifty dollars on one sculpture?"
"Nobody asked you," Ernie muttered.
"Call Alex," I told Leslie. "Tell her we want to meet Pop-Pop.
I want to see the full inventory before we commit to anything, but tell her we're very interested.
" I looked back at the shell, at the river stone pearl resting in its hollow like it had always belonged there.
"And nobody breathes near that alabaster piece until it's in a crate. "
"On it." Leslie was already reaching for her phone.
Ernie let out a long, put-upon sigh. "I'll start measuring the window."
"Got it." Leslie was already reaching for her phone, then stopped, practically vibrating. "Oh! Oh, this reminds me. We're getting low on the rugs."
I looked up from the shell. "How low?"
"Down to three. I sold two this week alone." She was already pulling up something on her phone. "I need to make a run up the mountain and see Judy and Janice. See what they've got ready."
"Take them some of those good batteries they like," I said. "And check if they need anything from town before you make the trip."
"Already on my list of things to do." She was typing as she talked. "I also want to swing by Bertha's."
Ernie looked up from whatever he was pretending to be busy with. "Is this a supply run or a social call?"
"With Bertha it's always both," Leslie said serenely. "Besides, we're almost out of the preserves, and I think we can talk her into letting us carry the chutney too. The strawberry rhubarb moved faster than anything we put on that shelf last fall."
"She still doesn't want to label them properly," Ernie said.
"She's coming around." Leslie pointed at him. "She let us put the little cards with her name on them last time, which for Bertha is basically a press release."
I smiled despite myself. Bertha Conners had taken approximately four months of gentle, persistent Leslie-style persuasion before she'd agreed to let us sell her preserves at all.
The woman was eighty years old, had lived alone on that mountain since her husband Brian passed thirty years ago, and was deeply suspicious of anything that smelled like commerce.
But her strawberry rhubarb preserves had a waiting list, and her hot and spicy apple chutney—made with extra vinegar for ornery people, according to Bertha herself—had sold out in a week.
"Bring her something good from town," I said. "Not as a transaction. Just because."
Leslie gave me a look that said she didn't need to be told that. She was right. She didn't.
"So," she said, turning back to her phone with renewed purpose. "Call Alex. Trip to the grocery store. Rugs. Chutney." She ticked each one off on her fingers. "This is why I love this job."
"You love this job because Ernie lets you rearrange the window display," Ernie said.
"I love this job," Leslie corrected cheerfully, "because every week I get to call an eighty-year-old woman who once talked down a hostile veteran with a jar of apple chutney and ask her if she has anything new for me." She looked at me. "Where else am I going to get that?"
Ernie opened his mouth, then closed it.
"Start figuring out the window display," I said, before he could recover.