4. Quinn #2
“Assuming I haven’t been banned.”
Mr. Alvarez waved a dismissive hand. “You not banned. Dog not banned. Only German.”
I put a hand to my heart. “Thank you.”
Halfway down the block, I looked down at Max and said, “We almost needed a new hot dog vendor.”
Max glanced up at me, unconcerned. Then he sneezed.
“Right. Of course. Entirely my fault.”
He stayed close to my side as we kept walking, the city all around us honking and shouting, steaming and glittering in that grubby, gorgeous way that only belonged to New York. Behind us, I could still hear Elena laughing.
I smiled despite myself and tugged lightly on the leash. “Come on, soldier. Let’s go commit some more cultural misunderstandings.”
Grand Thrift Oughta occupied the ground floor of a narrow Chelsea building.
It had a purple awning and the windows were so crowded with sequins, lamps, lacquered side tables, and a ceramic greyhound that it looked less like a retail establishment and more like the aftermath of a very glamorous estate dispute.
We’d barely made it through the door before a voice from the back called, “Is that my favorite grandpuppy I’m hearin’ or am I finally havin’ a stroke?”
“It’s us, Octavia,” I said with a smile.
“Well, praise the Lord and Saint Laurent!”
Out from behind a rack of winter coats trundled Octavia Andreas.
Eighty years old and four-foot-nine-and-a-half on a generous day, she wore a teal caftan under a men’s brocade smoking jacket, her silver hair pinned up in a precarious bun with two lacquered chopsticks.
A pair of rhinestone cat-eye glasses sat low on her nose, and in one hand, she held a paper cup of dog treats.
I’d met her my sophomore year of college, when I’d come in half-panicked, looking for something to wear to an awards dinner I had no business being invited to and even less money to attend. Octavia had given me a once-over and produced a black velvet dress with dramatic sleeves.
After that, I kept coming back. First, it was only for clothes, but then I found myself coming back for conversation. At some point I stopped being a customer she liked and became, in the way older women sometimes decide these things, one of hers.
“Come to Nana,” she said to Max, lowering herself into a regal crouch. “I got liver bites and dried salmon, because unlike some people I believe in treating a handsome man with proper treats and not that processed nonsense.”
Max, who had standards about strangers and was generally suspicious of enthusiasm not backed by credentials, went to her immediately and sat. Then, because he wasn’t a fool, he offered his paw.
“That’s right,” Octavia crooned, feeding him a few treats. “You go tell your mama what a gentleman looks like.”
“I’m standing right here,” I said, already preparing myself for Octavia’s matchmaking antics.
She looked up at me over the rims of her glasses. “You’re in your twenties, with those cheekbones and a law degree, and yet you keep showing up in here on Sundays with only the dog on your arm. Frankly, it’s wasteful.”
I laughed and bent to rub behind Max’s good ear while he chewed his treat. “You say that like I haven’t rejected at least three of your candidates.”
“Four,” she said. “You forget my nephew from Astoria.”
“The crypto one?”
“The dentist.”
“Oh, right. The one who said loafers were pretentious.”
Octavia pressed a hand to her chest. “A criminal opinion.”
“He also asked if law school was, quote, ‘basically like debate team with debt.’”
“Well, now you’re just making my case for me. He was handsome and stupid with a good paying job. Sometimes that’s beneficial.”
“He also collected haunted dolls.”
Octavia waved that off. “Everybody needs a hobby.”
I glanced around. It always looked as though several glamorous eccentrics had exploded in pleasing succession.
Racks of silk blouses and coats ran in loosely organized rows.
Costume jewelry glinted in glass cases and on old velvet busts.
There were lacquered cabinets, brass lamps, embroidered cushions, bowls of loose bracelets, a bin labeled VESTS/VEST-ADJACENT, and the back wall had been given over to shoes that ranged from sensible loafers to what I could only describe as architectural masterpieces.
The store always smelled faintly of cedar, dust, and perfume samples from another era.
It was one of my favorite places in New York, and not because everything in it was beautiful.
Frankly, some of the pieces were indefensible, but it had all survived being discarded once already, and Octavia was giving it a second chance and giving people a chance to discover things they might treasure.
Octavia rose with a soft grunt and brushed off her jacket. “How bad was it this week?”
I let out a breath. “Bad enough that I’m here on a Sunday to touch fabrics for emotional support.”
Her expression softened. “That bad?”
I considered lying, but Octavia was eighty and had, I suspected, bullied the truth out of better people than me.
“Pretty bad,” I admitted. “But in a temporary, character-building way.”
She softened then, like she usually did when I let my edges show. “You’re still the brightest thing in any room you walk into, sweetheart. Don’t let them train that out of you.”
The words landed more poignantly than I could handle, so I deflected. “You know, this would all hit harder if you weren’t bribing my dog with salmon.”
She gave me a look. “Bribery? Never! I prefer to think of it as support.” Then she pointed a lacquered fingernail toward the racks. “Go look around. You’re pale. That means you need color.”
“I’m pale because I never see the sun.”
“You’re pale because you’re overworked and under-accessorized. Shop, Quinn.”
Saluting, I moved off, Max at my side, his tail wagging contentedly.
I drifted through the racks slowly, fingers moving over silk, wool, brocade, cotton.
To me, shopping had never been about brands so much as texture and construction.
I liked clothes with convictions and possibility.
A sharp print under a sober blazer. A blouse in a color people with trust funds called “too much” even as they envied it.
I liked good tailoring, weird details, sleeves that did a little too much, fabrics that persevered, and shoes that might have been designed by a woman in the middle of a very satisfying revenge arc.
My wardrobe, constrained as it was by reality and the legal profession’s deep distrust of joy, still ran toward bright silk shell tops under dark suit jackets, patterned scarves, showy earrings, and shoes no one could accuse of being practical: floral platform boots, chartreuse loafers with gold hardware the size of small brooches, strappy, open-toed sandals that probably belonged in a painting of Greek goddesses, and spectacular black ankle boots with a Lucite heel shaped like stacked dice that I had nowhere to wear but loved too much to part with.
I was halfway through admiring a green jacquard jacket with shoulders broad enough to negotiate peace treaties when I noticed Max had gone on alert.
He touched his nose briefly to the back of my hand, then turned his head and looked to the back of the store.
“What?” I murmured.
He took two steps, then looked back at me.
Interesting. Normally, when Max accompanied me shopping, his chief contribution was moral support and the occasional expression of concern over my shoe choices. This was different. This was work-brain. Search-brain.
“All right,” I said softly. “Such. Search.”
He moved off with intent, weaving between an endcap of handbags and a rack of sequined skirts. I followed him past the shoes and a shelf of ceramic lamps shaped like fruit, to the jewelry section near the back window.
At first, I thought he was marking the glass case itself, because it held the usual glorious chaos of thrift-store jewelry: tangled chains, rhinestone bracelets, clip-ons the size of civic monuments, beads, brooches, costume rings, old lockets, suspicious cameos.
But he lowered his nose and touched a tiny box sitting half-hidden behind a chipped, wooden display bust.
“Well,” I said. “That’s not ominous at all.”
He touched it again, more insistently this time, then let out an unusual whine.
It was slightly larger than a ring box, and when I picked it up, I thought it was made of wood. But the second it settled into my palm, I felt the difference. It was cool despite the overheated store, smooth in a way age hadn’t managed to roughen, and heavier than cheap materials usually were.
My pulse jumped with interest.
“You found something weird,” I told Max.
I turned the box over carefully. No maker’s mark or obvious hinge damage. It was old and grimy, though, and faintly singed at one corner. I scratched lightly with my nail in a spot where the finish had gone dull. It was cream underneath the grime, and I doubted it was paint.
“Oh,” I said very quietly.
Ivory.
Illegal to sell in plenty of contexts, morally complicated in all of them, and exactly the kind of thing that turned up in old New York apartments after decades of being passed through generations and estate sales.
That little box alone was worth far more than whatever Octavia usually charged for the odds and ends I dug up.
My thrifter instincts and my Catholic-guilt-adjacent ethics activated at the same time, which was enough to exhaust me.
I didn’t open it, partly because the case itself was already enough to make my brain light up like a scoreboard, and partly because Max had chosen it. I would have bought whatever he’d marked as long as it didn’t contain live bees.
“All right,” I said to him. “Let’s see how much damage this does.”
Octavia looked up from rearranging a tray of bracelets and immediately clocked both my face and what was in my hand.
“What have you found?” she asked.
“Potential trouble.” I set the box on the glass counter between us.
Squinting, she picked it up and examined it, then set it down with a shrug that nearly gave me heart palpitations.