Chapter 10
Moore
Love You Jewelers was the only jewelry store in town.
And as Moore made his morning walk from the back stairs of the apartment above the store around the block to the front door, the Maine spring air still crisp, holding a hint of snow in it, he smiled as he approached.
There were plenty of gift shops that sold cute little baubles, but Love You Jewelers was the only place you could go to find gemstones, gold, silver, platinum, and the perfect ring for your lovestruck needs.
They sold good old standards: promise rings, engagement rings, wedding bands. Gold lockets stamped with the Love You Jewelers logo were a popular item you could only purchase in person, no online sales.
These flew off the shelves every year at Christmas and especially Valentine’s Day.
When Moore stepped into the business ten years ago, his father had told him firmly that absolutely nothing could change.
Their bread and butter came from the lovesick tourists who were searching for the perfect item to express their feelings.
That item may have been the very same thing that thousands of other people were using to express their unique love, but that didn’t matter to his father.
What mattered was that every customer who walked through the doors of Love You Jewelers came in with a question and went out with a package.
Moore had followed his father’s dictate, but had found a way to quietly subvert–never rocking the boat enough to hurt sales of the old standards, of course. Instead, Moore had slowly expanded the custom design side of the business, which his father had always offered but never seriously promoted.
Moore enjoyed the travel that was required to find good gems, to source high-quality precious metals, and to network in ways that kept their small-town jewelry store in the national spotlight. Location alone wasn’t going to cut it, though.
Some of the larger chains occasionally tried to get a toehold and establish a franchise in Love You, Maine, but the Love Committee had been an exceptional ally in protecting Love You Jewelers from outside pressure. Their only competitors were in the neighboring towns.
And so Love You Jewelers continued to be the only place in town to buy a symbol of your heart’s true message to the person who made your pulse race, your limbs tingle, and who lit you on fire.
Commissions for custom designs trickled in at first, then began to come in at a steady rate. Moore’s father had been forced to recognize that the revenue stream from what Moore was doing was significant enough that he deserved the closest thing his father could give to an accolade:
“Nice to see you can balance both lines without hurting the core business,” Leander Mottin had said.
While that terse sentence didn’t exactly make Moore swell with pride, he did feel at least a little vindicated.
Custom designs would never outpace the thousands of standard mainstream products they sold, but they gave Moore a place where he could be himself within the confines of a life he’d never chosen.
As he jiggled the key in the lock, the deadbolt frustratingly misaligned and difficult to coax into place at times, he heard footsteps approaching and paused, turning around. A very nervous young man in a hoodie and jeans was toeing the concrete about ten feet away.
“Can I help you?” Moore asked, knowing exactly what this guy was here for.
“Uh… yeah, uh… are you, uh, open?”
When the young man pulled the hood off his head, he revealed a baby face. This kid couldn’t be more than eighteen or nineteen.
Same age as Moore when he became a father.
“I’m about to be, if I can get this door to cooperate.” He shook the keys and went back to his magic act with the lock.
The kid laughed through his nose. “Yeah. That happens all the time at the sub shop where I work. Owner’s too cheap to get the lock fixed.”
Moore laughed.
The guy inhaled sharply. “Oh–no–I didn’t mean to imply that, like, you’re cheap. I just meant…”
Click
Moore succeeded, the deadbolt sliding back, allowing him to push the door open and turn around.
“It’s cool,” he said to the kid, who stood under the red awning that covered the storefront.
The words Love You Jewelers were printed in white on the awning, the letters backward from Moore’s viewpoint, looking like a foreign language that made the store more exotic than it really was. “Come on in. I can help you.”
“That’s okay. It’s three minutes until you open, right? Go take your time. Get your coffee. I know how it is.”
Moore waved him in. “Get in here. I can make my coffee while you look.”
“Really?” He perked up. “’Cuz…” The kid pulled a phone out of his back pocket and stuck it in front of his face. “’Cuz I’ve only got twenty minutes. I’ve got to get back for my shift.”
“Let me guess,” Moore said, looking him up and down. “A promise ring.”
“How’d you know?”
“’Cuz I’m psychic,” Moore deadpanned.
“Seriously? My mom’s super into that since Grandma died.”
Moore blinked. Sometimes his smart mouth got him into trouble.
“No, I’m not actually psychic.” Mr. Hoodie followed him into the shop and closed the door, flipping the sign from Closed to Open. “I’ve just been working at a jewelry store for a very long time, and I can spot a promise ring from a thousand feet away. What’s your partner like?”
The kid went still.
“She’s the best,” he said in an earnest voice that made something inside Moore melt a little, an instant flash of Colleen coming into his heart, as if she were the one who’d unlocked a glitchy deadbolt and managed to open the door, flipping the sign from Closed to Open in the process.
The kid’s eyes met Moore’s.
“You ever feel that way about someone?” His words rushed out.
“Where the love just doesn’t fit inside you?
It just spills out all over, and it’s like you have to pick it up and carry it with you everywhere, but it just keeps falling and you can’t drop any of it, until finally all you can do is lay in bed and listen to music and stare out into space, and it just takes over and suddenly you’re floating in a giant ocean of… her.”
“That sounds like a lot of emotion,” Moore said carefully, the words smooth and professional, even if the rest of him felt like it was drowning.
Drowning in years of love that had indeed been spilling over, all of it for Colleen.
“I’m Moore,” he told the kid, reaching out to shake his hand. “What’s your name?”
“Elliott.”
“Okay, Elliott. Nice to meet you. Why don’t we go over to this case and you take a look at the rings while I go get that cup of coffee you were talking about?”
“Cool. You get it. I totally can tell, you get it,” Elliott smiled.
“You can?” Moore stumbled. “How?”
“When you know, you know.”
The cryptic phrase made Moore chuckle and walk away before he said anything so stupid, he couldn’t walk it back. As he approached the back room, the smell of pine hit him hard. Last night was the weekly cleaning and their longtime person, Jeanette Fowler, had clearly done her job.
The woman was addicted to pine. She used it, along with an obscene amount of bleach, on the bathroom in the back. Moore turned on the HVAC system and hoped the odor would clear out quickly.
“Hey,” he called out to the front of the store, “you want a cup of coffee, too?”
“No, thanks though. I’m gonna hit up Love You Coffee. They’ve got that drink called the Love Bomb.”
“How do you know about the Love Bomb?” Moore called back. “Are you from around here?”
“No, I’m over near Fryeburg, but my girlfriend loooves those Love Bombs. I’ll get her one on my way out of town.”
Moore smiled to himself as he used the carafe to fill the water compartment of his coffee machine. He’d have to make sure to tell Rachel that her custom-designed drink at the coffee shop was that popular.
Coffee grounds in place and machine percolating, he headed back to the front of the store, turning on soft jazz that would play at a level so low you only realized it was there in total silence.
Setting a mood for people who came in to buy a luxury item meant creating a luxurious scene, and he had a part to play in that as well. This was why he spared little expense on his business clothes.
Research had shown that there was a sweet spot.
If they made Love You Jewelers too high-end, they would lose a lot of the middle-range business.
But it still had to be aspirational for that middle-range customer.
This was the kind of contribution that Moore had brought to the business ten years ago, painstakingly showing his dad the market research.
As a result, his dad had added a slightly better line of watches and rings, just expensive enough to provide three levels for people coming in, and here’s what they had found:
Some people came in with a specific budget, and they could buy the lowest level and that was it; there was no upselling possible.
Some people came in with a specific budget, but they could stretch it, and that’s where some of the changes Moore had put in place had worked. To his father’s surprise but not Moore’s, people often went for the top option when there were three choices.
Aspiration, he had explained to his dad. Adding marketing materials that featured photos of celebrities wearing the higher-end pieces had been one key to their success.
“How’s it goin’?” Moore asked Elliott, knowing immediately that this was going to be a low-end sale. That was fine. When you’re eighteen, why spend a bunch of money on a symbol of your love? This kid was so lovesick, he was a walking symbol of what he felt for his girl.
That would be more than enough for her.