I said reflexively.
“Only if it’s someone else’s.”
I recognized her second attempt at a lame joke and chuckled in return. It seemed possible at that moment that she might become, if not a fan, something I needed even more: a friend.
Waking up late with a hangover the next morning, I hustled to Laurel’s Paper and Gifts for my opening shift and nearly smacked myself on the forehead when I saw all the cars in the parking lot. I’d forgotten about the early staff meeting. I used my key to get in and hurried past the display shelves full of stationery and gilt-edged notebooks.
When I first came back from L.A., I’d dropped into Laurel’s as a customer, hoping one of those fancy notebooks might inspire me to start writing again, though in the end I wound up buying the same old pocket-size Moleskine I’ve used since they first appeared by the cash register in Amarillo’s sole Barnes and Noble. But Laurel herself, a squat, hippie-ish woman in her late fifties, happened to be managing the store that day, and I made her laugh as she was ringing me up, and then we got into a long chat that ended with her asking if I’d like to work there. It was the easiest time I’ve ever had getting hired for anything. Back then, it reinforced my idea that Austin was not only an easy place to be, but the perfect place to recover from L.A.
People say retail is boring, but I didn’t mind. After having waited tables for so long, I never wanted to see another apron again, and the days seemed to pass at an unimaginably luxurious pace in this store full of inessential luxuries. The trifling nature of the merchandise appealed to me, as did the way customers drifted around, looking for a vague something, a housewarming gift, maybe, or a stack of thank-you notes. No one ever rushed through the door needing anything more urgent than a birthday card.
Unfortunately, Laurel’s stray-dog approach to hiring had recently plagued us with Becca, a trod-upon twig of a woman with eyebrows tweezed into a perpetual look of surprise, and her boyfriend, Henry, a self-described “retail identity therapist” with sleeve tattoos and careful stubble. Henry knew how to throw serious charm at a woman in her late fifties and had rapidly edged his way into a consulting position to upscale the store. The new items he had ordered and placed among the older journals and cards were objects that, in his words, “told a story about their own creation.” The right kind of story called to mind ease, but not luxury; difference without hostility; poverty, but never disaster. Items that qualified included colorful place mats hand-woven by Indonesian women (actually nuns, but Henry said religion was a downer) and heavy stone cubes that, according to the display card, represented the thing-in-itself. Minimalist bowls in dull, hammered silver were filled with scarves of braided and distressed twine. It went without saying that it was all prohibitively expensive. The jokes practically wrote themselves. (Pilot idea: Enchanted gift shop where all the gifts can talk, but they’re even bigger assholes than the humans. Wonderfalls meets BoJack Horseman.) It was the way the whole city was headed, and I could only assume the rising rents that had driven out the store’s old-Austin neighbors were making Laurel, who’d owned the little shop for as long as I’d been alive, antsy. Or perhaps all this talk of authenticity appealed to her hippie soul. Either way, Henry was a loathsome addition to a job that was otherwise perfect for getting writing done on a little notepad I kept under the counter.
When I opened the door of the break room, Henry was already holding forth, looming over a table that was barely big enough for the rest of the staff, all women, to squeeze around it. A powerful smell of bacon and eggs reminded me of my hangover in ways both positive and negative, though from the crumpled paper bag and empty salsa cups scattered around the table, I gathered that I’d missed the breakfast tacos.
“Oh, hello, Dana,” Laurel said as I maneuvered myself around the door to close it. “Henry was just saying how we’re going to be more than just a store. We’ll be an—um—” She looked at him uncertainly.
“Aspirational lifestyle brand,” Henry filled in airily. “Which starts with everyone on the team committing to punctuality.”
I restrained an eye roll as he continued talking. Henry’s objects, with their obsessive authenticity, grossed me out. I found the idea of Indonesian nuns and Japanese ceramicists and San Salvadoran peasants sitting in their faraway countries making them unutterably depressing. As the staff members dispersed, I found myself hoping the stories behind all of these items were fabricated and they were actually mass-produced in China. Now, that would be funny.
“Flimflam artist,” Ruby muttered to me as I was taking the note later. She stood at my elbow behind the counter, her eyes on Henry and Becca fighting in the parking lot as she vindictively yanked the white paper price tags off of fountain pens to make way for the new, Henry-mandated linen tags. “I can smell it a mile away.”
Ruby fascinated me. Some ten years older than me, she came to work every day in a stylized version of a fifties secretary costume: sheath dresses with string bows at the waist, pencil skirts and Peter Pan–collared blouses, emerald-green cat’s-eye glasses on a chain around her neck. Her shellacked curls were short and red, and it took me a long time to figure out that she wore a wig. One day she took a pencil from behind her ear and I saw all the curls shift at once, just a few millimeters, in unison. “I just got sick of bad haircuts,” she explained when she noticed me noticing, and I waited until she went to the back and scribbled it down verbatim.
“Frankly, I don’t know what Becca sees in that creep,” Ruby was saying. She leaned over and whispered, “Do you think he hits her?”
The idea jolted me out of my reverie. “Why do you say that?”
“I don’t know, I just get a vibe,” she said. “Have you ever noticed how she always has bruises on her arms?”
“No,” I said.
“Well, that’s because she wears long sleeves. Even in the summer.” She raised her penciled eyebrows meaningfully.
“It’s still spring,” I pointed out, and Ruby shrugged. She was a hopeless gossip and paranoid to boot, but the conversation brought Amanda to mind again. Where a moment before I’d been thinking disdainfully about Henry’s objects, I now found myself imagining the tall, rangy woman from the night before standing at the displays in her leather jacket, picking things up and putting them down, swinging the little Japanese ceramic pendants in front of her face and weighing the votives in her palm. Something about her made me think she’d be able to listen to their stories. I blushed.
“Last night I met this kind of strange chick at Nomad,” I said. “She came up after my set.”
“Sounds like you’ve got a new number-one fan,” Ruby said. “Watch out.”
“I’ll be sure to hide my sledgehammer,” I said. “No, she was nice, actually. We had a lot in common, it turned out.”
“People must come up to talk to you after shows all the time.”
“Only a dozen or so per set,” I said with a straight face. “I can usually handle it.” I went back to doodling in my notebook.
Ruby jerked at another tag and looked at me. “What was strange about her?”
“Huh?”
“You said she was strange.”
“Did I?” Ruby looked at me pointedly, and I backtracked. “It was what you said about Becca that reminded me.” What was it exactly? “This woman was telling me about her ex-boyfriend, and she said, ‘He didn’t hit me.’ Just out of the blue.”
“He definitely hit her,” Ruby said sagely.
“It just seemed like a weird thing to volunteer to a total stranger.”
“Sounds like she has boundary issues. I used to have major boundary issues because of being molested as a child.” I’d grown accustomed to upsetting revelations like this from Ruby, but I never knew where to look. I kept my eyes trained on my notebook. “My