Devils in the Sugar Shop
Devils in the Sugar Shop
TIMOTHY SCHAFFERT
This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Unbridled Books
Denver, Colorado
Copyright © 2006
All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be
reproduced in any form without permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Schaffert, Timothy.
Devils in the sugar shop / Timothy Schaffert.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-1-932961-33-1
ISBN-10: 1-932961-33-X
1. Omaha (Neb.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3619.C325D48 2007
813'.6—dc22
2007000107
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
BOOK DESIGN BY SH • CV
First Printing
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks: as always, to Rodney Rahl, and to my parents, Larry and Donita Schaffert, for their love and support; to Leslie Prisbell, whose bon mots and raggedy fishnets pop up from time to time in this novel; to Janet Lura for her insights and humor; to Gerry Shapiro and Judy Slater for their continued inspiration as writers and teachers; to Wanda Ewing for letting me borrow her artwork; to Amanda and Carl, whose own work of art, Jackson Street Booksellers, served as the inspiration for Mermaids Singing, Used & Rare. Thanks to my dear friends Justin Wolta, Rivkah and Abe Sass, and Maud Casey, for their wit and wisdom. Thanks also to my family, including my aunt Myrna (a tireless promoter of my books), my aunt Mae (who looked after us when my dad was sick), my niece Miranda, and all my brothers’ kids. (A special thanks to Desiree and Ruarik for their service in Iraq.)
Many thanks to my friend and agent, Alice Tasman, and to Greg Michalson, Fred Ramey, Caitlin Hamilton Summie, Cary Johnson, and all the fine folks at Unbridled Books for their phenomenal commitment to my novels. Thanks also to Hilda Raz and Prairie Schooner and the English Department of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, which got me started and keeps me going.
Devils in the Sugar Shop
Ashley, Deedee & Viv
Ashley Allyson, the failed erotic novelist, stood in Mermaids Singing, Used & Rare, with an armful of pink, freckled lilies, the stems wrapped in tissue, bought from the corner florist in the Old Market. Ashley remembered her mother calling that breed of lily a naked lady because its many leaves dropped off as it bloomed.
Despite the falling temperatures outside, and despite wearing only her husband’s elbow-patch tweed jacket over her nearly threadbare Concrete Blonde concert T-shirt, Ashley felt faint from the heat of the bookstore. But she couldn’t bring herself to leave just yet.
For weeks and weeks, possibly months and months, a copy of Ashley’s first novel had sat on a shelf in the fiction section of Mermaids Singing, unsold even with the low, low price of $3.95 penciled into the upper-right corner of the title page. Now Ashley saw that the book was finally, blessedly gone.
Whenever she was in the store and no one was looking, Ashley would take the novel down from the shelf. Just an inch or two too petite, she’d have to step up on the bottom shelf of the bookcase, reach high, and crook her finger into the bottom of the spine to tug the book from where it was stuck in between the humid magic of Isabel Allende and Jorge Amado. She would dust off its dust jacket with her sleeve, be charmed again by the Alex Katz painting reproduced on it. She would slip off the jacket and run her thumb over the initials of her name embossed in the cloth of the cover, and read again “A Note About the Type” on the last page (“This book was set in Mrs. Pickering Neoclassical, a typeface based on an alphabet created by a children’s book author in 1848 . . .”). Overlooking all the weaknesses of the novel itself, Ashley could still become mesmerized by the book’s physical beauty, right down to the elegant stitching of its pages to the binding, all in pink thread.
Though it was early February, when Omaha stayed gray, with muddy, sooty snow melting and refreezing in the gutters, Ashley felt uplifted. Someone, against all possible odds, had bought her abandoned little book. And maybe this someone would see the novel’s qualities, find its heart, and fall in love with its cast of fragile creatures.
Feeling generous, Ashley stepped over to browse the shop’s selection of rare books. She decided she’d buy her husband a pricey Valentine’s gift, the signed copy of The Moviegoer, perhaps, or the Peter Max Paper Airplane Book, its pages meant to be torn out and folded, with trippy statements of love and peace across Popsicle-colored wings.
But as she ran her finger along the front of the cabinet, she became sad at the possibility of this sentimental gesture losing its every bit of romance in the chill of their apartment. Something was wrong in her marriage, and that something weighted every exchange and pleasantry and informed every sharp tone. After nineteen years of raising a family together, she and Troy had fallen out of touch in their own home, lost among their own things.
Ashley and Troy had married at the very beginning of their adult lives, so everything they owned belonged completely to the both of them. If their marriage ever ended, they’d have to divide down an impossible middle, determining whether something was somehow more his than hers, or more hers than his. This book she might buy, for example: it would be Troy’s gift, but it was Ashley’s thought that counted, wasn’t it? The book would represent this spontaneous Saturday-morning side trip into Mermaids Singing, these lilies, the snow falling lightly outside, her enthusiasm that turned to melancholy.
If divorce loomed, they’d have to decide who got the circa-1950s Frank Lloyd Wright cocktail table they’d bought while antiquing in Madison County on a romantic weekend touring the historic bridges, or the French poster for Annie Hall that had hung on the bedroom door of their first apartment, or the clear broken horn from a crystal unicorn that their daughter, Peyton, had used as a stage prop in her high school’s production of The Glass Menagerie, a tiny spiraled piece of glass she’d presented to her father as he’d handed a bouquet of blue roses up to her from the orchestra pit during the curtain call and the standing ovation. Such a sweet moment.
The grandfather clock in the corner of the bookstore chimed eleven times with effort, its squeaky gears and workings about to give. Ashley had to run. She taught a Saturday-afternoon writing class, and later that evening she was hosting a girls-only shindig, which was the reason she’d ventured out at all, for flowers, a peek of spring, this miserable icy morning.
As Ashley turned to leave Mermaids Singing, she saw the bargain bin, a wooden wine crate full of books, “The Last Ditch, $1” painted on its side. That long-unsold copy of her novel, its dust jacket now with a new, painful little rip from clumsy handling, sat at the top of the pile.
The bookstore was owned by identical twentysomething twins named Peach and Plum, and Peach took Ashley’s writing class. Ashley sighed, glancing around the empty store autumnally lit by haphazardly placed lamps with dusty shades. A shadow slipped around a corner, and the dry pages of an antique pinup-girl calendar rustled in the shadow’s wake. Perhaps Ashley had once been too harsh to