Jane slid in between the couch and the coffee table, nudging her brother out of the way. In the process she knocked the dirty diaper to the floor, where it fell open.
“Oh my God!” She gagged and turned her head.
“Another reason not to eat brown mustard, huh?” Charlie said.
“You bastard!”
He backed away. “Okay, I’m going downstairs. You’re sure you got this?”
“Go!” Jane said, waving him out of the room with one hand while holding her nose with the other.
5
DARKNESS GETS UPPITY
Hey, Ray,” Charlie said as he came down the steps into the storeroom. He always tried to make a lot of noise on the steps and usually fired a loud and early “hello” to warn his employees that he was coming. He’d worked a number of jobs before coming back to take over the family business, and had learned from experience that nobody liked a sneaky boss.
“Hey, Charlie,” Ray said. Ray was out front, sitting on a stool behind the counter. He was pushing forty, tall, balding, and moved through the world without ever turning his head. He couldn’t. As a San Francisco policeman, he’d caught a gangbanger’s bullet in the neck six years ago, and that was the last time he’d looked over his shoulder without using a mirror. Ray lived on a generous disability pension from the city and worked for Charlie in exchange for free rent on his fourth-floor apartment, thus keeping the transaction off both their books.
He spun around on the stool to face Charlie. “Hey—uh—I wanted to say that, you know, your situation, I mean, your loss. Everybody liked Rachel. You know, if I can do anything—”
It was the first time Charlie had seen Ray since the funeral, so the awkwardness of secondary condolences had yet to be forded. “You’ve done more than enough by picking up my shifts. Whatcha working on?” Charlie was trying desperately to not look at the various objects in the shop that were glowing dull red.
“Oh, this.” Ray rotated and pushed back so that Charlie could see the computer screen, where there were displayed rows of portraits of smiling, young Asian women. “It’s called Desperate Filipinas dot-com.”
“Is this where you met Miss LoveYouLongTime?”
“That was not her name. Did Lily tell you that? That kid has problems.”
“Yeah, well, kids,” Charlie said, suddenly noticing a matronly woman in tweed who was browsing the curio shelves at the front of the store. She was carrying a porcelain frog that was glowing dull red.
Ray clicked on one of the pictures, which opened a profile. “Look at this one, boss. It says she’s into sculling.” He spun on his stool again and bounced his eyebrows at Charlie.
Charlie pulled his attention from the woman with the glowing frog and looked at the screen.
“That’s rowing, Ray.”
“No it’s not. Look, it says she was a coxswain in college.” Again with the eyebrow bounce, he offered a high five.
“Also rowing,” Charlie said, leaving the ex-cop hanging. “The person at the back of the boat who yells at the rowers is called the coxswain.”
“Really?” Ray said, disappointed. He’d been married three times, and been left by all three wives because of an inability to develop normal adult social skills. Ray reacted to the world as a cop, and while many women found that attractive initially, they expected him eventually to leave the attitude, along with his service weapon, in the coat closet when he arrived home. He didn’t. When Ray had first come to work at Asher’s Secondhand, it had taken two months for Charlie to get him to stop ordering customers to “move along, there’s nothing to see here.” Ray spent a lot of time being disappointed in himself and humanity in general.
“But, dude, rowing!” Charlie said, trying to make it all better. He liked the ex-cop in spite of his awkwardness. Ray was basically a good guy, kindhearted and loyal, hardworking and punctual, but most important, Ray was losing his hair faster than Charlie.
Ray sighed. “Maybe I should search for another Web site. What’s a word that means that your standards are lower than the desperate?”
Charlie read down the page a little. “This woman has a master’s degree in English lit from Cambridge, Ray. And look at her. She’s gorgeous. And nineteen. Why is she desperate?”
“Hey, wait a minute. A master’s degree at nineteen, this girl is too smart for me.”
“No she’s not. She’s lying.”
Ray spun on the stool as if Charlie had poked him in the ear with a pencil. “No!”
“Ray, look at her. She looks like one of those Asian models for Sour Apple Flavored Calamari Treats.”
“They have that?”
Charlie pointed to the left side of the front window. “Ray, let me introduce you to Chinatown. Chinatown, this is Ray. Ray, Chinatown.”
Ray smiled, embarrassed. There was a store two blocks up that sold nothing but dried shark parts, the windows full of pictures of beautiful Chinese women holding shark spleens and eyeballs like they’d just received an Academy Award. “Well, the last woman I met through here did have a few errors and omissions in her profile.”
“Like?” Charlie was watching the woman in tweed with the glowing frog, who was approaching the counter.
“Well, she said that she was twenty-three, five feet tall, a hundred five pounds, so I thought, ‘Okay, I can have fun with a petite woman.’ Turns out it was a hundred and five kilos.”
“So, not what you expected?” Charlie said. He smiled at the approaching woman, feeling panic rise. She was going to buy the frog!
“Five foot—two-thirty. She was built like a mailbox. I might have gotten past that, but she wasn’t even twenty-three, she was sixty-three. One of her grandsons tried to sell her to me.”
“Ma’am, I’m sorry, you can’t buy that,” Charlie said to the woman.
“You hear the expression all the time,” Ray went on, “but you hardly ever meet anyone really trying to sell his own grandmother.”
“Why not?” the woman asked.
“Fifty bucks,” Ray said.
“That’s outrageous,” the woman said. “It’s marked ten.”
“No, it’s fifty for the grandmother Ray is dating,” Charlie said. “The frog is not for sale, ma’am, I’m sorry. It’s defective.”
“Then why do you have it on the shelf? Why is it marked for sale? I don’t see any defect.”
Evidently she couldn’t see that the goofy porcelain frog was not only glowing in her hands, it had started to pulsate. Charlie reached across the counter and snatched it away from her.
“It’s radioactive, ma’am. I’m sorry. You can’t buy it.”
“I wasn’t dating her,” Ray said. “I just flew to the Philippines to meet her.”
“It is not radioactive,” the woman said. “You’re just trying to jack up the price. Fine, I’ll give you twenty for it.”
“No, ma’am, public safety,” Charlie said, trying to look concerned, holding the frog to his chest as if shielding her from its dangerous energy. “And it’s clearly ridiculous. You’ll note that this frog is playing a banjo with only two strings. A travesty, really. Why don’t you let my colleague show you something in a cymbal-playing monkey. Ray, could you show this young woman something in a monkey, please.” Charlie hoped that the “young woman” would win him points.
The woman backed away from the counter, holding her purse before her like a shield. “I’m not sure I want to buy anything from you wack jobs.”
“Hey!” Ray protested, as if to say that there was only one wack job on duty and he wasn’t it.