“Where’d you go?” he asks on the drive from the Berners’.
“I wasn’t feeling that well.”
“I think they’re very interested. You need to get to know them. It’s like I’ve been saying, low pressure. No one wants some salesman breathing down their neck. They don’t trust that. Call them up in a few days just to talk. Don’t ask her anything except how she’s doing, the weather, Mr. Berner, and things like that and she’ll invite you in for pie — I guarantee. And tell her about yourself a little. Ask her advice on something. I swear, it changes everything. Get them involved in your life a little. The sale has got to be secondary. You push too fast, like you were starting to in there, and people smell a rat.”
We pass through rugged forest on our way into town.
“What kind of things do I tell her about myself?”
“Tell her about your family, about your mom and dad and how you worry about them from time to time. Tell her about visiting them. What that does is it makes you into a son. You’re a salesman here, but you’re also somebody’s son. See what I’m saying?”
I am renting a three-room apartment directly above Latrell’s General Store and across Collins Street from the post office. In the mornings I buy a cup of coffee and I sit in the back with the regulars, a bunch of old guys in baseball caps who smell like cigarettes. Vern Latrell knows me by my name now on most mornings, though once he called me Andy and another time Patrick. I corrected him both times because I want him to remember me. I want everyone around here to remember me because I will be here for a while. Eddie introduced me around my first week here. They all like Eddie. A couple of them have gone fishing with him. One old guy took him hunting. Eddie Callahan from Westchester County gumming around the woods hunting for deer. I tried to talk the way Eddie talked with them, loose and comfortable, one of the gang, but the words always came out wrong, stiff and unnatural, or else exaggerated, as though I were mimicking them. Now Eddie’s moved away to meet another town full of homeowners, and he’s left me behind as the new Eddie. No one has asked to take me hunting.
In a few days I call Mrs. Berner. She knows my voice before I identify myself.
“I was hoping you’d call, Randall,” she says. “Have you gotten settled in yet?”
“All settled in at Eddie’s old place. On top of Latrell’s,” I say. “Right there in the middle of town.”
“You must be a little restless, huh?”
“What do you mean?”
“Not much for a young man like you to do around there, especially a young man whose roots are downstate.”
“I like it. I’m getting to know everyone. All the regulars at Latrell’s.”
“That’s a lazy bunch of do-nothings.”
Weather, I think. “Days have been beautiful, huh? For October? I can’t believe it. Is it always that beautiful?” Sunshine glazes my window.
“It’s usually colder. But it’s always beautiful.”
“I think you’re right,” I say.
She says nothing. I say nothing. I can’t think of anything else. She suspects me, I think. She knows about the perfume bottles. Good for her. Good for them. I’ll say good-bye, I decide.
“Randall?” her voice creaks. “Do you like grilled cheese sandwiches with Virginia ham and tomato?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Well, I do too. I would like you to come over to the house and have a sandwich with me.”
Mr. Berner is in bed with the flu, she says. From time to time we hear a frightening cough from the other room. She brings him his sandwich. I wave from the doorway. He waves back pathetically. “Hello, Randall,” he calls out. “Nice to see someone so young and healthy.”
The rooms are so large I can’t imagine how they heat the place in the winter. I can imagine old Mr. Berner sick all winter in that cold house.
In the living room Mrs. Berner and I sit across from each other, me on the blue couch, her on the cloth-lined rocker.
“We’ve been discussing what you and Eddie brought up the other day. I’m starting to think it might make a whole world of sense.”
Too fast, I think. Hold back. “But you’ve been here so long,” I say. “It’s got to be hard to think of moving from here.”
“We’ll go broke living here. And we don’t get out that much to appreciate it that much anyhow.”
I eat my sandwich. It is hot and gooey and as good as anything I can remember eating.
“I’m lonely all the time,” she says. “You think you’re teaching a lesson… ”
She looks so sad I feel the need to cheer her up. “My mother and father are both retired. And they get such a kick out of my coming home,” I say. “My mother makes a big deal out of it and she cooks some terrific meals. Sometimes my brothers come home at the same time. Family is important to me.”
“What do your parents do?”
“Well, my father is a school custodian and my mother is a secretary in the military. She works for the army.”
Neither of these are true. I haven’t seen either of my parents in more than five years, and so I couldn’t say precisely what they do. It doesn’t seem like Mrs. Berner hears me anyhow.
“My mother just finished a tour in Kabul,” I try.
“I wish you’d come by whenever you like and visit us, Randall,” she says.
On the way back from the bathroom this time I take the magnifying glass. I hold it at my side the way I did the perfume bottle as I say my good-byes. Mrs. Berner says nothing about it. She ducks back inside. On the way to my car I swipe the newspaper from the blue plastic box from the road.
That night I meet Eddie at a bar in Saranac Lake. He has two more prospective sellers lined up — another old couple, and a ninety-three-year-old widower. He’s doing chores for the widower, bagging leaves and painting.
“I let him pay me a few dollars and a beer each time so he doesn’t get suspicious or anything. I haven’t even told him I work in real estate.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him I was a social worker on sabbatical.”
Eddie buys the beers and asks the bartender to make out a receipt. He knows the bartender’s name and asks him about fishing on a particular section of the river.
“Caught two today,” the bartender answers. “Walleyes have been hitting, Eddie. But it’s just pan fish. Nothing too big.”
“I can’t even catch a cold lately,” Eddie says.
It seems to me there are very few people Eddie doesn’t know.
“What’s new with the Berners?” he asks me when the bartender is out of earshot.
“Grilled cheese and Virginia ham today. Hamburgers and peach cobbler on Sunday night.”
“Nice. Nice.”
“I’m following your advice. I’m taking it slow.”
“Good, good. You’re making a friend here. Not a sale. A friend. Remember that. You are helping them get to where they need to go. They can’t survive in that place. When you’re getting close, let me know and I’ll write you out a check you can take over. She’ll cry, I guarantee. She’ll take one look at that ninety-thousand-dollar check and she’ll cry.”