And now Sunny was stuck in the same life. He could almost smell the yearning on her. And while desperation was sad enough for a teenage boy, it was downright dangerous for a girl. He was terrified for Sunny. When Miriam tried to minimize his fears, he wanted to say, I know. I know. You can’t begin to understand what goes through a man’s mind at the sight of a girl in a tight sweater, just how base and primary those urges are. But if he told Miriam this, she might ask what went through his mind, every day, when he saw the girls from Woodlawn High School stroll past, heading to the bakery or High’s Dairy Store or Robin’s Nest Pizza.
Not that he wanted anything to do with teenagers, far from it. Sometimes he wanted to be a teenager, or at least a man in his twenties. He wanted the freedom to wander in this new world, where the girls’ hair swung long and free and their braless breasts bounced in slinky print shirts. The freedom to wander and gawk, but nothing more. When he was still working for the state, he’d seen plenty of colleagues succumb to this desire. Even in the cultural backwater of the accounting division, men suddenly sprouted sideburns and bought sharp new clothes. About ten months later-really, Dave could have put together a chart, predicting that the appearance of sideburns on a man presaged the end of his marriage by exactly ten months-the guy would move out of the house and into one of those new apartment complexes, explaining earnestly that his kids couldn’t be happy if he wasn’t happy. Uga -duh, as Sunny might have snorted. Dave, having grown up in a fatherless household, would never subject his daughters to that.
The hour hand on the “Time for a Haircut” clock crawled toward 4:00 P.M. Almost six hours into his day, and not a single customer had come into the shop. Was it possible that the site was cursed? A few weeks back, Dave had chatted up one of the counterwomen at Bauhof’s Bakery as she dropped cookies into a waxed-paper bag. The bakery still used the old-fashioned counterbalances, the ones that were being phased out by electronic scales that could measure weight to one-hundredth of a pound. Dave preferred the inexact elegance of the old scales, enjoyed watching them slowly align as each cookie dropped.
“Let’s see,” said the counterwoman, Elsie, who had to stand on tiptoe to reach the scale. “For years and years, it was a hardware store, Fortunato’s. Then, in 1968, the old man got upset by the riots and sold, moved to Florida.”
“There weren’t any riots in Woodlawn. The trouble was miles away.”
“No, but it aggravated him all the same. So Benny sold to some woman who sold children’s clothes, but they were too dear.”
“Dear?”
“Pricey. Who’s gonna spend twenty dollars on a sweater that a baby’s gonna wear all of a month? So she sold out to this restaurant, but it just didn’t take. The young couple just didn’t know which end was up, couldn’t get a western omelet on the table in under forty-five minutes. And then there was a bookstore, but what with Gordon’s up to Westview and Waldenbooks at Security, who’s gonna come to Woodlawn to buy a book? And then there was the tux rental-”
“The Darts,” Dave said, remembering the round-shouldered man with a measuring tape about his neck, the shy woman who peered out from a great curtain of long, prematurely gray hair. “I took over their lease.”
“Nice couple, sensible types, but people go to where they’ve always gone when they want formalwear. Tuxes is traditional. Like funeral homes. You go to the place where your dad went, and he went to the place that his dad went, and so on. You want to open a new place, you got to go to a new neighborhood, where people don’t have loyalties.”
“So four different businesses in less than seven years.”
“Yep. It’s one of those black holes. Every block has one, the one store that never works.” She brought her hand up to her mouth, the waxed grabbing paper still in her hand. “I’m sorry, Mr. Bethany. I’m sure you’ll make a go of it with your little, um…”
“Tchotchkes?”
“What?”
“Nothing.” In a German bakery that sold “Jewish” rye bread, without irony or apology, it was probably too much to expect Yiddish to be understood, much less the self-lacerating mockery in Dave’s use of the word. Tchotchkes indeed. The items in his store were beautiful, unique. Yet even the families he knew through the Fivefold Path, like-minded people when it came to spiritual matters, had been slow to embrace his material goods. If he had been in New York, or San Francisco, or even Chicago, the store would be a hit. But he was in Baltimore, which he’d never intended. Then again, it was here that he’d met Miriam, had his family. How could he wish that away?
The wind chime over the front door keened softly. A middle-aged woman, and Dave wrote her off instantly, assuming she must be in need of directions. Then he realized she was probably only a few years removed from him, no more than forty-five or so. Her clothes-a fussy pink knit suit and boxy handbag-had thrown him off.
“I thought you might have unusual items for Easter baskets,” she said, stumbling a little over the words, as if worried that this unusual store required an unusual etiquette. “Something that could be used as a keepsake?”
Fuck . Miriam had suggested that he stock more seasonal items and he had ignored her. He had done Christmas, of course. But Easter had seemed far-fetched. “I’m afraid not.”
“Nothing?” The woman’s distress seemed disproportionate. “It doesn’t have to be for Easter, just Easter-themed. An egg, a chick, a rabbit. Anything.”
“Rabbits,” he repeated. “You know, I think we have some wooden rabbits from Mexico. But they’re a little large for an Easter basket.”
He went to the shelves that held Latin American art and gently pulled down one of the rabbit carvings, passing it to the woman as if it were an infant that needed to be cradled. She held it in front of her with straight, stiff arms. The rabbit was simple and primitive, a sculpture created with a few swift, sure cuts of a knife, far too nice to be a consolation prize in some child’s Easter basket. It wasn’t a toy. It was art.
“Seventeen dollars?” the woman asked, looking at the handwritten price tag on its base. “And so plain.”
“Yes, but the simplicity…” Dave didn’t even bother to finish his own sentence. He had clearly lost the sale. But he thought of Miriam, her poignant faith in him, and made one last attempt. “You know, I might have some wooden darning eggs in the back room. I found them at a West Virginia craft fair, and they’re painted in bright primary colors-red, blue.”
“Really?” She seemed oddly excited by this prospect. “Would you get them for me?”
“Well…” The request was a delicate one, for it would mean leaving her alone in the shop. This was the consequence of not being able to afford a part-time helper. Sometimes Dave invited customers into the back room, made it seem like he was conferring special honor on them, rather than insult them by suggesting he was worried about theft. But he couldn’t imagine this woman pocketing anything, or trying to get into his cash register, an old-fashioned one that would ring clamorously if opened. “Wait here, I’ll see if I can find them.”