Now I walked through his church door again. The bell on the doorknob announced me just as always. He was reading at the cash register and put down his book. He looked more like Lincoln than ever, thin face and deep-set eyes, until he smiled.
“Margaret, my pearl,” he said, as he used to. My name, he had explained, meant pearl in Greek, which he studied in seminary. “Your mother said you were home. Care to answer an old man’s prayers and help out?”
“Okay,” I said.
“Let’s have a cup of tea before I press you into service.”
We walked through the shop, dim and dusty as I remembered, and through the door behind the pulpit into his apartment, carved out of what had been the choir dressing room. I sat at his kitchen table and glanced around while he made tea. The bulky old phonograph was on its shelf in the pantry. I knew the piles of records on the floor were the popular songs from his youth. Glenn Miller. Frank Sinatra. “Dancing is my secret vice, Margaret. I’m thankful to be a minister, not a priest,” he used to say. He had taught me to dance, on those afternoons, the year I was thirteen. Just before I went home for the evening, we would have our lesson. He was graceful, and had made me feel graceful as well, though I was growing tall too fast. He would lead me around the kitchen table and keep count as the music spilled and spun. My favorite song was Fascination. He had always played it last.
“Your tea, mademoiselle.” He filled my china cup from the fat pot I remembered, snug in its knitted cozy, like a baby in a bunting.
He heaped sugar in his cup and stirred. It was like the old days when I used to sit at this table and sip milky tea—cambric tea, he called it—and eat graham crackers. He stroked his cat and we would talk. About customers, if he’d had any, and what they bought. About his missionary days in India. About my homework; we practiced the county seats of Pennsylvania, the presidents in order.
And now here we were again, drinking tea.
“You have perfect timing. I’ve just been to a big auction and could use help sorting.”
My favorite task had always been sorting purchases from estate sales and auctions. Opening the cartons, unwrapping objects from layers of old newspaper had seemed like Christmas.
“Let me give you a tour, refresh your memory as to where things go.”
The sanctuary was crammed with table linens, sheet music, books, buttons, old post cards, and costume jewelry. His inventory was always more junk than antiques, except for the glass-fronted cabinet of bone china. We paused there.
“I still have my weakness for fine china,” he said. “Can’t ever let a pretty piece go unclaimed, no matter if it’s chipped or cracked. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” Once I had been in the shop when a customer exclaimed, “Oh! This is my grandmother’s pattern,” as though her grandmother were restored with the pink-flowered saucer. It did seem possible, in the clutter of his shop, to find something precious that had been lost.
We squeezed down narrow aisles between laden card tables.
“Here are the salt and pepper shakers,” he said. “I keep an eye out at the sales for the ones shaped like fruit, the ones you liked.”
When I was his after-school helper, I had started a salt and pepper collection, purchasing one or two a week. He would have given them to me, but I preferred to pay, twenty-five cents a set.
He flipped on the light in the stairwell and I followed him upstairs. He paused on every step and leaned hard on the banister.
“The choir loft is still for clothes and hats. I put the everyday dishes, board games, jigsaw puzzles, and picture frames up here, too. When I can climb the stairs. My hip’s a bit gimpy.”
I spotted the old dressmaker’s dummy he had rescued from a dumpster at the women’s clothing store in town. We had named her Esmerelda. I used to dress her up in outfits culled from the cast-off clothes. Now she leaned in the corner of the choir loft, draped in an old wool coat with a fur collar.
“Esmerelda!”
“Yes, wish I was aging as gracefully as she. A classic beauty.”
He made his painstaking way downstairs and sank into his chair by the cash register.
“Don’t think I’m up for a trip to the basement today. Check it out. Then we can go to the garage and start work.”
The basement was as I remembered: a dank catacomb of little rooms, packed with tools and pots and pans, coffee percolators, bottles, canning jars. I climbed back upstairs.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Ready,” I replied.
“Well, no rest for the weary,” he said, and hoisted himself out of the chair.
We walked through the shop and kitchen, out the back door into the garage. The big folding table he kept for sorting was covered with boxes.
“I’ve fallen behind. Glad you’re here.”
It was like old times. I fished in the cartons, handed each item over, and watched him deliberate before writing a price on a sticky circular label.
“This treasure is ready for the floor. Find it a spot. Remember, like goes with like,” he said.
I did remember. It was a scavenger hunt in reverse, finding each piece its place. As I fell into the familiar quiet rhythm of working together, I recalled how I used to tell him about what I was reading. He sometimes had recited poetry. Parting is all we know of heaven, and all we need of hell, was the line that came back to me now, his voice in my mind’s ear. I almost wanted to tell him what I had learned in college, about love. And ask him if he thought I would go to hell, for what I had done. But it was enough to work together until evening fell. Mr. Westervelt did not suggest dancing. I wondered, as I crossed the yards between his house and ours, if he could still dance, with his gimpy hip.
There was no letter waiting for me on the mail table. I had left a note, with my address, in his study carrel beside mine in the library, where we had first met, studying side by side. Once he had left a rose for me, on my books. I had the dry petals in my jewelry box. He had been avoiding the library, before I went away, before I conveniently disappeared. He would not write.
“I’m back here,” called my mother from the kitchen. I walked down the hall.
“So, how was your day?” she asked, scanning my face with a quick glance.
“Okay.”
“Did he tell you the doctor wants him to have hip replacement?”
“He didn’t mention it.”
I went back the next day.
“Margaret, my pearl,” he greeted me, as though I were the person he most wanted to see in the world. “There’s a good sale advertised in The Gazette. Let’s go.” He hung the Closed sign in the window and locked the door. Early spring was quiet, no need to worry about missing customers.
“Be my chauffeur, please.”
Driving his dilapidated station wagon, my attention on the twists and turns of the road, the cotton fog in my mind cleared. The quiet road unrolled. Tree branches were misted with the first green leaves. We rode past red barns emblazoned with Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco, Treat Yourself to the Best and big metal mailboxes planted hopefully by the end of long drives leading to weather-beaten farm houses.
We came to the sign: Sale Today. I followed the arrow and parked in the mud beside a rambling house.
“Ah, the thrill of the chase,” he said. “You go in first. Case the joint, I’ll let your young bones do the leg work. Come back and tell me what to bid on, and who is going to outbid us.”
There