“Wait, go back—code for what?”
“Excuse me?”
“Loneliness is a code word for what?”
Amos shrugged. “That’s for you to decide, I guess.”
They sat in silence a few more minutes, Claudia now fully aware of all the reasons she had never sought counseling before. She glanced at the clock on the wall behind Amos’s desk and realized she needed to get to work. “I need to go,” she said, standing up. Amos stood, too, and for Claudia it was one of those rare occasions when she could look another person in the eye.
They shook hands and Amos said, smiling as if they were old friends, “It was a pleasure. Come see me again anytime.”
Salt of the earth. All through the day Claudia considered the phrase as it applied to Ludie, and to her father, Bertram. She didn’t know the provenance, but assumed the words had something to do with Lot’s wife, who could not help but turn and look back at the home she was losing, the friends, the family, the—who knew what all?—button collection, and so was struck down by the same avenging angels who had torched Sodom and Gomorrah. Ludie would not have looked back, of that Claudia was certain. They were plain country people, her parents, upheld all the conservative values that marked the Midwest like a scar. But they had been canny, too—they had played the game by the rules as they understood them. They were insured to the heavens, and when they died they left Claudia a mortgage-free house, and a payout on their individual policies that meant she would never want for anything. For her whole, long life, they seemed to be saying, Claudia would never have to leave the safety of the nest.
Ten days before Christmas and the Used World Emporium was busy, as it had been the whole month of December. Claudia thought about her mother and Beulah Baker showing up on Amos Townsend’s doorstep and wished, as she wished every day, that she could witness, or better yet, inhabit, any given moment when Ludie was alive. Claudia didn’t need to speak to her, didn’t need to stand in her mother’s attention; she would take anything, any day or hour, just to see Ludie’s hands again, or to watch her tie behind her back (so quickly) the pale blue apron with the red pocket and crooked hem. She thought of these things as she moved a walnut breakfront from booth #37 into the waiting, borrowed truck of a professor and his much-too-young wife, probably a second or third spouse for the distinguished man, and not the last. She carried out boxes of Blue Willow dishes (it multiplied in a frightful way, Blue Willow; 90 percent of what they sold was counterfeit, but in the Used World the sacred rule was Buyer beware). Over the course of the day she wrapped and moved framed Maxfield Parrish advertisements; an oak pie safe with doors of tin pierced into patterns of snowflakes; a spinning wheel Hazel had thought would never sell. She watched the clientele come and go, and they were a specific lot: the faculty and staff from across the river filtered in all day, those who knew nothing about antiques except the surface and the cache. The gay couples who were gentrifying the historic district, well-groomed men who walked apart from each other, their gimlet eyes trained to see exactly the right shade of maroon on a velvet love seat, a pattern of lilies on a cup and saucer that matched their heirloom hand towels. And behind them the crusty, retired farm folk who knew the age and value of every butter churn and cast iron garden table, who silently perused the goods and would not pay the ticket price for anything. Claudia watched them all, this self-selected group of shoppers, aware that just half a mile down James Whitcomb Riley Avenue, the Kmart was doing a bustling business in every other sort of gift, to every other kind of person, and she was grateful to work where she worked, at least this Christmas season. She moved furniture, took off and put on her coat a dozen times, thought about Ludie and Beulah, and she thought about loneliness, a code for something. Everyone she encountered stared at her at least a beat too long, then talked about the weather to disguise it. She nodded in agreement, as the sky grew dense and pearl-gray.
By three o’clock Rebekah Shook had said, “What a lovely piece—someone will be happy to get it,” approximately twenty-four times, and had meant it on each occasion. She was always the saddest to see anything go. She had wrapped dishes and vases and collectible beer bottles in newspaper until her hands were stained black and her fingerprints were visible on everything she touched. No matter what she was doing or whom she was talking to, she was also remembering the number 31 (or maybe it was 32 now), rising up before her like an animate thing as she was falling asleep, something with power. The 3 was muscular, with hands sharpened to points, and the 1 was a cold marble column. She sat up straighter on the stool behind the counter, closed her eyes. Her lower back ached; the night before, she’d sat down on the edge of the bed, intending to brush her hair, but before she could lift her arms the room had swayed like a hammock. She was on her back, counting the days since she’d last seen Peter, the hairbrush next to her pillow. She didn’t remember anything else until morning, when she woke to the sound of her father’s heavy gait in the hallway outside her room and realized she’d been reliving, in a dream, the last conversation she’d had with her mother.
It isn’t life, Beckah.
I don’t understand.
Of course not, but your father does. I’m going to ride this horse home.
Which horse, what horse?
Can’t you see it? It has blue eyes. Turn that knob and see if it comes in any clearer.
“It’s almost completely dark outside,” Hazel said, coming around behind the counter with a box of miscellaneous Christmas cards.“Sell these for a quarter apiece. Some don’t have envelopes, so if anyone complains tell them that the glue becomes toxic over time anyway.”
“Does it?” Rebekah asked, flipping through the stack. There were plump little angel babies, snow-covered landscapes, faded Santas affecting listless twinkles.
“Oh who knows. There are a few in there that date back to the thirties, I’m pretty sure. Who the hell would want to lick something that old?” Hazel jingled as she walked. Today she was wearing, Rebekah noticed, one of her favorite outfits, an orange and yellow batik vest with matching pants. The vest sported big metal buttons designed to look like distressed Mediterranean coins. Under the vest she wore a lime-green turtleneck, on her swollen feet a pair of stretched white leather Keds. Her dangly earrings were miniature Christmas trees with lights that blinked red and green. Hazel had less a sense of style than an affinity for catastrophe, which was one of the things that had drawn Rebekah to her.
“I’m going in my office for a minute, listen to the weather report. I’ll call the mall, too. If they’re closing early, we’re closing early.” Hazel jangled down the left-hand aisle, past booths #14 and #15, toward the cramped little office. Rebekah noticed that Hazel favored her left hip, something she hadn’t done the day before, and she realized, too, that the Cronies, the three men who always sat at the front of the door drinking free RC Colas, were mysteriously absent. Rebekah stood. She glanced at the two grainy surveillance cameras trained on the back of the store; in one a man flipped through vintage comic books. In the other nothing happened. She looked out the large picture window, through the backward black letters painted in a Gothic banker’s script that spelled out hazel hunnicutt’s used world emporium, and saw the heavy sky, the absence of a single bird on the telephone line. She knew, as everyone from the Midwest knows, that if she stepped outside she would be struck by a far-reaching silence. In the springtime of her childhood it hadn’t been the green skies or the sudden stillness that would finally cause her mother to throw open doors and windows, grab Rebekah’s hand, and pull her down the stairs to the basement: it was the absence of birdsong, of crickets, of spring peepers that meant a twister was on the way. It’s not the temperature, it’s not the sky. It’s the countless unseen singing things that announce by the vacuum they leave that some momentous condition is on its way.
Rebekah rang up a lamb’s-wool stole and a breakfront from #37 for the professor’s young wife, forgot to charge the tax. She said to the customer, whose expression was cold, “This is lovely, this lamb’s wool—it’s one of my favorite pieces.” The woman smiled vaguely, as if made uncomfortable by the familiarity from the Help. The husband, his beard streaked with the marks of a