The Used World. Haven Kimmel

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 small comb, rested his hand on his wife’s shoulder with a proprietary ease. “I shouldn’t be buying her gifts before Christmas, but how can I stop myself?” he said, glancing down at his wife.

      “Merry Christmas,” Rebekah said to them both, and the man nodded, steered his sullen charge out the door.

      She sat back down on the stool, felt dizzy just for a moment. Her vision righted itself, and she decided to begin organizing the day’s receipts in case Hazel closed early. She lifted the thick stack off the spindle—it had been a busy day—and could go no further. The receipt on top was nothing special, just a box of miscellaneous linens from #27. Rebekah let her hand rest on top of it, felt her pulse pound against her wrist. What had happened on that night thirty-one or thirty-two days before? She had read the events over and over, she had turned every word between them inside out, she had rebuilt from memory every square inch of Peter’s cabin, as if the truth were under a cushion or tucked between two books.

      All evening he had been distracted, but polite to her as if she were a fond acquaintance. He’d eaten the dinner she had made (chili, a tossed salad), answered her questions about his day without any precision or energy; he’d declined to watch a movie. She had overfilled the woodstove and the cabin was hot. On any other night Peter would have complained, he would have said, “We’re not trying to melt ice caps here, Rebekah,” but on that evening, the last one, he couldn’t be moved even to irritation. He had taken off his gray wool sweater and wore just a faded red T-shirt and blue jeans. There were things he wanted to look up on the Internet, he told her, and because she understood very little about computers he left the description of what he was seeking opaque: something to do with chord charts, a lyrics bank, copyrights.

      “It’s a doozy,” Hazel said, startling Rebekah out of the too-hot cabin.

      “I’m sorry?” Rebekah blinked, patted her face as if trying to stay awake.

      Hazel swayed in front of her, widened her narrow green eyes. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

      “None. What’s a doozy?”

      “The snowstorm appears to be doozy-like, Rebekah. Let’s pull the gates down on this Popsicle stand.”

      “Oh, the snowstorm.”

      “If you’ll help me round up the customers and chain them in the basement, I’d much appreciate it. And also tell Miss Claudia I’d like us to be out of here by four. I’m going to call my mother, make sure she’s okay.”

      Hazel headed back to her office and Rebekah stood, intending to do a number of things, but instead just stared out the large front window. That night, the last night, she’d gotten into bed without Peter. She’d been wearing a summery yellow nightgown with a lace ribbon that tied at the bodice, and he’d said good night in a normal if distracted way. She’d fallen asleep without waiting for him to come to bed and in the morning it appeared he never had, he hadn’t gotten into bed with her. He’d left a note that said he had some things to attend to early at his parents’ house, and that he’d talk to her later. That was it, I’ll talk to you later, xo, P. It was that simple. He didn’t call that night or the next day, and when she called him there was no answer. When she drove past the cabin he wasn’t there; when she tried his parents, they were also gone.

      Peter had been her first in every category, and she had no idea what to do when he vanished. He should have come with an instruction guide, Rebekah thought, or a warning label, turning and heading out to round up customers.

      “You’ll lock up?” Hazel asked, jingling her keys.

      Rebekah nodded, continuing to stack receipts. The Clancys, in booth #68, seemed to be coming out ahead.

      “You’ll lock up if I go ahead and go?”

      Rebekah glanced at Hazel, who had her heavy bag over her shoulder and her car keys in her hand. She’d made the bag herself, out of a needlepoint design intended as a couch cushion: a unicorn lying down inside a circle of fence, trees in delicate pink bloom, a black background.

      “God knows traffic will be backed up all through Jonah, and my femurs ache like they did in seventy-eight.”

      “I already nodded, Hazel, that was me nodding,” Rebekah said. “Claudia nodded, too.”

      “I could stand here all night, waiting for you to nod. In seventy-eight, maybe I’ve already told you this, after the snow stopped falling, the people who lived in town went out to check the damage and didn’t realize they were walking on top of the cars. There were drifts eighteen, twenty feet high in some places.”

      “I remember,” Claudia said, changing the roll of paper on the adding machine.

      “How on earth could you remember?”

      “Let’s see, I was…nearly eighteen. That’s about the time we start to remember things, I guess,” Claudia said, without looking up.

      Rebekah laughed, put a paper clip on the Clancys’ receipts.

      “My cats could starve to death, waiting for an answer from you two,” Hazel said, jingling.

      “Have mercy,” Rebekah said, dropping the paperwork and giving Hazel her full attention. Hazel’s purple, puffy coat, fashioned of some shiny microfiber, hung almost to the floor and resembled nothing so much as a giant, slick sleeping bag. The hem had collected a fringe of white cat fur. Beside Rebekah, Claudia was sorting her groups of receipts by vendor. She took the largest stacks from her pile and the largest from Rebekah’s to add up and enter in the ledger book. Rebekah hardly knew Claudia after working with her for more than a year. She knew only this gesture from Claudia, the taking on of the heaviest moving, the staying later if necessary, the silent appropriation of the less appealing task.

      “I could wait if you want me to. We could go get some White Castles and then go back to my house,” Hazel said.

      “No, СКАЧАТЬ