Looking for Me (5 page)

I
met Albert James Pickens on the day I arrived in Charleston, back in the summer of ’72. I wasn’t prepared for Charleston, though no first-time visitor could be. Church steeples pierced a sky so blue it didn’t seem real, and the streets were lined with trees that left me speechless. Some had branches so long and twisted they appeared to defy gravity, and others were tall palms that swayed in the breeze like giant green fans. While I was driving down a street that ran along the water, my mouth dropped when I saw the grand old houses that looked out across the bay. Many had porches on each of their three stories, and in the slant of sunlight I swear those homes shimmered with the soft pinks and yellows of fine mother-of-pearl.

Charleston was a unique place—one where it seemed as if two different worlds not so much collided but gracefully slid up beside each other and decided to just get along.

Realizing I was lost, I turned around and drove slowly until I found Wentworth Street. I parked at the curb, and with Mr. Palmer’s business card tucked in my pocket I began walking. All the buildings were old and tall, and many had arched windows, keystones, and deep eaves accented by fancy cornices. Though I’d seen photographs of all these architectural details in the books I’d studied, seeing them in person was something else entirely.

I passed one shop after another, peering into windows that showcased everything from the latest fashions to fine bone china. After walking several blocks, I saw a small, weatherworn sign hanging cockeyed from a broken frame. The sign read:
PALMER’S FINE ANTIQUES.

Wedged between a deli and a narrow, brick-paved alley, the shop didn’t come close to the image I’d conjured in my mind. The window was so dirty it blurred the chest on display, the door was scarred with deep gouges, and when I pressed the old bronze latch and stepped inside, I was greeted by an aroma of mildew.

The entire place was crammed with furniture, paintings, lamps, and all sorts of knickknacks. Boxes filled with tarnished silver spoons and glass doorknobs sat atop a giant mahogany sideboard, and rugs rolled up like cigars and tied with twine were stacked in a corner. From a metal pole suspended across the ceiling hung two crystal chandeliers and a sock monkey. There was even an old one-eyed doll sitting in a porcelain soup tureen.

Mr. Palmer’s shop was the messiest, dustiest, craziest place I’d ever seen.

I purely loved it.

The floorboards creaked, and I turned to see Mr. Palmer amble toward me. He pushed his way past a china cabinet, squinted, and pulled up right quick when he saw me. “Well, I’ll be a three-legged jackrabbit! Am I seein’ what I think I’m seein’? Could you be that farm girl from Kentucky?”

I smiled nervously and ran my fingertips over a stained-glass lamp shade. “Yessir. I like your shop. You sure have lots of stuff.”

Mr. Palmer looked around, his eyebrows raised as if seeing his own shop for the first time. “Reckon I do. Want a nickel tour of the place?”

With an eager nod, I followed, listening to stories about where certain pieces came from and who had once owned them. He used words like “Rococo,” “Biedermeier,” “cyma reversa,” and so many more that my brain hurt. The more he talked, the more I figured that Mr. Palmer was a human encyclopedia when it came to antiques.

When we reached the back of the shop, he led me down a hall and stepped through an open doorway. “This here’s the workroom.”

Shelves crammed with jars of stains and lacquers lined one wall. A pegboard held all kinds of clamps and tools, and the smell of turpentine hung in the humid air. Standing at a workbench was a man built like a cinder block. Beneath the bright lights, his bald head shone like polished mahogany. He was repairing a deep split in a chair leg, his face intense as he adjusted a clamp.

Mr. Palmer said, “Albert, remember that painted chest I brought back from Kentucky, the one I sold to Miz Fitch?”

Albert looked up, expressionless.

“Well, this here’s the young lady who painted it.”

I could tell that Mr. Palmer didn’t remember my name, so I smiled and said, “My name’s Teddi Overman.”

Albert’s eyes telegraphed his thoughts as clearly as if he’d spoken them:
So what?
Then he went back to working on the chair.

And that was that. I’d been dismissed.

I spent more than an hour with Mr. Palmer, listening to his furniture stories and asking questions. When I told him I’d driven to Charleston all by myself, he offered to buy me lunch. We went out his front door, walked a few steps, and entered the deli. Mr. Palmer waved to the cook, and then we sat on chairs with red vinyl seats and ordered from plastic-covered menus.

Mr. Palmer tucked a paper napkin into his shirt collar and commenced to eat a grilled-cheese sandwich that he dipped into a bowl of stewed tomatoes, while I enjoyed a tuna-salad sandwich.

I chattered away, describing things I’d recently learned about furniture-painting techniques. Mr. Palmer listened, but he didn’t offer an opinion one way or the other. When he asked where I was staying, I took a sip of lemonade and answered, “I don’t know. Guess I’ll look for a cheap motel.”

“You still have your mind set on workin’ with furniture?”

“Yessir.”

He took a bite of his sandwich and chewed real slow as he studied me, and then he turned his attention back to his meal. We finished our lunch in silence.

“So,” he said, tugging the napkin from his collar and wiping it across his mouth, “you just visitin’ Charleston or you plan to stay?”

“I’m not sure. But I like what I’ve seen so far.”

“Do your folks know you’re here?”

I said, “Yes.” It wasn’t a lie. Well, not exactly. I had left them a letter, so technically they
did
know.

“Let me ask you something, Teddi. You’ve got this dream of havin’ your own shop, but my guess is you don’t have any money. Am I right?”

I squirmed a little. “I have some.”

“Well, whatever that ‘
some’
is, it most likely won’t do you a lick of good. So if you’re here,” he said, taking a pepper shaker and plunking it directly in front of me, “and you wanna get to
here
and have your own shop,” he added, pushing the salt shaker to the edge of the table, “then how you gonna do it?”

I glanced from the pepper to the salt and felt my cheeks color up. “I . . . well, I’ll get a job, buy old furniture, and work nights and weekends painting and refinishing until I save up enough money.”

“And where do you think you’ll sell your furniture? You’ll starve if you try and sell it at the side of the road.”

I looked down and traced a crack in the tabletop with my fingernail.

“Now, here’s another question. If you was to work, let’s say, in my shop, for example, what would you see yourself doing?”

I met him eye to eye. “First thing I’d do is wash your window. Then I’d repair all the gouges in your front door and paint it. And then I’d take those two matching chairs you have shoved in the corner and paint them, too.”

His woolly eyebrows shot up. “Paint the Gustavian chairs! Why, that’d be a . . . a sacrilege.”

I shrugged. “They’d sell if they were painted.”

He rubbed his hand across his stubbly chin and looked out the window. After a moment of silence, he mumbled, “What color?”

“Antique silver for the chairs and green for your front door.”

“Green. Why green?”

“Well, it’s a soothing color,
and
it’s the color of money. Might put people in the mood to spend.”

Mr. Palmer gave me the strangest look and then let out a hoot and slapped his hand on the table, sending the salt shaker flying into the air and crashing on the floor.

“So if you worked for me, what wage do you think you’d earn?”

While leaning over to retrieve the salt shaker, I thought of what Mr. Palmer had said the previous year, how I should start my price high and be willing to haggle. I placed the shaker on the table and lined it up with the pepper. “I’d say five dollars an hour.”

“What! Nobody will pay that. I’ll go two bucks, not a penny more.”

I shook my head. “What I do is art—you said so yourself. Remember? But I suppose I’d take four.”

He narrowed his eyes. “You’re dreamin’. I’ll give you two-fifty.”

I held his gaze. “Three seventy-five.”

Mr. Palmer tugged on his earlobe and looked at me for a long time. Right when I thought he was going to tell me to forget it, his lips twitched. “All right, goddamn it. You’ve got yourself a job.”

When we returned to the shop, Mr. Palmer led me into his office. While I sat in a lumpy chair with springs poking through its cushion, he made several phone calls. By four o’clock that afternoon, he’d found me a tiny furnished apartment to rent above a bakery. Though it sure wasn’t much to look at, it was clean and smelled of warm bread.

That night while unpacking my belongings, I found an envelope at the bottom of my suitcase. Inside was a note that read:

Three chirps into the sun brings good luck.

And out fell a bluebird’s feather.

The next morning I began my job. I spent the first three weeks scrubbing the front window, painting the door a soft viridian green, and working myself into a sweat as I cleaned and rearranged Mr. Palmer’s entire shop. After rubbing every stick of furniture with a special beeswax paste I’d found in the storeroom, I took the silverware from the shoe boxes and polished each piece. Once I was done, the shop looked like something special.

Mr. Palmer grumbled when I begged him to buy a radio, but one day he walked in and shoved a box into my hands. I set the radio on top of a bookcase and tuned it to the best classical station I could find. I knew this would be the final touch.

And I was right.

People walked into the shop with its glowing woods, sparkling sterling, and classical music skimming through the air and they couldn’t help but relax and open their wallets.

With nothing left in the shop for me to polish or rearrange, Mr. Palmer set me up with a small workbench and a stool in the far corner of the workroom. When I began to paint the Gustavian chairs, I had the sinking feeling I was headed for trouble.

Albert didn’t like me.

He wouldn’t say good morning or good night, and he wouldn’t look at me when I asked a question, much less answer me. Sometimes I’d watch him from the corner of my eye, the way he’d smooth his dark hands over a break in a chair leg or a gouge in a table, assessing the problem with his touch, and how, when the damage was severe, he’d pull a penlight from his toolbox and shine it real slow over the areas that needed special attention. He’d select the tools, glue, and clamps required, lining them up neatly on a white towel like a surgeon in an operating room. The day he finished repairing a nineteenth-century armoire that movers had dropped off the back of their truck was the day I knew that Albert James Pickens was a wizard with wood.

The more I watched him, the more I came to understand that Albert had a rare kinship with furniture. I swear, the more damaged it was, the more he seemed to love it. Whenever he went out for lunch, I’d sneak to his side of the workroom and examine his craftsmanship. His finished work was so meticulous that it was impossible to find even the slightest indication that any damage had ever occurred.

I still don’t know why I began talking to Albert—loneliness, I guess—but I’d babble on and on while I painted furniture or polished silver. I’d tell him things like how my mother baked the best pies in all of Powell County and how Grammy could close her eyes, run her hand over the bark of any tree, and know what species it was.

Albert said nothing.

“My brother has an amazing connection to wildlife. It’s hard to explain, but things happen to him. Remarkable things. Once when we were running in the field and Josh was ahead of me, a woodchuck started running alongside of him. He was playing with my brother. I swear it’s true. Our farm is surrounded by nature. Have you ever been to Kentucky?”

Silence.

“Well, it’s really beautiful, and wait till I tell you about Red River Gorge . . .”

Albert never showed the least bit of interest, so I eventually shut up. Then one day when clouds blackened the sky and rain beat against the window, I felt lonely and started blabbing again.