Wreath (23 page)

She pulled out her journal and flipped to the section where she kept track of her money.
$$$
, the heading said, followed by neat columns of the little bit of pay she received and the steady expenditures on everything from expensive batteries to a supply fee for art class to money for the required school notebooks.

Chewing on one of her last peanut butter crackers, her supper for the night, she looked at her food purchases, each listed separately. The amount she spent didn’t buy enough to keep her stomach from growling, but it still took a bite out of her budget. With the light she looked around the Tiger Van at the stacks of clothes she had scavenged from nearby cars and wished again she had enough money to purchase something new. A month into school, she wondered what the other kids thought of her wearing identical things again and again, and she knelt down by the tidy rows of clothes, rearranging them into different outfits.

She could already feel a shift in the weather and knew that her next project needed to be finding heavier clothes. While the junkyard had been nearly unbearably warm many times, she dreaded trying to stay warm in the months ahead.

Without a dollar in her budget for fashion, she was going to have to come up with something better than this.

Working at Durham’s Fine Furnishings after school and on Saturdays was what Frankie would have called a mixed blessing.

In her journal she had several pages filled with details under the label
MY JOB
.

Under that she had divided the pages into four categories:

DO,
DON’T DO, DETAILS
, and
IDEAS!!!!

The
DO
column was filled with things Mrs. Durham used to emphasize, such as getting to work on time (although she was never late), sweeping first thing, and emptying the trash. The smell of leftover tuna was never pleasant, and Wreath didn’t need to be told twice to set the garbage out.

The
DON’T DO
section was still evolving as she got to know her boss better. It included not leaving the back door unlocked, even when they were inside, and not breaking anything. So far she had broken one lamp, when the broom fell from where she’d propped it.

The
DETAILS
list included names of people who sometimes came into the store, like J. D. and the rare repeat customer. One of the regulars in the store was Law’s grandmother, Nadine Nelson, who acted like she and Faye were old friends but mostly caused Mrs. Durham to go into the kind of shell that Wreath put around herself in the lunchroom at school.

Details also included what to do when a shipment came in, although that hadn’t actually occurred in the more than four months Wreath had worked at the store.

“I’ll place an order closer to the Christmas season,” Mrs. Durham had said back when school started. “People don’t shop until the end of the year.”

“But doesn’t it take awhile to get merchandise delivered?” Wreath asked, looking through one of the dozens of glossy catalogs that landed on Faye’s always-messy desk.

“We don’t live in the horse-and-buggy days,” her boss said. “Don’t you need to dust that grouping in the front window?”

That conversation had led Wreath to her fourth and favorite
JOB
category in her diary—
IDEAS!!!!
Here she let her imagination run wild in the good sort of way, not in the way she did when she thought she’d seen Big Fun on a side street in Landry or when she got a bad grade on an assignment in art class.

Everything, from the way the light shone on her campsite to the clothes other girls wore to school, inspired Wreath’s ideas for the furniture store. She wanted to do seasonal window displays, make a display of small home accessories all in one color, and find old books to put on a shelf in a “reading area.” Her retro arrangement drew comments from the few people who came into Durham’s.
Collect more retro pieces
was on her list.

Stepping into the furniture store after school had become one of her favorite moments of the day. She had recently admitted to herself that she looked forward to seeing Faye and was surprised at the interest her employer showed in the details of life at Landry High. But Mrs. Durham wouldn’t be part of Wreath’s life long-term, and the girl tried to keep from becoming too friendly with her, although as the days went by it was harder.

Faye seldom preached at her anymore, often asking her opinion instead. Sometimes—like when a stack of bills came in or Nadine invited her out to lunch—she was moody, but Wreath figured she deserved her down moments.

“So you decided to come back,” Mrs. Durham said each time the girl came to work, and it had become sort of a joke. Enough people had come and gone in Wreath’s life that she knew what it was like to wonder if someone would show up, and she thought Faye always half expected her to quit.

“Couldn’t stay away,” Wreath replied every day.

Faye’s second question on school afternoons was also standard: “Did you learn anything today?”

She’d toss the question out as Wreath walked to the back room to store her pack. Since Wreath expected the query, she considered her answer during the day. At first she had given studious replies, such as, “William Shakespeare had trouble making money as a writer,” or “The Vikings first landed in Newfoundland.”

During the past couple of months, though, she had gotten more creative with answers. “Landry High’s colors were purple and gold before LSU’s,” or “High school teachers like to wear jumpers to work.” She considered it a personal triumph when she made Faye chuckle with an observation. While her boss was considerably nicer than she had been back in the summer, she was not prone to laughter or affection.

Scarcely was the question out of Faye’s mouth this particular late September afternoon when Wreath jumped in with an answer. “Customers are more likely to enter a retail business with an enticing storefront or merchandise display,” she said, talking as she walked to the workroom.

Faye made a sound that could have been a snort or a choked laugh. “And where did you pick up this piece of information?” she asked, her voice almost echoing in the cavernous showroom.

“From this book on merchandising.” Wreath held a heavy volume in one hand and an apple in the other. “I checked it out of the school library. You can borrow it if you want. Thanks for the fruit.”

In the past few weeks, the back room was always stocked with fruit. While it seemed to be no big deal to Faye, it helped Wreath enormously. “It’s one of the perks of the job,” Faye had said when Wreath offered to pay for a banana. “Take all you want.”

“What do you think about the seasonal idea?” Wreath asked before biting into the apple, a dribble of juice running down her chin. “Are you ready to let me try a fall window display?”

“I don’t suppose it could hurt anything,” Faye said. “It’s not like customers are arriving in droves.”

Wreath did a quick tap dance with her feet and rushed over to give her boss a hug.

Faye stiffened but didn’t pull away.

“Sorry,” Wreath said. “I got a little carried away.”

“It’s nice to see enthusiasm around the place,” the woman said and walked to her desk, where she commanded the store like a general in a tank. “What do you propose doing first?”

“One moment,” she said, flipping through the pages of the book until she came to an eye-catching autumn arrangement. “What do you think of this?”

“Lovely,” Faye said, “but I don’t see one item in that picture that we actually have in this store.”

“We can improvise.” Wreath opened the back cover of the book and pulled out a stack of colored paper. “I finished my art test early today and cut out a few fall leaves, in case you said yes.”

She fanned the leaves. “These might look good taped to the window, and …” She scanned the room as she did a dozen times a day. “We can use that little brown table and that rust-colored velvet chair.”

“That ugly thing?” Faye said.

“Just wait till you see what I have in mind. If you don’t like it, I’ll put it back exactly the way it was.”

She tugged on the heavy old piece of furniture, tried to put a rug under it and drag it, and then inched it across the wooden floor.

“You’re strong as an ox,” Faye said, “but that thing weighs more than a grand piano.” She sighed. “We need a man around here.”

Wreath tried to hide the gleam in her eye. “Would you mind asking J. D. to help? He said to ask anytime.”

“Is that necessary? Can’t the two of us handle this?” Faye asked.

The hardware store owner was such a nice man, and Wreath had seen the way Faye watched him when he wasn’t looking. Without a doubt, the woman was lonely since her husband had died, and maybe she and J. D. could become friends.

Wreath made a big deal out of being unable to budge the chair. “Even if we get it over there, we can’t lift it onto that platform.”

“I’ll see if I can find him,” Mrs. Durham said, acting as though he was a hundred miles away instead of probably reading on a bench next door, a denim jacket having been added to his regular ensemble.

Faye smoothed her hair, the way Frankie always did right before she left the house on a date, and threw her shoulders back as though heading into battle. Wreath climbed up in the window and cleared out the faded furniture that had sat there for no telling how long. She saw Faye approach their neighbor and didn’t miss his delighted smile as he stood and listened to whatever she was saying.

He pointed to a pile of pumpkins in the front of his store and handed a medium-sized one to Faye and lifted the largest of the group as though it weighed no more than the apple Wreath had eaten earlier.

“J. D. thought you might be able to use a couple of pumpkins,” Faye said, her voice one note lighter than usual. “In keeping with the fall theme.”

Wreath clapped her hands together and resisted the urge to do another dance. With money always tight and addresses always changing, years had passed since she and Frankie had bought any seasonal decorations, and the girl could already see the display in her mind.

J. D. put the chair in the window and carried the old pieces to the back corner before a hardware customer pulled up and he had to leave.

“Nice job, Wreath,” he said, looking at her intently as he pulled open the door. Walking past the window, he turned back to look again, his head tilted to the side. Then his stance relaxed, and he waved and went into his own store.

Wreath smiled as she attached the leaves to the glass. “I promise I’ll get this tape off when I take them down,” she said. “I’ll even clean these windows.”

Faye walked out on the sidewalk to inspect their progress and gestured for the items to be shifted slightly before heading back into the store.

“Doesn’t it look better?” Wreath asked, hopping down to grab two orange pillows with brown fringe balls on them.

“It changes the entire look of the store.” Faye climbed up on the platform as she spoke, sat in the velvet chair, and patted the padded arms. “This thing was ugly as sin on the floor, but the window showcases it perfectly.”

“You look like a queen sitting up there,” Wreath said and then put one of the pillows over her face and giggled. “I mean like royalty, in a good way, you know.”

“You’re not the first to notice,” the woman said. “My brother calls me a royal pain. He wants me to sell the store.”

Wreath laid the pillows on the platform and tried to make her question sound casual. “Are you thinking about it?”

“I don’t think about anything else.” Faye picked up the cushions. “Where did you find these?”

“In the storeroom,” Wreath said. “There’s an amazing amount of stuff in there.”

“These things must be thirty years old,” she said. “Who’d ever buy a store with inventory like this?”

“Business has picked up a teeny bit,” Wreath said, an ugly feeling in the pit of her stomach. A recent compliment from a customer or two had probably gotten her hopes higher than they should be, but she hated to think about the store changing hands.

“Thanks to your displays.” Faye lowered herself regally back into the chair. “We’ve sold three or four pieces of furniture since you rearranged things and made new signs.”

Wreath liked the way she said
we
instead of I, and the knot in her stomach loosened slightly.

“You’re a good shopkeeper,” she said and patted Faye on the shoulder.