Chương 13: The Apron on the Hook

Tempe, Arizona. Tuesday. Aaron Moss opened the store, because the store opened on Tuesdays, and he did not have a better idea than doing the thing the day already knew how to do. It was the second Tuesday. He had not started counting yet. Counting would come later, the way rust comes later, a thing you notice only after it has already been happening for a while.

This Tuesday he just turned the key, and flipped the sign from the side that said one thing to the side that said the other, and stood in the middle of his own store at 7: 02 in the morning with no customers and no reason and a bell above the door that had rung twice, once for the open and once for nothing, because that was how many notes the bell had. The apron was on the hook by the back door. It was hers.

Canvas, four pockets, a burn mark near the hem from a soldering iron she'd set down wrong when she was fourteen and swore she'd be more careful and never was. She'd hung it there the last time she was in, the way you hang a thing you are coming back for. Aaron looked at it the way you look at a clock that has stopped: not to read the time, because the time was wrong, but to confirm the hands were still where they'd been. He did not take it down. Taking it down was a decision, and he was not making decisions yet.

He was making change and fixing toasters and keeping the aisles square, because those were not decisions, those were just the store, and the store did not require him to have decided anything about the world in order to keep selling three-eighths lag bolts to a contractor who needed four and would round up. A man came in around ten needing a washer for a hose bib. Aaron found him the washer. The man paid and left and did not know he had been the whole morning.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon. At noon Aaron ate half a sandwich standing up and put the other half in the small refrigerator in the back, next to a diet soda that was hers and that he was not throwing out. The refrigerator hummed. Everything in the store that could hum was humming. It was the sound a building makes when it is full of working things and empty of the person the working was for. He fixed a lamp. He cut a key.

He talked to Ruth from the bank about her gate latch, which did not need the whole latch, which needed one screw, and he gave her the one screw and would not take the dollar. Ruth looked at him for a second longer than a screw was worth, and Aaron looked back at her in the way that meant not today, Ruth, I cannot do the looking today, and Ruth, who had known him thirty years, took her screw and her sympathy and went home. At 8: 52 he wiped the counter.

He wiped it twice, though it was clean the first time, because the second wipe was not about the counter. He stood at the register with his keys in his hand, and something in the back of him, some part that kept books he had not asked it to keep, did a small piece of arithmetic he did not authorize and did not want. Not a number yet. Just the feeling a number gives you right before it becomes a number, the way you feel a sneeze before it is a sneeze. Two Tuesdays. He did not say it. He did not write it down.

He turned off the lights and left the sign lit, because a lit sign at night made no sense and he did not care, and he stood on the sidewalk for a moment in the October dark and did not go to the car. The apron was still on the hook.

He could see it through the glass, a pale shape in the dark store, four pockets, one burn mark, waiting the way he was waiting, which was to say not the way you wait for a bus, which comes, but the way you wait for weather to change, which it does, on its own schedule, without asking whether you are still standing there. He went to the car. He would be back next Tuesday. He did not know that yet either.

He only knew that the store opened on Tuesdays, and that he had opened it, and that the opening had cost him something he could not name and would pay again in seven days without deciding to. The bell said its two notes as the door closed.