Surprise
Boxes
I slept like a hibernating beast the first week and would have liked to sleep straight through the spring, hiding in my room, but my mother pushed me out of bed. Heavy and slow, as though walking underwater, I dressed and brushed my limp hair to please her. I felt erased, the past months flushed away without a trace.
“Enough moping. Go make yourself useful to Mr. Westervelt,” my mother said.
It was easier not to refuse so I walked next door to the church Mr. Westervelt had converted to his home and antique shop. He had retired and moved to town the year I was ten. I’m a retired minister living in a retired church, he liked to say. My mother had said he had retired early and wasn’t really old but he had seemed old to me. His shop was my after school refuge until I went to high school and abandoned him for drama club, year book and a summer job at the Frosty Bear selling soft serve ice cream to blond boys on the football team.
Now I walked
through his church door again. The bell on the doorknob announced me just as
always. He was reading at the cash
register and put down his book. He
looked more like
"Margaret, my pearl," he said, as he used to. My name, he had once explained, derived from Greek, which he studied in seminary. “Your mother said you were home. Care to answer an old man’s prayers and help out?”
“Okay,” I said.
“Let’s have a cup of tea before I press you into service.”
We walked through the shop, dim and dusty as I remembered, and through the door behind the pulpit into his apartment, carved out of what had been the choir dressing room. I sat at his kitchen table and glanced around while he made tea. The bulky old phonograph was on its shelf in the pantry. I knew the piles of records on the floor were the popular songs from his youth. Glenn Miller. Frank Sinatra. “Dancing is my secret vice, Margaret. I’m thankful to be a minister, not a priest,” he used to say. He had taught me to dance, on those afternoons, the year I was thirteen. Just before I went home for the evening we would have our lesson. He was graceful, and had made me feel graceful as well, though I was growing tall too fast. He would lead me around the kitchen table and keep count as the music spilled and spun. My favorite song was Fascination. He had always played it last.
“Your tea, mademoiselle.” He filled my china cup from the fat pot I remembered, snug in its knitted cozy, like a baby in a bunting.
He heaped sugar in his cup and stirred. It was like the old days when I used to sit at this table and sip milky tea - cambric tea, he called it - and eat graham crackers.
He
would sit, stroking his cat in his lap, and we would talk.
About customers, if he’d had any, and what they bought.
About memorizing the county seats of
And now here we were again. We finished our tea.
“You have perfect timing. I’ve just been to a big auction and could use help sorting.”
My favorite task had always been sorting purchases from estate sales and auctions. Opening the cartons, unwrapping objects from layers of old newspaper, had seemed like Christmas.
“Let me give you a tour, refresh your memory as to where things go.”
The sanctuary was crammed with table linens, sheet music, books, buttons, old post cards, and costume jewelry. His inventory was always more junk than antiques, except for the glass-fronted cabinet of bone china. We paused there.
“I
still have my weakness for fine china,” he said, “Can’t ever let a pretty
piece go unclaimed, chips or cracks not withstanding.” Once I had been in the
shop when a customer exclaimed, “Oh!
This is my grandmother’s pattern,” as though her grandmother were
restored with the
We squeezed down narrow aisles between laden card tables.
“Here are the salt and pepper shakers,” he said. “I keep an eye out at the sales for the ones shaped like fruit, the ones you liked.”
When I was his after school helper, I had started a salt and pepper collection, purchasing one or two a week. He would have given them to me, but I preferred to pay, twenty-five cents a set.
He flipped on the light in the stairwell and I followed him upstairs. I noticed he paused on every step and leaned hard on the banister.
“The choir loft is still for clothes and hats. I put the every day dishes, board games, jigsaw puzzles, and picture frames up here, too. When I can climb the stairs. My hip’s a bit gimpy.
I spotted the old dressmaker’s dummy he had rescued from a dumpster at the women’s clothing store in town. We had named her Esmerelda. I used to dress her up in outfits culled from the cast off clothes. Now she leaned in the corner of the choir loft, draped in an old wool coat with a fur collar.
“Esmerelda!”
“Yes, wish I was aging as gracefully as she. A classic beauty.
He made his painstaking way downstairs and sank into his chair by the cash register.
“Don’t think I’m up for a trip to the basement today. Check it out. Then we can go to the garage and start work.”
The basement was as I remembered - a dank catacomb of little rooms, packed with tools and pots and pans, coffee percolators, bottles, canning jars. I climbed back upstairs.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Ready,” I replied....
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