“Sabina.”
Oh, dear. “Sabina who?”
“Sabina long time since I’ve seen you.” He threw his head back and laughed. “Get it? Sabina? It’s been a?”
I smiled. Sort of. “Haven’t heard that before.”
“Got it off the Internet.” He winked. “Don’t tell, okay? You know, I haven’t seen you much lately. You’re not taking your cleaning to Madison, are you?” He stepped close as a cloudy frown took up too much of his face.
With Richard and his suits out of the house, my dry-cleaning bill had dropped to almost nothing. “And miss your jokes?” I edged over to Evan’s side. “How could I? And I sent those drapes from Agnes’s house to you. Don’t those count?” Well, Marina had sent them, actually, but I was part of the cleaning team.
“Working on them,” he said. “There’s a spot that’s resisting me—can you believe it?” He winked. “Knock knock.”
“Who’s there,” I said weakly.
“Ally.”
“Ally who?”
“Ally gator. See you!” Laughing, he nodded at the two of us and sauntered off to find another victim.
Evan watched him go. “Is it always knock-knock jokes?”
“This year.” We started walking again. “Last year it was lightbulb jokes.”
“As in how many whatevers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”
“Yup.” I wondered what kind of joke Don would be telling next year. Lois guessed limericks, but even cannibal jokes would be better than that.
We’d come to the front door of the hardware. Evan pulled open the wooden door with its large glass panel and bowed. “Milady.”
If I’d been Dorrie with no Jim, I would have tittered and batted my eyelashes. If I’d been Marina, I would have curtsied and said, “Thank you, milord,” and swished billowing skirts through the doorway. But since I was just me, I flushed a fast bright red, stammered out, “Um, thanks,” and stumbled over the threshold.
Gone were the scary-looking power tools. In their place was a friendly display of doorknobs and door knockers. And where plumbing parts had once awed me to speechlessness, a small lighted Christmas village was spread out across a large table coated with artificial snow. Tiny skaters raced on a mirror pond. A miniature horse and sleigh traveled through a downtown out of Currier and Ives.
“I know it’s not even Halloween,” Evan said, “but—”
“It’s wonderful.” I was entranced by a two-inch-tall chimney sweep. “No one else in town sells these. Look!” I pointed at a miniature cat being chased by a dog. “They even left footprints in the snow.”
“Toothpick.” He stood next to me, hands in his pockets. “Took me forever to get it right.”
“You did this?” I looked at the complicated display, at him, then back to the display. “All by yourself?”
“I detect surprise.” He grinned. “I think my feelings are hurt.”
“Well.” I fumbled to say something that didn’t sound patronizing. “Of course I’m surprised. I’m surprised you had time.” Good answer, Beth. He’d buy that.
Evan looked at me. “Did you know your earlobes turn red when you lie?”
I covered my ears. “They do not.” But they did. Always had.
“First time I noticed it was the second week of kindergarten. It was your turn for show-and-tell, you and Dave Kravis. But he forgot and started crying, and you told him you’d forgotten, too.”
“I don’t remember.”
“You’d brought a bag to school that morning and hung it on your hook.”
Good heavens, the man remembered more about me than I did.
“You didn’t normally carry a bag,” Evan was saying. “So I looked inside and saw a ring of skeleton keys. No five-year-old carries skeleton keys. You’d brought them for show-and-tell, but you didn’t want to make Dave feel bad, so you lied, and your ears turned red.”
I stuck to the faulty-memory story. “Don’t remember.” The whole red-ear thing had been an embarrassment my entire life. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the time I simply told the truth—lying was almost always wrong, and keeping track of lies was hard work—but every so often I wished for the ability to, if not lie, at least dissemble.
“So,” Evan said, “I hear you’re the new secretary for the local PTA. How did you get talked into that job?”
“It was . . .” Spinelessness. Irresolution. Weak-willed timidity. “It’s something I wanted to try.”
“Why?”
I looked at him. Finally, he was shedding his mask and turning into the jerk he was destined to be. “What do you mean, why?”
“This probaby isn’t the right time for this conversation.”
“When better? Go on, you can tell me the truth.”
He half turned away from me, his gaze falling on a girl and her father hauling a fresh-cut Christmas tree through the snow. “The truth is, I’m interested in everything you do.”
“Umm. . . .” This wasn’t the kind of truth I wanted. Why couldn’t he have said something about having an insatiable interest in PTA committees? Or that he was a feng shui master and had recommendations for the school addition?
His arm brushed up against mine. Had I stepped closer to him, or had he moved closer to me? His hands touched my hair. “Beth,” he whispered, his eyes going a deeper blue with each breath. “Kind, sweet Beth.”
The front door opened, and I sprang back.
“The display looks great,” I said loudly. “Really great. I’ll see if my mother still collects these. Last Christmas she had them on so many tables, she ended up eating at the kitchen counter until January.” I smiled at the stooped man walking through the door. “Hello, Mr. Brinkley. Evan was just showing me his line of collectibles. They’re nice, aren’t they?” I was in hapless babble mode. Escape was the only solution. “Well, I have to be going now. Bye!”
My escape was slowed by Mr. Brinkley’s quavery chuckle. “My eyesight isn’t what it used to be, but it sure looked like he was showing you something else.”
I fled.
I did my best to smooth things over with Lois. I hadn’t done a very good job, though, because at two o’clock she appeared in front of me, arms folded.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
I sat up straight enough to make my grandmother proud, but my earlobes were already feeling hot in preparation of the lie I was going to tell. “Thinking about how many copies of
“Mmm-hmm. Looks to me like you were doing nothing but staring at that list. What’s it a list of, anyway?”
“Oh . . . nothing.”
“Really,” she said flatly. “I thought when we moved the displays around—”
What “we” was she talking about, exactly? As far as I could recall, all Lois had done was head up the Overly Critical section of the cheerleading squad.
“That maybe you wanted to track customer movement patterns,” Lois continued. “Looks more like you’re daydreaming about that Evan.”
A Marcia giggle came from the back of the room. She’d come in at noon, stared at the changes, and said nothing. Marcia wasn’t into confrontation; she was more the type to offer her opinion in whispery teapot confidences.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “The only daydreams I have are about banana splits with hot fudge topping.”
Marcia giggled again. Both Lois and I looked at her. Whose side was she on, anyway?
