第16章 Halberd Properties

The man from Halberd Properties was not a villain, and Romy had been prepared for a villain, so it took her a while to understand him. His name was Mr. Girdwood, and he came to the bakery on a Tuesday in the second week of September to walk the building one last time before the papers were signed, and Romy happened to be on her knees at the front case when he came in, and Junie introduced them, and he shook Romy's hand, which people rarely did when she was holding a rag. "How long has the business been here?" he asked Junie. "Nine years me. Forty before that, as the hardware store." He nodded and made a note. He was in his sixties, in a good coat, with a folder under his arm, and he had the manner of a man who had done a great many of these and no longer needed to pretend that any single one was interesting. "What are you putting here?" Junie asked. "Office suites, probably. The county's growing. Small firms, a dentist, a title company." He looked around the bakery. "The ovens will go. They always go first. It's the venting." "Can I ask you something, since you're going to own it," Junie said. "The back room. The one at the end. It has a table in it made of two doors." "I saw it." "Would you leave it." He looked at her for the first time as if she were a person rather than a transaction. "It's not structural," he said. "I don't care what's in the room. If it's not on the plans, my crews will carry it out to the dumpster, and somebody will take it, or nobody will." He put his hand on the doorframe. "My advice is, take it with you. Whatever it is you care about, take it with you the day before. Don't leave it for the dumpster. I've seen a lot of people leave things for the dumpster and then come back for them." He left. Junie stood at the register with her hands on the counter. "I liked him," she said, "and I hate that I liked him." --- The last week in the back room was a week like any other week, and that was the strange mercy of it. Romy cleaned it on Monday the way she had cleaned it every Monday, and on Friday the second-to-last time, and on the Sunday they had the meeting, and the Monday after, and each time she did it slowly and took the corners and did not think about anything in particular, which was the way she had learned to do hard things, one surface at a time. On the last night she did something she had not planned. She took down the table. Not apart — she could not take it apart without a wrench and Vernon, and Vernon was coming in the morning — but she did something to it that a person would not notice unless they were looking. She took the pencil out of her apron and got down on the floor beside the east leg and wrote, on the underside of one of the two doors, in small letters, the way you write inside a cabinet: *Wellerby Reading Circle, 2015–2026. R. Fraley, cleaner, member.* Then she put the pencil away and got up and looked at the table, which had not changed at all, and felt, absurdly, that she had been somewhere. --- In the morning, Vernon came with the truck, and the two of them carried the table out through the bakery and down Court Street to the Grange, four blocks, walking at either end of it, holding the two doors level. It was a ridiculous way to move a table and there were easier ones and neither of them suggested any of them. They set it up in the long hall between the stove and the west windows, and stood back, and Romy took the folded matchbook out of her pocket and put it under the west leg, which had always been the wobble, and the table sat. "That's it," Vernon said. "That's it." He looked around the long empty hall. "You know, I've been in this room maybe fifty times in my life for the Grange suppers, and I never once noticed it had a west window." "It has nine windows." "Well," Vernon said. "There you are." They stood there a minute in the light. Then Vernon took the grocery bag out from under his arm — no, the tote, Romy noticed, the mended library tote — and set it on the table, and said, "I'll bring the chairs Sunday. All fourteen, from the stack. You want the eight in the circle and six more by the wall for the ones who come late." "Six by the wall," Romy said. "And the ones who come late," Vernon said, "should get the ones by the wall, because if you're late you don't get to sit in the circle." He said it like a rule from a union meeting and Romy did not argue with him, because it was the truest thing anyone had said about the whole arrangement in eleven years. --- That afternoon Romy scraped the magnetic sign off the car. She had been meaning to for a year. It came off in four pieces, leaving a pale rectangle on the gray paint where the door had been protected from the sun, and she stood in the parking lot behind the bakery holding the four pieces of *R. Fraley — Cleaning Services* and looked at the pale rectangle, which would fade in a year or two, if she kept the car, and she intended to keep the car. She threw the pieces into the dumpster and went upstairs, and the room was warm because the radiator worked, and the ceiling sloped, and the mouse was still in the wall, and it was a room with a window on Court Street, and it was hers, and she paid for it out of wages, and she sat on the bed with her back against the wall and did not open a book, because it was September, and there were two meetings left, and she had the September book, and she was saving it. Two days later the new signs went up. The old building got a small white board by the door with a row of names in gray letters, offices to let, and the name of the firm at the bottom in a font that was meant to look like stone. Three doors down, over the smaller storefront with the bad foot traffic, Junie's new sign went up on a Saturday with Vernon holding the ladder: the same name she had used for nine years, because a name is a thing you keep, and under it, in smaller letters, the words she had added at the last minute and had not told anyone about until it was cut: *and reading circle.* Romy stood on the sidewalk in the September light and looked at the two signs, the white one and the small one, and thought about the fact that a town is mostly a record of what people were willing to carry four blocks, and then she went in and started the morning's bread, because it was Tuesday, and Tuesday was hers. ---