Two

Blin sometimes went to bed forgetting that she had to go to work the following day. Her life had changed so much since her little church was closed! She tried to schedule her day around saying her Office and fitting in a worship service at somebody’s home, but she couldn’t quite accustom herself to not being in priest-mode all the time. She knew she had to wake up to say her Office, but it was the getting-up-and-getting-ready-for-work segment that challenged her reason for rising early in the morning. Instead of going to the rectory, joyfully anticipating a full day of being a religious shepherd, she now had to mentally prepare herself for service of another kind: retail. As the employee of the Schneiders’ bookstore, she was more sheep than shepherd, sometimes amused, often humiliated, and frequently lamenting her fate.

Until the Schneiders offered the job while she waited for a new assignment from the diocese, Blin had never worked in a store, not even during summer vacations from high school, when most of her friends worked in stores or as waitresses. She would not have been caught dead behind a cash register or in a waitress uniform, smiling perkily and jumping to meet patrons’ demands as if she hadn’t a brain in her head. There was more important work to do. She made certain that every job she held while in college and seminary was geared toward her life’s mission of serving others. Accordingly, she had worked in church offices or in situations that found her “in the field,” ministering to the poor and homeless. She had been glad to be appointed assistant rector to her first parish, but she did not know what it was to rejoice until she was appointed canon, with her own church. Every moment of her life, every fiber of her being had been dedicated to reaching that moment, and she knew deep in her heart that there could have been no other fate for her. The exhilaration of her duties transcended her love for Paul. If he noticed, he said nothing. He rejoiced with her, never complaining that she left the house too early, came home too late, or ran right out again after stopping in for a few bites of a meal that he himself had found time to cook.

As she lay in bed that morning, listening to traffic chuff along on the cobbled street below, Blin could not recall the last time she had felt exhilaration. Its place had long been usurped by an un-nameable blend of agonies that had begun to absorb her in the days leading up to Paul’s death: knowledge that she should have spent more time with him, and regret that her absence had been deliberate (albeit for the right reasons, she ceaselessly told herself).

Blin shot into a kneeling position atop her bed and stared in terror through the adjoining parlor to the door, which rattled beneath a succession of knuckle blows.

“Good morning, Sleeping Beauty! Are you coming out to play with us today?”

“Mr. Schneider!” Blin shouted at the deep, monotonous voice, which contained the slightest German accent. Leaping from bed, she threw her robe over her nightshirt, not because she was going to let her boss in, but because, in her panic, she didn’t know what else to do. “I’m so sorry! I mustn’t have set the alarm!” Again, she silently noted.

“Yeh, yeh,” the voice droned, amiable despite the monotony. “Emmaline wanted me to make sure you were still alive. If you were, she wanted to know if you prefer cheese or raspberry danish.”

Blin’s mind was as scattered as the clothes she flung from the armoire onto the bed. “Er…cheese…no, raspberry! Cheese! Oh, whatever’s there, actually…”

Moments later, still obsessing over how she could have neglected to set the alarm, Blin raced down a flight of groaning, wooden steps to the bookstore, which occupied the entire first floor of the house. Unlike Blin’s third-floor rooms, the first-floor rooms retained their Victorian grandeur: twelve-foot-high, molded tin ceilings; Persian rugs; ridiculously thick, oak frames around the doors and windows. In cooler weather, massive, waist-high radiators whistled soothing steam against a distant chorus of clanking pipes. There was no need for heat this morning. The windows were open. Some of the wisteria that choked the house’s green and pink gingerbread shakes crowded the screen as if trying to break in.

Blin was sorry the Schneiders didn’t own the building. They’d take care of it better than the current landlord, who Blin had never met. She had had no reason to meet the property owner in person, for the owner was an entity--a limited-liability corporation whose name denoted financial services. On the first of every month she dropped her rent check off at the local realtor’s office. It was the realtor who was supposed to assure that the place was maintained and painted, its lawn mown. Though the realtor had found a reliable landscaper, Blin discovered help was never around when she needed it, such as when the toilet broke or when the pipes froze during a spell of unusual, Arctic-like cold. On both occasions, the Schneiders came to her rescue. They were both in their sixties, had doctorates in physics, and could probably build the house from scratch if given the chance. They had already crafted the place into a homey enclave. The books were in rosewood bookcases that Mr. Schneider had built into the walls, and customers could sit in plump, wingback chairs and have tea and scones that Mrs. Schneider prepared in the kitchen.

Mr. Schneider had just stuffed the remainder of a gooey cheese danish into his mouth and was heaving himself out of the wingchair next to the sales desk when Blin skidded into the main room. “Ah, there she is: the loose canon.”

“Freedy!” Mrs. Schneider, a cheery woman with a fragile pink complexion and gossamer gray hair, did something Blin had never actually seen anybody do but had heard and read about throughout her life: She elbowed Mr. Schneider—whose proper name was Friedrich--in the ribs. “You make her sound like a trollop!”

“She is a loose canon—c,a,n,o,n. She’s not attached to a church. Enjoy your freedom,” he said, straightfaced, in a dramatic aside to Blin. “One day you will be tied down. You know what I mean, tied down. Not naughty business, right? Tied down like working day and night. Or married,” he added in an undertone that failed to escape his wife.

“I’ll tie you down!”

Though his face continued to show no emotion and his voice continued to drone, Mr. Schneider winked. “See? Even Mrs. Schneider enjoys that sort of thing. Keeps a marriage youthful all these years.”

“You were going to the hardware store, my love.”

Mr. Schneider fumbled through his pockets, searching for keys, mumbling. “Yes, I need to talk shop with the other retired rocket scientists.”

Envisioning the tubular community college boys who staffed the place when Dave-the-Owner was out, Blin giggled. “Oh come on, Mr. S, they’re not too unenlightened.”

“They shouldn’t be, not after what I’ve been teaching them,” replied Mr. Schneider, who really was a retired rocket scientist. “I expect them all to be admitted to M.I.T. several eons from now, it’ll take them that long to catch on.”

“Will you please go?” Mrs. Schneider’s question was a burst of exasperation. Her husband disappeared into the hallway that led to the entrance vestibule.

The bell over the front door jangled delicately as he crossed over the threshold, then repeated the song as he popped back inside, swinging wide the door and calling to his wife, “Oh, Geliebte, we’ve got to tell Hans they had to put the book he wanted on backorder. No, wait. Let Belinda tell him. He’s not going to be happy, but he won’t dare yell at a priest.”

“He’ll yell at me because I’m a lowly clerk,” Blin grumped, not knowing who Hans was but assuming, from the name, that it was one of Mr. Schneider’s relatives.

“Then remind him you’re a priest before you tell him about the book. If he yells at you after that, tell him to go to hell.”

“You mean tell him that he will go to hell for being so rude to clergy,” Mrs. Schneider prompted.

“No, I mean tell him to go to hell. It won’t bother him. He’s impervious. Thinks he can’t do a thing that will make people mad at him. He’ll simply think there’s something inherently wrong with you and that you don’t know any better, which is why you’re working as a clerk. Don’t feel bad,” Mr. Schneider said as Blin squealed “I’m sorry?” “He thinks that about everybody. Even retired rocket scientists. Toodles!” For the second time in five minutes, Mr. Schneider left the premises.

The bookstore had no computer. The Schneiders believed that keeping an extensive collection of catalogues, and staying in contact with distributors, publishers and authors gave them a refined, old-fashioned, personal character that set them apart from the competition. The old-fashioned way of doing business also required frequent visits to the post office with letters, other correspondence, and books that had been ordered over the phone. Mrs. Schneider waited for Blin to finish making a pot of tea, then headed out with the mail.

Blin was dusting the porcelain figures of Napoleonic generals on the mantelpiece when she heard the distinctive sound of books being placed upon the desk. She turned, surprised, to see a field guide to the birds of the region, and a glossy encyclopedia about roses merchandised as a “coffee table” book, probably because it was roughly the size of an actual coffee table top. In front of the desk stood John-Emory Hance, who waited with the dull-eyed indifference of someone on line at the supermarket.

When did he come in? Blin wondered, shaken by the sudden, inexplicable appearance. She figured she must have been in the kitchen when he arrived, and he must have been in the other room when she returned. Or could he have been there already when she came in late for work? He wasn’t dressed for business, in the black suit he wore with uniform-like consistency. He wore a navy blazer and khakis, which suggested that he had no appointments that morning and, therefore, had plenty of time to kill. If only he had chosen to kill it somewhere else!

Blin mutely began the transaction. She had grown accustomed to having parishioners see her engaged in menial work. It was humiliating in the beginning, but everyone understood she needed to work in order to survive. Some of them stopped by just to visit, not to buy books. She began to feel much better about her situation, to lose the embarrassment. Now Hance was there, without so much as a smile, throwing her tortured self-esteem back into the abyss.

“I’d like it wrapped,” he said as Blin finished the sale and began to place the smaller book in one of the pretty paper shopping bags made specially for the store. No bag had yet been created to fit the monstrosity about roses.

Blin placed the bird book back on the desk and reached for the wrapping.

“The other book.”

The monstrosity?

Blin fidgeted. There was no way on earth that she could wrap the thing and not produce something that looked like it had been retrieved from a landfill. Words spilled out of her in a weak, raspy chain. “My wrapping skills are so distinctive that all people have to do is look at a present to know it’s from me.”

Hance was impervious. “May. I. Have. It. Wrapped.” Several heartbeats passed before he added, “Please.”

Blin’s face burned. Was he serious? She was about to say something smart, something about using yards of fabric from Mrs. Lane’s sewing shop when Hance said, “It’s my daughter Lucinda’s birthday.” The information was so unexpected, and spoken with the faintest touch of affection, that Blin sensed a crack in the hostile door between them.

“She’s not into birds?”

The weak attempt to nudge fate in another direction fell flat as Hance concluded, “Roses.”

Wrapping the book was like wrestling with a mummy. Trembling with nerves, the sound of her heart booming in her ears, Blin was only mildly aware of slamming the thing on the table as she turned it in spastic fits to swaddle it in stiff, gold-metallic paper that split and crinkled at the touch. In the course of the struggle, the tape dispenser shot over the side of the desk and the scissors missed skewering Hance’s cuff by an inch. But Blin triumphed, though the result looked more like a lumpy patchwork quilt held together by Scotch tape.

Hance's eyes narrowed and his ruddy color deepened as he beheld the gift for his daughter. Oh Lord, he thinks I wrapped it that way on purpose, Blin thought. He at least had the civility not to say so. He said nothing. Just smiled thinly, shoved the package under his arm, and left.

The bag with the birding book was where Blin had placed it to contend with the coffee table book—on the floor behind the desk. Instinctively, she did what she would have done for any customer who had paid for something and then walked out without it: she seized the bag and dashed after him. They ran into each other in the vestibule, at the foot of the main stairs that led to the upper level apartments. “Your book,” she stammered, extending the bag by its handles.

Walking past her into the shop, Hance plopped the roses book on the desk and held up a forefinger, as if to signal for her to wait and watch.

Blinn feared he was going to rip off the offending façade, violently crush it into a ball, and shove it into the wastepaper basket beside the desk. But even as she thought all this, he carefully removed each layered morsel of wrapping, folded it and placed the sections in the basket. After studiously eyeing the mammoth publication, he selected an appropriate length of wrapping paper, positioned the tome upon it, and proceeded to fold the paper around the book. Blin paid attention, as amazed by his hands as by the impromptu lesson. She had never before noticed his hands. Musician’s hands, they were, with long, tapered fingers that moved gracefully, fluidly, sculpted by years of practice. A pianist, she mused, entranced. The deed done, he took the gift in his arms and went his way, the little shopping bag dangling from his wrist.

“Sounds like he was sticking it to you, showing you one more thing in his book that you can’t do well,” Gretta said between chomps of Mrs. Schneider’s sauerbraten as they ate lunch in the bookstore’s kitchen.

“True,” Blin muttered through a glass of iced tea. She couldn’t quite bring herself to tell Gretta what Hance had said just before leaving: “Next time, I’ll let you do it yourself.”

Next time. Her heart shivered and went “Gaaaa” when he said that. She didn’t know if she should be glad or wary that he could develop into someone she would see on a regular basis.