Glass Tidings

by Amy Jo Cousins

  “But what do they do with them the rest of the year?” Eddie, who traveled with everything he owned on his back, understood that most civilians had a lot of crap. Picturing a—what? Closet?—closet full of houses the size of cereal boxes, roofs heavy with ceramic snow, tiny wreaths on front doors with painted brass knockers? The sheer impossibility of someone having the space for that much stuff made him a little dizzy.

  But . . . I mean . . . that’s a lot of crap. What about when you have to move and there isn’t any room for all your tiny houses wherever you’re going?

  He might not understand how someone could have a life that allowed for building a Christmas village once a year, but as he set a steepled church back on the shelf, he could already feel how much it would hurt to leave such carefully acquired magic behind.

  Gray’s brow wrinkled. “They put them in storage. With the rest of their Christmas decorations.”

  Eddie had known a guy on the circuit once who kept a storage locker full of stuff he couldn’t travel with but couldn’t stand to give up either. Eddie had listened to the guy raving about how great it was to have a place to store his seasonal clothes.

  All Eddie heard was monthly bill.

  Besides, making those kinds of plans was a fast path to disappointment. What if he couldn’t make it to wherever his storage locker was as the weather got colder? He’d be stuck buying or bartering for a new coat instead of having his fleece at the bottom of his bag. And if he had a place to stash stuff, then it would probably be harder to let things go. Eddie had gotten really used to thinking of objects as impermanent. He enjoyed them while he had them—there was a laundromat by his favorite early spring faire that had one of those Take a Book, Leave a Book library shelves, and Eddie looked forward to holding a real book in his hands again every April—but knowing he couldn’t take anything with him on the road made it easier to let things go.

  But that kind of storage probably wasn’t what Gray meant. The people who lived in this town had things like attics and basements and garages. Shit, they probably had boxes and boxes of their kids’ old report cards and sports trophies and diplomas and stuff.

  His mom had probably kept some of that stuff when he’d been little, but their constant moving—middles of the night exits from apartments with overdue rent—wasn’t kind on keepsakes. Plus, he didn’t remember his mom well, but he was pretty sure school hadn’t been a priority for her. When she’d been high, getting a five-year-old to kindergarten hadn’t been as important as sleeping off hangovers. He’d been a couple of grades behind by the time he got settled into a school at the group home.

  Better not to get too attached to things of any kind.

  After Eddie managed to move on from the tiny houses, Gray taught him how to work the cash register, which took about five minutes. Eddie had worked in shops using everything from the latest iPad app to those old-school cast-iron registers that gave you nothing at the end of the day but a dollar total.

  He kept waiting for Gray to hesitate over trusting him with some new part of his life. Guest room. Empty home. Cash register.

  Gray never did.

  Eddie wasn’t sure he was comfortable with that. He liked it better when someone tried to keep him on a short leash, because that gave him an excuse to push back. When he first started working the faire circuit, he used to walk away from jobs the first time someone offended him. He’d been an angry punk as a kid.

  Hell, you’re an angry punk still. What’s your excuse now?

  Spending his days at Gray’s shop was the easiest job Eddie had ever worked. It was strange, doing all the same work he was used to doing on the faire circuit—running a register, restocking empty shelves, keeping an eye out for shoplifters—but in such a . . . normal place.

  Nobody was in costume, and Eddie wasn’t sweating his balls off in some moldy, old, velvet hat and long-sleeve shirt, faking an Elizabethan accent and throwing out Shakespearean phrases he’d memorized off the handout they’d given him at the first faire he’d worked. At Gray’s shop, Eddie had to catch himself before he referred to an older woman as good madam or her little kid as good young sir.

  Adding good to any greeting was a Ren faire cheat to make it sound right. Eddie had a hard time shaking the habit over the winter, although he usually managed by the New Year. But he’d skipped his usual final faire of the season to shack up like a moron with the pot king of Chicago, so he could mostly control himself.

  Still, he used the walk to the shop each day around lunchtime to run a quick rehearsal of key phrases like Yes, ma’am and I’m sorry, sir.

  And even those strolls to and from Gray’s home and the shop had a Little-Red-Riding-Hood-fairy-tale kind of feel. Eddie had spent his teen years bouncing around group homes in a couple of different cities, where the kids rotated in and out depending on foster placements, and the years since then in fake, temporary villages around the country, where everything was an illusion and no one lived or worked there for more than a couple of months at a time.

  Walking through the streets of Clear Lake was fucking surreal. It disoriented him, as if he’d been plucked up in a whirlwind and deposited in a Christmas display. The houses were perfect, with wreaths on front doors and Christmas trees standing tall in the windows.

  He kind of wanted to keep walking these streets forever.

  Everything was so solid. Like, he could tell the houses were all really well-built, all the way down to the ground. None of them wobbled in the cold winds that scoured the streets some mornings, and sometimes in the evening he’d even see smoke coming out of chimneys.

  And the people . . . the people looked so ordinary. Everyone’s clothes were really clean. Like, shiny. And everything matched. He saw a woman with a hat, scarf, and mittens, all three knit in a complicated pink and white pattern. A matched set, like a Barbie doll, except she was older than him and plump like a mom. And there were, like, kids riding fucking bikes around town together and cars slowed down when they saw them coming.

  Eddie flinched at the memory of a car that hadn’t slowed down.

  Maybe not so fairy tale after all.

  Once, when he was about thirteen, some temporarily energized group leader at his residence of the moment had been motivated at Christmas to take the kids to see the store windows on display in that city’s shopping district. The outing had ended early because kids kept wandering off and bitching about the cold—none of them had gloves or hats—and by the time they got back to the home, half of them were on lockdown for the rest of the week for acting up.

  But for the twenty minutes they’d managed to visit the holiday display, Eddie had been mesmerized. Animatronic ballerinas danced among shiny-wrapped candies in one window. Couples in old-fashioned coats and hats skated in circles on an iced pond in another, the entire scene dusted with fake snow that drifted from the top of the window and swirled around the pond. His favorite was the one with an entire train set running through the center of a tiny village and then up through paint-and-plaster mountains, passing through a tunnel and coming out the other side. Probably they used the same display year after year, he’d thought, because he could see the bits where the plaster had chipped and some of the tiny fir trees were bent, like they’d been stepped on. But he didn’t care.

  It was all magical. And unlike anything Eddie had ever seen in real life.

  Just like the Christmas Shoppe.

  That Ye Olde Merry England spelling bothered him every time he saw it though. With his crankiness rising as it became clear the glass company was hitting the outside edge of the five-to-ten-business-day-delivery promise because Eddie didn’t even have a fucking tracking number yet, his petty irritation at the extra “–pe” provoked him to question it. Unwisely.

  “Did you ever think about changing the name?” he’d asked Grayson Wednesday afternoon. “You know, to something funkier. Like, Bows and Balls. Mistletoe Madness. St. Nick’s Knick Knacks.”

  Gray had dropped an anvil on that idea with a single look. “No
.”

  Clearly a little more persuasion was in order.

  “Rudolph’s Reindeer Games. Frosty’s Fripperies. Glad, no, Glass Tidings,” he said, and that last one rang like a bell in his chest with the rightness of it.

  But Gray cut Eddie off before he could come up with more names, and his voice had a weird, sharp edge to it that made Eddie uncomfortable.

  “My grandmother named this shop. It’s been in my family for three generations. It may sound like a stupid name to you, but it means something.”

  So much for that idea. Yikes. Someone was touchy. Eddie didn’t get what the big fucking deal was anyway. It was just a stupid name. If you had something your family passed down to you, you were already ahead of the fucking game. What the hell did it matter if you changed the name or not? It was your thing now, right?

  But twenty minutes later, he still felt kind of bad. He wasn’t even sure why, because they were just talking. You couldn’t get your feelings hurt that bad just talking, right? It wasn’t like when someone actually did something to you, stole your stuff or kicked your ass. That hurt. But there’d been real pain in Gray’s voice, and Eddie’s stomach was all knotted up about it, which was stupid as hell because he hadn’t done anything wrong.

  He kept tagging the Christmas cards with the pricing gun. The thunk of the mechanism every time he pulled the trigger was louder than his own stupid thoughts.

  “Sorry.” The word burst out of him in between tags.

  Gray looked up from the laptop he had open on the counter. His lips were pressed together, lines running across his forehead, but everything on his face relaxed after a moment. He nodded. “Thanks.”

  And it was stupid how immediately Eddie’s stomach unknotted itself. Stupid to give a shit about the opinion of someone he didn’t even know, and who didn’t know a damn thing about Eddie either. Not really.

  He shook his head.

  Stop being so fucking mushy and do your job. The trash doesn’t take itself out.

  At the back of the stockroom, Eddie wrestled the door open and hauled the bag of garbage to the locked dumpster. He’d forgotten to bring the key with him, damn it.

  But first . . .

  The pack of smokes was burning a hole in his pocket. He tugged it out and fished deeper for his lighter. Tap, tap with the pack, then a snick of the flint wheel and a deep, hard draw . . .

  Ahhh. Perfect.

  He hadn’t even asked Gray about smoking in the house. The man had teacups with flowers on them, for Chrissakes. Definitely no smoking. He hadn’t even considered firing one up in the backyard, because the smell would probably sneak into the house and get his ass booted.

  Maybe he hadn’t wanted to stay at first, but there was no denying his setup was sweet. No rent, a place to work, and Gray thinking twenty percent was a fair seller’s percentage?

  Eddie almost felt bad. Like, maybe Gray didn’t understand how this worked—although he had that shop and oughta know better—and probably Eddie was being a douche for not reminding Gray that vendors kept half, or more, but fuck it.

  The vague sense of guilt made him crankier than usual though. Eddie didn’t do guilt. People were mostly awful, and the ones who weren’t, were useful, but there was no sense getting all emo about it.

  All Eddie’s plans for the winter had gone to shit. So if he had a chance to regroup in Bizarro World, aka Clear Lake, he wasn’t gonna stress about taking advantage of Gray. Maybe the man did know what he was doing and just wanted to be nice.

  The first touch of wishful thinking made him recoil.

  He also wants to fuck me. Eddie hadn’t missed Gray’s reaction that first night. And he wasn’t opposed to the general idea either, but knowing it was basically a trade for services made it hard to work up any real enthusiasm. He figured Gray was giving him time to get over the whole almost-dead-girl-in-his-arms thing, but that wasn’t going to last much longer now that Christine had confirmed the girl was on her way to recovery.

  Even as the thought floated through his head, Eddie recoiled from his own cynicism. Half of what made him watch Gray—watch Gray’s hands and arms and mouth as he forced as few words through it as possible, like he got charged by the syllable, damn—was the reserve Gray wrapped around himself like a cloak with Eddie.

  The problem wasn’t so much that Gray wanted to fuck him as that Eddie wasn’t sure what Gray wanted from him at all.

  Two months of sitting on his ass at Bertie’s pot-infested palace had made Eddie weak as hell apparently. That first Saturday and Sunday had been jumping with customers, and Eddie had collapsed at Gray’s house each night, barely able to keep his eyes open through reheated sort-of-quiche and canned soup.

  Weekdays were quieter, thank god. But even though he’d spent plenty of time on the stool behind the checkout counter, his feet hurt by the end of the day on Wednesday, and his back was killing him.

  Because he understood the value of being useful, Eddie had been thinking about what else he could make to feed Gray right up until his sore feet started crying at him.

  Not tonight. Tonight I want to sit on my ass and eat junk food.

  He wandered listlessly into the kitchen when they arrived home. “Man, you gotta keep more junk food on hand, son.” He kind of liked it when Gray winced at being reminded about his age. Whatever. Most of the guys Eddie had fucked when he was younger had been, like, twenty years older than him.

  A lot of those guys had been hella creepy—Gray was pretty much the opposite of the dudes Eddie had run into during his teen years—and Eddie had been happy enough to start banging guys his own age once he’d settled down some and had a bit more security for himself. Faire jobs he hadn’t had to blow anyone to get. A trade he could rely on.

  But when it came down to their age difference? Pffft. Wasn’t hardly a thing.

  Eddie let the latest cabinet door he’d opened bang shut again. “I normally like cooking, but I’m just tired.” Maybe if he whined about it enough, Gray would get the hint.

  “Good job today,” Gray said, hanging up his coat by the door.

  “Thanks.” He’d busted his ass for the past five days, determined not to be a freeloader. To show Gray he hadn’t made a bad call. But, seriously, that was enough hard work for one week. Not that Gray seemed to take any days off, since he’d mentioned being at the shop the next day, despite offering Eddie a break. He’d also handed Eddie a stack of cash, most of which Eddie had pretty much turned right back over to Gray to pay for the Home Depot run. Watching that money vanish out of his hands so speedily had made him reconsider the day off though. Cash was so pretty. “Now to figure out dinner.”

  “You don’t have to cook.” Gruff Gray was back.

  Like dinner was going to make itself. Eddie rolled his eyes but kept his back turned while he did it. “I guess we could just heat up some soup?”

  Gray’s supply of canned soup was enough to get them through the zombie apocalypse.

  “Sure, if that’s what you want.”

  “What I want is something absolutely terrible for me,” Eddie said, then decided that hint might not be strong enough. “That someone else makes.”

  Gray didn’t say anything for a long time. Man, the guy was slow to get a clue. “We could . . . order pizza?”

  One. More. Nudge.

  Eddie turned, shaking his head. “God, that would be awesome, but I’m saving up. That kind of extravagance is off the menu.”

  Gray frowned. “I’ll pay for it. It’s only a pizza.”

  Eddie let his shoulders drop, the weary worker letting ease approach at last. “Thank you. I really like your shop, if I haven’t said that already. It’s easy to work there, because everything is beautiful and people want to buy it all. They just need a little push.”

  Gray’s eyes narrowed at him, as if calculating whether or not he’d just been the subject of that exact same kind of push.

  Of course he had. But since Eddie knew Gray was tired and cranky too, he’d mostly done Gray a favor by leadi
ng him toward the obvious solution.

  “So I’m thinking anchovies. Lots of anchovies,” Eddie said with a totally straight face. “I know people say they don’t like them, but they’ve got all kinds of protein. And iron too. Bad rep, those fishies.”

  Gray pulled a paper menu off the side of the fridge and slapped it down on the counter in front of Eddie. “We’re getting normal stuff that normal people eat on pizzas. No anchovies.”

  Eddie bit his lip. Anchovies were the only thing he hated on pizza.

  Mission. Accomplished.

  By the time the pizza arrived, Eddie had set the table, which was a challenge because he’d already forgotten what he’d looked up the other day about which side of the plate the fork and knife were supposed to go on, and he hated not knowing that shit. But Gray was buying the pizza, so Eddie needed to balance the scales. This and cleanup would have to do.

  After switching the silverware places three times, he muttered, “Fuck it,” and made a decorative stack of napkin, knife, and fork in the middle of the plate. “Close enough.”

  Not knowing this stuff instinctively was always humiliating. But that was the kind of growing-up crap that hadn’t stuck with him, having been half-assed the first time around.

  Most of the time Eddie played it off like he didn’t care either, pretending that embarrassment wasn’t a thing he ever felt because he totally didn’t give a damn.

  And besides, who gave a fuck, really? Could you eat without drooling? Yay. Job well done.