Beginner's Luck

by Kate Clayborn

  But when you take one step inside Tucker’s, you get the sense that there’s no way to make it quick. The building itself is probably the size of a football field, and the space that greets me is sort of a large anteroom—there’s an L-shaped set of glass cases, the kind you’d see in a jewelry store, behind which is what looks to be an office. All around me are large, gorgeous pieces of refinished furniture, set out to create aisles and alcoves within this large room. Above me hang pendant lights and chandeliers of all types, some of them casting prisms of light on the concrete floors and along the walls. Along one wall—top to bottom—are shelves lined with labeled bins, the sign above indicating that this is where you search for Hardware.

  I look down at the crystal doorknob I’m carrying, the one I brought from my upstairs bathroom. I’m supposed to find a match for it in there?

  It’d take at least a full day to get through this front room alone, and I can see beyond that the warehouse is full up, and I feel simultaneously overwhelmed and intrigued. I want to look around, to explore this place that’s probably full of treasures, but I don’t much feel like doing it around Ben Tucker. I don’t think I should betray that kind of enthusiasm in front of him.

  “First time here?” comes a voice from behind me, and I jump, almost dropping the doorknob. When I turn around, I find myself—well, not face to face, yet, until I look down—with a man in a wheelchair, his left leg extended and elevated, his left arm held close to his body in a sling. He has graying hair and kind, blue eyes, and I know right away that this is Ben Tucker’s father. I’ve thought of Ben’s face that much since last week, which is probably not a good sign.

  “Oh, hello. Yes,” I say, “It’s my first time here. It’s—ah. It’s big.”

  The man chuckles, uses his right hand to move the lever that propels his chair forward, and then extends it to shake mine. “I’m Henry Tucker. This is my place.”

  “I’m Kit. This is wonderful,” I tell him, shaking his hand and looking around again. “I had no idea this was here. I came to look for—”

  He cuts me off before I can finish. “For my son? You’re the one he’s been telling me about this week.” He smiles up at me, a teasing glint in his eye. “Says you’re smart, and also immune to his bullshit.”

  “Oh. Well. I suppose I am,” I say, feeling a little proud of myself under Henry Tucker’s regard. “I’m sorry about your accident,” I blurt, and then feel awkward for doing so. I mean, the wheelchair and casts don’t make it any kind of secret, but maybe he doesn’t want to talk about it.

  He shrugs the best he can, given the sling. “These things happen. It’s just that when you get old, they happen and you’re probably going to break something. You ever break a bone?”

  “No,” I say. “I’m a pretty risk-averse person. My brother used to make me wear a bike helmet when I played kickball as a kid.”

  That makes him laugh, and once again, I feel that weird surge of pride. It probably feels good to laugh when you’ve been laid up, and I’m glad to be the one who’s done it.

  “Dad?”

  That’s Ben’s voice, echoing from somewhere in the depths of this giant building, and I feel a spike of nervous energy. There’s a thunk thunk thunk, heavy steps sounding on a metal staircase, but from where I stand, I can’t see it. I didn’t even realize there was a second floor in here. I immediately raise a hand up to my hair, smoothing it, and then I straighten my glasses. I completely fail at not blushing when I realize that Henry Tucker has caught me primping, but I clear my throat and give him a side-eye that’s meant to communicate something like don’t make any assumptions, mister. But probably it does not communicate that. Probably it looks like I have lint in my eye.

  Ben strides in from somewhere deep in the recesses of the warehouse, and—wow. He looks different. The Ben I saw last Friday was the kind of handsome that made you do a double take, a lean, polished, practiced look that reminded you of high rises and fast cars and dimly lit restaurants. But this Ben—this is the kind of handsome that gets you right in the stomach, that makes your knees feel weak. His dark blond hair is messy, a slight curl at the ends, his face more tanned than it had been when I’d seen him last week, his square jawline shadowed with stubble. His gray t-shirt bears a strip of paint across his right pectoral, which—damn. The man has a chest. And shoulders. You could see it the suit, sure, but in the t-shirt, you could see it. I picture, for a flash, my hands spread across that chest.

  “Hi,” he says, and oh, that smile. Like he’s genuinely glad to see me. “I see you’ve met my dad. Who is not supposed to be at work this week.” Ben gives a scolding look down at his father, who waves an annoyed hand in Ben’s direction.

  “I’m renting this baby for sixty bucks a day just so’s I can be right here where I can see you, kid,” says Henry, tapping the chair with his good hand. “So you don’t go selling any of my treasures on the cheap. Again.”

  “Dad, that was a good sale. You weren’t going to get two grand.”

  “I could’ve got twenty-five hundred! This sideboard,” he says to me, as if we’ve known each other forever, as if I’m part of these conversations all the time, “you should’ve seen it. Mid-century modern, teak. Almost perfect condition—”

  “One of the legs was missing!” Ben exclaims.

  “It was a small fix! I could’ve fixed that myself, you know. If you had any sense, you could’ve fixed it.” He grumbles this last part, and Ben rolls his eyes.

  I am enjoying myself immensely.

  But then Ben turns his attention on me, and I drop the smile I now realize I’d had plastered to my face as I watched their exchange. “Sorry about this. We’re—you know. Adjusting to all this time we spend together.”

  “That’s all right,” I say. “I get it.” But I don’t get it. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve spent any extended length of time with my own father. Mostly it was only me and Alex, and I never got sick of him. Now I feel uncomfortable—I’m the awkward plus-one in this comfortable family moment.

  “Dad, how about you go back to the office and keep working through those receipts?”

  “Oh, I see. You’re giving me tasks to placate me. Or else you’re trying to be alone here with this lovely lady. This reminds me of the time you were in ninth grade and had that redhead come here after school.”

  “Jesus, Dad. You are the worst.”

  I laugh, in spite of myself, and then put a hand over my mouth. Ben getting knocked down a peg—by someone who so clearly loves him, where the feeling is still light and jovial—makes me feel a little less nervous here in this big space, in his space. Henry winks at me and rolls away, the mechanized sound of the chair fading as he maneuvers himself around the glass cases toward a back room.

  Then it’s just me and Ben, and he looks down at the floor and runs a big hand through his hair, shaking his head. “You’re early,” he says.

  “Um, sorry?” I say, but I don’t really mean it.

  “I wanted—I was going to be down here to greet you. My dad, he’s—he can be a lot.”

  “He’s great. He makes a good first impression.”

  Ben’s answering smile is crooked, sheepish. I like it so much that I can’t help but smile back.

  “So,” he says, taking a cautious step toward me. “Hardware.”

  He leads me back toward the wall of bins, steps away to pull over a ladder on wheels, the kind you see in one of those big-box hardware stores. “Why don’t you start by telling me what you’re looking for?”

  “Well,” I say, twirling the crystal doorknob in my hand, “Now that I see how big this place is, I guess I’m looking for a lot. Doorknobs, cabinet handles, switch plates, that kind of thing…to start.”

  “To start?”

  “I’m hoping to find things that are, well, if not completely consistent with, then at least adjacent to the time when the house wa
s built.” I twirl the doorknob in my hand again, welcoming its weight, and clear my throat. “I bought a house. Very recently.”

  He gives me a long look, and I imagine this is not welcome news for him, given his recruiting goals. It’s probably much easier to recruit someone who hasn’t just purchased a home in an area you’re trying to get them to move away from. I expect, maybe, that he’ll be less helpful now, because let’s face it, I’m sure part of the reason he’s had me come out here, despite his promise not to talk about Beaumont, is to show me that he’s worth listening to.

  “Congratulations.” He extends a hand toward me, palm up, and I have this odd moment of confusion, wondering if I’m supposed to shake it, and then he says, “Maybe you could let me have a look at that.”

  Right. I hand him the doorknob, watch him as he turns it over in his hands, furrowing his brow in concentration. “This is Russell and Erwin,” he says, as though I’m supposed to know what that is. “Do you have other pieces like this in the house?”

  “Some. It’s a bit of a hodgepodge, honestly—there’s things like this, and then some, you know, really cheap replacements here and there.”

  “When was the house built?” He’s pushing the ladder down the wall a bit, climbing on the first step to look down at me before going any farther.

  “1870. It’s a row house, Queen Anne style.”

  He nods, and I can see his mind working. “This is probably original,” he says, climbing up the ladder and reaching toward one of the uppermost bins. I see a flash of his taut stomach and avert my eyes. Reluctantly.

  When he comes down, he’s holding a bubble-wrapped package, and he sits on one of the lower steps of the ladder so that now I’m looking down at him as he unwraps it. He holds it out to me, an exact match for the doorknob I brought in. Those eyes. “Wow,” I say, and am mostly referring to the doorknob.

  “I’ve got a lot more up there. These show up a lot, probably from houses in the area built around the same time as yours.”

  “That’s—that’s great. I didn’t really count, though, before I came in. And there’s all the other stuff I should look for too. I should’ve made a list, I guess.” But I thought I was coming here as a formality, I don’t add.

  “Well, we could start by checking out some of the things that match the style of the house. My dad organizes things mostly by period, so that shouldn’t be too hard. And Russell and Erwin did all kinds of hardware, so we could start by looking there…”

  And he’s off, moving down the wall with his ladder, pulling out bin after bin to set on the floor, and I should say that this is all too much trouble, that I can’t stay long, that I’ll have to come back another time. But it’s easy to get pulled into this orbit, and before I know it, I’m kneeling down on the hard concrete floor, carefully unwrapping filigreed switch plates that Ben says were manufactured right around the same time as the doorknob, and would I also want to look at some hinges? Hinges? I think. Hinges sound awesome, as long as you’re still within smelling distance, because frankly, you smell amazing.

  It’s like this for a few minutes, Ben crouched next to me, occasionally bringing me another bin, and I feel a giddy sense of excitement about the possibilities of this place, about what I could find here for my house. At one point, I unwrap a hinge—a hinge, who knew?—that features a delicately carved leaf pattern, and in my surprise at the work put into something so largely unseen, I say, “Look at this,” and hold it out to Ben.

  There’s this moment where our eyes lock, and we’re both smiling, sitting here like we’re two kids who found a buried treasure, and I forget all about Ben being such an idiot last week.

  And then the yelling starts.

  Chapter 4

  Ben

  In general, I don’t scare easy. When I was eleven, I found a copperhead snake under my sleeping bag during a school camping trip, and I just backed away slowly and found the ranger who was supervising, keeping an eye on any person who might head in that direction and put themselves at risk. When I was seventeen and stood in front of a judge who was going to make a decision that was going to affect the rest of my life, my hands were as steady as granite, my voice, when I spoke, came out clear as a bell. Even when I got the call about my dad two weeks ago, I’d managed to stay calm, to ask the right questions, to make all the necessary arrangements to get back here.

  But when I hear my dad yell, I think my stomach is leaping out of my body, if only to jam itself back down my throat, settling somewhere in the vicinity of my chest. I spring up from where I’m crouched on the floor, dropping a handful of switch plates behind me, and tear toward the office, my mind racing. Surely it’s impossible for me to have so many thoughts in the twenty or so seconds it takes me to reach him, but it seems like I have them all: Has he fallen, how bad is it, will there be more surgery, could it be a clot, a stroke, how could I have let him come here—

  I barely register Kit’s presence behind me, not until I barrel through the office door and stop in my tracks, Kit’s small frame bumping against me with an oof of surprise. My dad’s still in his chair, looking as hale and hearty as he has all day, but he’s shouting, banging his one good fist against the window overlooking the scrapyard, his face getting redder by the minute.

  “Dad, what the—”

  “Get outside!” he shouts to me. “Get out there and get that kid!”

  I take a step toward the window, and outside across the yard I see a short, skinny kid dressed in tight black jeans and a black hooded sweatshirt, taking bricks off a pallet and hurling them at my dad’s truck, the one he mostly keeps on site.

  “Shit,” I mutter, and hit the pavement.

  Jasper and I run most days back in Houston, early mornings where we meet up to strategize, so I’m quick. But it’s still weird that with my loud boots on the gravel, the kid doesn’t try to flee until I’m almost on him, and I barely have to make a few more strides before I snag him by the back of his hood and pull him toward me, wrapping my other arm around his shoulders to keep him still. I don’t realize he’s still got a brick in his hand until he drops it on my foot.

  “Fuck,” I groan, lifting my foot against the pain while tightening my grip against his struggle. “You need to settle down, kid.”

  He elbows me in the gut, but I’m prepared for that; I’ve made myself a wall against him. “I’m fucking serious. I don’t care how old you are. I will lay you out if you keep this shit up.”

  “Fuck you,” he spits, but he’s slumped over a bit now, the fight gone out of him. I loosen my grip and keep a hold of his elbow, turning him to face me. Jesus, he looks young, maybe thirteen? His hair is an unnatural grayish-purple color, swooping over one eye, and his jawline is pocked with acne. I feel like hell, manhandling a kid this way, even if he is a little criminal. And anyways, that look in his eyes—that stubborn, angry stare—I know that look. I was that look, back in the day.

  “Name,” I say.

  “I’ll tell it to the cop.” His voice is unusual, slightly accented, and when he turns his head away from me, avoiding my stare, I catch a glimpse of a hearing aid wrapped around his ear, peeking through his longish hair.

  “You’ll tell it to me,” I say, resisting the urge to raise my voice, “or else you get no help when that cop gets here.”

  “River.”

  “This isn’t a western, kid. What’s your first name?”

  “That is my first name,” he says, and boy, he does not sound happy about it. “And you can save your fucking jokes. I’ve heard them all.”

  “I’m not in a joking mood.” My dad’s truck is a mess, the right fender smashed to hell, the windshield shattered but still in place, which is more than I can say for the passenger side window, which I’m guessing is in pieces all over the front seat. “What the hell did you think you were doing?”

  “That’s pretty obvious, genius.”

  Damn
, the attitude on this kid. “Well, I’d say what’s obvious is that you’re looking for some way of getting caught out here, since it’s twelve fucking forty-five on a Thursday afternoon and you’re making a hell of a lot of noise right outside an open place of business.” Shit, I think. Was the remark about the noise insensitive? Honestly I don’t know why the fuck I’d care, since this kid is trying to destroy my father’s property. “Let’s go,” I say, and tug him back toward the entrance. I have no idea what I’m going to do when I get him there. I’m not really sure whether a citizen’s arrest is an actual thing or just something Dad used to yell at me when he caught me stealing the Oreos from the top shelf of the pantry.

  Kit and my dad are out front, her standing behind his chair. I don’t want her to see me dragging a teenager around by the elbow, no matter what I’ve caught him doing—I probably look like a brute. So I pause and look at him, wait for him to meet my eyes. “You run and I’ll catch you,” I say, dropping his arm and nodding toward where my dad is. He falls into step beside me, and I see him discreetly reach up both hands and adjust his hearing aids.

  In front of my dad, he’s not nearly so defiant. He’s shoved his fists into the pockets of his sweatshirt and he’s not looking at any of us. “What now?” he asks miserably, and I’m already feeling pretty bad about that when I look up at Kit and find her watching him, sympathy and kindness written all over her face. So I did look like a brute then. I resist the urge to kick my toe at the gravel, feeling more like a teenager than River probably does.

  “I called the police,” she says, surprising me. But she’s still got eyes on River. “Maybe before they get here you can explain yourself?” She doesn’t say it with any malice or judgment—she says it as if she’s begging him, really, to have some good excuse for destruction of property, to have something to say that would justify us letting him off the hook. I think if Kit looked at me that way, I’d probably confess sins I’d never even committed, just so I’d be doing what she wanted—she’s that persuasive, at least to me. In the warehouse, I’d wanted to bring her every single piece of hardware we had so I could see the look she got on her face when she opened something new.