The Luster of Lost Things

by Sophie Chen Keller

  I top off the oil in the mason jar and Milton pushes his nose under one cuff and sniffs my ankle and sneezes. I touch the lighter to the wick and nudge him away so Lucy will not notice that I am wearing mismatched socks I pulled out of the hamper.

  I met Milton three years ago in a LOST DOG flyer. In the picture, he was gripping the leg of a wooden coffee table and adding fresh chew marks on top of the old ones, heedless of the camera’s reproachful eye. The woman who posted the flyer had recently moved in with her boyfriend in a doorman building on Fifty-seventh and Third. We sat in the lobby on hard acid-green chairs. She had a pinched face with a narrow nose and hazel eyes that sat close together, and she wore a neat dress with flowers printed on it. I started as always by asking her about the thing she lost and her mouth pinched even more when she spoke about Milton.

  “John had always wanted a dog but his mother had these allergies, and when his coworker mentioned that his golden had puppies, John jumped at the chance—of course, he didn’t even check with me,” she said, breathless and aghast. “He went off to Westchester and came back with it! Like some surprise handbag—right, like he would ever!” She made a snorting noise and rearranged her neat dress.

  “What was the dog like?” I asked carefully, a smoky ache gathering under my temples from the effort.

  “John picked out the worst one. It ate underwear and dripped toilet water in my lap and destroyed the furniture,” she said. “And John is away for work and now it’s lost.” She shrugged with her palms up and sat back in her chair.

  “Since when?”

  “Two days ago. I came home from happy hour and one of my pumps was sitting in a puddle in the middle of the room, with that dog nowhere to be found.”

  I asked her where she had looked.

  “Oh, the usual places,” she said airily, gesturing at the front door. “Walked around a bit outside, too.”

  I asked about the daily routine, which took her ten whole minutes to discuss, and then I asked her if she was sure that she had looked in the obvious place.

  “Checked his pen,” she confirmed, but she had only glanced into the other rooms of the apartment. I thought it was worth a closer look, so up we went to the fourteenth floor, which was actually floor thirteen but the landlord was superstitious.

  The apartment was pristine and lemony, with all signs of dog scrubbed away. I checked the closets and cabinets and behind the doors and did not find a single dog hair. I returned to the living room, where the woman looked on.

  “No hair,” I said grimly, and the woman beamed at her spotless apartment while I looked around one last time—and there, the coffee table was wavering at me, shimmering like a mirage. It was modern, made of glass and steel. I consulted the picture in the flyer and the table the dog was chewing on was wooden.

  “Where is this?” I pointed at the picture. The woman peered over my shoulder and said, “That old thing. The favorite chew toy. I had it taken to the corner for garbage.”

  She saw me to the lobby and shook my hand, pressing something into it. I looked down and it was Benjamin Franklin, grimacing wry and wise.

  “Sadly the dog is lost, but John and I must go on. Your reward, if you find it, for keeping it,” she said, flashing her eyebrows.

  On the corner of Fifty-seventh and Third, I saw a black trash-bag heap and a chipped bookcase and a wooden coffee table. Underneath the coffee table, working on the leg that was now almost gnawed in half, was the dog, gleaming gold as treasure. When I wrestled him away, he licked my face and lashed his tail against my stomach. Milton, carelessly lost, was delighted to be found.

  The journey home was a disaster. Joy coursed through Milton and he hurled it into the world and wherever it landed there was pandemonium. He nearly caused a five-way pileup when he spotted a woman across the street in a leopard cape, and then he swerved, spotting a trim jogger in sporty spandex with sagging ears and a blinking helmet. The jogger dodged this way and that and Milton enthusiastically tackled him, hoping to join the game. The jogger clutched his chest and screamed, “Boy, are you out of your mind?”

  Two overturned trash cans and a mouthful of rancid newspaper later, Milton careened into The Lavenders and startled a little girl into dropping one of her marzipan dragons. The dragon shook off its fall and charged at Milton and breathed fire, and Milton scrabbled back. The dragon hissed and Milton whimpered and scrunched himself into the corner, and sprays of pee drizzled onto the shiny floor.

  As an irritated Lucy mopped and disinfected, I went to the kitchen to find two more dragons. When I returned, Milton was nowhere to be seen and I found myself on the verge of doing the number one thing I told bereft owners not to do—panicking, and who would keep him out of trouble and defend him and how could I be so careless?

  In the end, I discovered him standing outside in self-imposed exile with his tail between his legs. He took one look at the dragons in my palm and backed away. I inched closer; he watched, wary. I picked up a dragon and placed it on my tongue and closed my mouth, and a puff of steam curled out of my nose. I deposited the remaining dragon in front of him and it spat fire his way and he stared at it and glanced at me. I nodded and he snapped it up before he could change his mind.

  That was his first taste of Lucy’s desserts. No longer afraid, he followed me back inside, and he kept following me for the next few months until he knew for certain that I would always come back. He would not let me out of his sight, and when he couldn’t follow he sat and blocked the doorway and ignored customers who offered him treats, thumping his tail against the ground until I reappeared from school or finding.

  Regulars grew used to seeing him by my side, a shadow that grew larger every day and sometimes crushed their toes. I snuck him broken rosemary tuiles and bourbon peach pie scraps, and he helped himself to unattended trays when Lucy was looking the other way, and his belly swelled with the sweet fullness of being loved.

  This morning, Milton licks my ankle again and twitches his nose at me, earnest and approving—Nice socks!—and the wick catches fire. There is a knock at the door and Flora waves at me from the other side, and her face is soft and plump as a peach. I unlock the door and she plods into the shop with a stubby sock and a pair of knitting needles under one arm because it takes her at least half an hour to come in from Astoria.

  She dumps the knitting needles and ball of red yarn on a table, and she sets down her bags and pulls out her blue apron. Lucy gave her a new yellow one but Flora insists on wearing the blue one whenever she works and it looks older than her, a starched threadbare gingham that still had its lace trimmings when she started six years ago but doesn’t anymore. Besides her thriftiness, she also spends her evenings after work clipping coupons, because her ex-husband gambled away all their money before catching a bus to Florida.

  She gathers her bags and I follow her into the kitchen. José is already there, crouched over a white bucket whacking pomegranates with the back of a spoon, and Lucy is swiveling from the refrigerator to a wooden worktable, pulling out sheets of croissant dough.

  “Ready to roll?” she says, reaching for the rolling pin next to Flora, who has started topping a tray of genoise sponge mini-cakes with white chocolate feathers and raspberries; she has a flair for decoration and the most delicate touch with the piping bag.

  I grab a fistful of flour and dash it across the wooden worktable. Beside me, José tosses aside a de-seeded pomegranate and says, “How’s it going, man.”

  He rises for a quick sliding handshake and a close-lipped smile. He is careful about not showing his teeth, embarrassed that two are missing from the top row and two and a half from the bottom. Sometimes he forgets himself and an enormous smile spreads unchecked across his face, like yesterday when his son won the class spelling bee and Lucy made him a saffron cake and I striped it with chocolate cardamom buttercream. He looked more like himself than he ever had, grinning with the little cake buzzing aro
und his head—right before he remembered and his mouth snapped back like a rubber band.

  Before he fled El Salvador he lived with his mother and she taught him how to make a mean tres leches. He was the shop’s first full-time employee and we get along fine, me and José, from eight years of sitting side by side on Friday nights supreming oranges and chopping chocolates, listening to the salamander sizzling and the people rushing outside the window with the silence between us thick and warm and hearty as a slow stew, and once in a while on summer nights he remembers sunsets from the old home and playing soccer by the beach, aiming the ball into the ocean, between the volcanoes.

  Lucy cares about the tres leches and not the missing teeth and that is why she hired him, but he still mashes his lips together when he smiles at me and stays in the back of the kitchen cleaning and doing prep work between deliveries, so that the customers in the front won’t accidentally see.

  “Junior says—” He pauses, sighs like he is already regretting it. “T-H-A-N-K-S for the buzzzzing bee,” he finishes stonily, prying a pomegranate apart.

  Lucy stops rolling out the croissant dough and tucks her hair behind her ear, leaving behind streaks of flour. “S-U-R-E. Bzzzz,” she teases.

  “He made me,” José says.

  Two years ago he laid out some newspapers and snipped at Junior’s hair, a chunk from the front and from either side and he started to slice a chunk from the back and stopped. Gently, he touched the lump with one finger. It was pale and hard, nestled in Junior’s soft dark hair like a frozen egg. José had saved enough money for new teeth but it was not enough for the operation Junior needed, and so Junior is six years old now and the lump has gotten bigger and José is still saving with his four and a half missing teeth.

  Whap-whap-whap-whap, goes his spoon against the pomegranate, and a ruby rain falls from his fingers and Lucy sweeps a brush across the dough and the flour-dust makes me cough.

  “What’s on the agenda today, Mr. Walter?” she asks, marking the dough and cutting it longwise into runways. I take the flyer for the musician’s bassoon out of my pocket and show it to her.

  Lucy nods and positions a large knife over the dough and rocks her wrist left, right, left, right, cutting out precise isosceles triangles with each click and clack of the blade against wood.

  “You’re becoming quite the master finder,” she says, giving me a small smile.

  A surge of strength or lightness floods my limbs and I stand a little taller as I reach for a triangle and focus on shaping a croissant.

  “By the way, I’ll be talking to Doc today about scaling back to once-a-month sessions.” Lucy’s voice is casual but she cuts faster, clickety-clackety, her wrist flashing with the knife. “She says there’s no point in seeing her every week. You’ve made so much progress you could say what you wanted, if you wanted.”

  Of course Doc would say that. I roll the croissant, keeping my motions smooth and applying just the right amount of pressure, and I reach for another triangle. In Doc’s sessions, we practice words and phrases for any kind of case that might arise, bicycle and snake and passport and lock and skateboard, and Where do you keep it and Tell me more and When did you last see it and What do you think, and when I am finding snakes and locks I can also find the words I want and string them together and push them out, and the pathways of my mind stay open and clear and connected all the way down to my mouth.

  Lucy wishes for my words so much I can see it on her breath like stardust, and I have learned to look away. Doc wants me to practice my words in normal settings, not just when I am finding, but when I try to do that a chill spreads through my body, sloshing around my stomach and freezing the stretchy parts of my face. I reach for the words only to find that my mind is frozen too, and I have no idea how and where to start chipping out the words I want and the ringing in my ears is a definitive reminder of exactly who I am and who I am not.

  Now, I roll one, two, three more croissants, listening to Lucy and Flora chatting about the temperamental air conditioner and thinking that at least I have figured out how to navigate through this kind of life, and this is just how things are and they are good and comfortable. Lucy and Milton understand me well enough in their own ways and there is the shop, thriving, and on top of that I have my finding, the cases lining up faster than I can solve them because people have heard about what I can do for lost things.

  “Already thinking of case number eighty-four?”

  My thumb twitches and I squish the croissant I am holding.

  Lucy has been watching me, even as she chattered, and now she closes her eyes, counting, and she opens them and says, “The bassoon is case number eighty-four, isn’t it?”

  I nod at her and by now I should not be surprised but I am, and comforted too, by how much she knows.

  She picks up her knife and I fluff the flattened croissant, trying to resuscitate it and giving up. I fall into the rhythm of rolling and pressing the croissants, and then Lucy is beside me and her elbow brushes my shoulder as she reaches for a triangle. Both of us are rolling and pressing now and on my other side José is whacking pomegranates and Flora is arraying the genoise sponge cakes on a platter, and at my feet Milton shakes flour and crumbs from his whiskers and laps at the floor and all around is the heat of croissants baking, and the smell of everything is pure and rich as butter.

  Roll, press. Roll, press. I push the thought of school away. Ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one hundred. The most I have rolled is two hundred and eighty. It is a game I play with myself, seeing how many croissants I can shape, because time seems to stretch when it is made of water and flour and butter, just triangles of dough and my hands rolling and pressing.

  One hundred and one. One hundred and two.

  Inevitably, 8:20 will come around, but I can carry this stolen half hour in the kitchen with me to school like a warmed rock and it is just enough to last the day.

  Milton slips out of the kitchen and there is some guilt in that slink; he must have gotten into the port caramel, which is his favorite because he can continue licking his nose and tasting the sticky sweetness plastered there long after the crime.

  Lucy does not notice Milton but she does notice the clock. “Time for school,” she says, kissing my cheek. “Better get going—you’re late.”

  I loop my lunch box around my neck and start running past restless trees shaking off the summer heat, hurdling over a cat, darting between honking cabs, my right little toe starting to wiggle a hole into my high-top. Cool air lifts the back of my jacket and my lunch box thumps against my chest and I fly up Sixth Avenue toward the corner of West Fourth in time to see the bus nudging its way into the flow of traffic. I put on a burst of speed but the light turns green and the bus emits a feeble roar.

  I wave my arms, run faster, and my jacket streams out like a banner and the ends of my breath are ragged. The bus is slowing down—I pull even with the back windows—see a few faces I do not want to see, Beaver, Todd—but then they blur as the bus roars again.

  I continue waving my arms as I chase the bus down the block. Beaver appears in the window; he makes Frankenstein arms at me and dissolves into laughter. The zipper on my flapping jacket hits me in the eye and tears well up but I squeeze them aside.

  The bus stops at Waverly Place to make way for a man struggling against a cloud of dogs. I dash to the door and pound, startling the driver, and then I am on board.

  3

  I make my way to the only open seat in the back and it is quiet on the bus until Beaver belches, “Waaall-rus.”

  “Good run?” Todd says. His neck is stretched forward, skinny and red as a vulture’s, and they both lean over to poke me. Beaver pokes harder and I flinch.

  “It’s alive,” he says, shivering his shoulders, and I pick at the dough under my fingernails to keep from getting mad. If I become too angry and try to say something, I will mix up my words and they won’t come out ri
ght, and it is best to keep my mouth shut.

  “Dumbass,” Beaver says. He turns his attention to drawing body parts on the window in permanent marker and I prop my knees on the seat back and think about things not related to this bus and Beaver and Todd.

  M422 is a gray fortress with windows like hollow eyes and an incongruous cherry red door for the mouth. The trees are cucumber-green, cooling underneath a sky that looks clean and new like someone has sponged off the sticky brine of August. First period is with Miss Bradshaw and it smells the same as always, lemon wipes and wood-dust. I take my seat and give tiny hello waves that my classmates do not see as they walk past.

  At 8:40, the bell rings and Miss Bradshaw is nowhere to be found. Five minutes roll by and some boys start making spitballs. A little later, the girls in the front with pigtails and Popsicle-colored sweaters start squealing.

  At 8:55, with no teacher to rescue them, the girls move behind the empty fish tank to mount a defense. The boys dodge a flurry of sharpened pencils and more boys join in the war effort. I stay seated in the middle of the room, a rainbow of pencils and spitballs arcing over my head, thinking that the croissants should be out of the oven by now, the air swirling with golden flakes and Milton gamboling in the flurry.

  When a substitute teacher finally lunges into the classroom, everyone except me scrambles like they are playing musical chairs.

  “Good morning, class!” she says, shutting the door. She begins taking attendance and when she says my name I raise my hand but say nothing.

  “Walter Lavender is here,” Becky Darling supplies. She lowers her voice. “He doesn’t always—get—what’s going on. You have to talk slow, make things easy.” She turns around to give me an encouraging smile but the sun turns her glasses into mirrors.

  When morning classes are over, kids stream into the courtyard on a tide of legs and arms and lunch boxes and voices. I gather my things, taking my time, and head out to my table behind the basketball hoops. I sit on the end of the bench and make myself small and quiet and invisible. A game of dodgeball starts and food spills and wrappers crinkle and a red rubber ball hits my shoulder. I jerk forward and knock over my carton of juice and Beaver laughs.