The Luster of Lost Things

by Sophie Chen Keller

  The sunset turns the streets to gold and I am feeling cold again, and anxious to get back to the shop. I pass the Italian bakery, which is a neighborhood landmark, and I turn onto Carmine and the crowds thin enough that I can run the final stretch home.

  The next day starts off well. I shape two hundred and sixty croissants and I get to the bus stop before the bus comes and Beaver and Todd are not on it. At lunchtime, I troop outside with everyone else. The game is Wiffle ball instead of dodgeball and I keep an eye on it in case someone sees me and gestures for me to join.

  While I wait, I ponder the unresolved case of the bassoon—the smooth wood gone prickly, the musician’s potential for sleepwalking—and I turn my thoughts over slowly, letting them break down and mingle so that I do not run out of things to think about before lunch is over. I am used to filling empty tracts of time, and I am used to not being seen when I am right there, although I think it would be a nice surprise if someone invited me and I could nod yes.

  If Walter Lavender Sr. was around, he would have taught me how to bat and how to field and that way I could join without being asked, just catch the ball and jump right in. Lucy said he had no particular fire for sports but he spoke often of the summer he spent playing catch on the beach with the sand soft between his toes and the sun peaked in the blue sky, and those were the moments that stayed with him.

  It is another reminder of what I am missing, and not only because of my silence. It is there when I pass a barbershop and see a father and a son sitting side by side in front of the mirrors, or when I overhear someone at school talking about a weekend fishing trip, or when a girl at the shop mentions the model rocket she is building with her father.

  But I tell myself that I have Walter Lavender Sr.’s stories, and by their light I can almost see him, or at least the outline of him, and I have the swirling almost-memory of the last story he told me and I recount it to myself now—Once upon a time, there was a boy who never imagined he could fly very far—and a gust of wind pushes the Wiffle ball off course and it flies straight at me, bounces toward my feet, and I start again from the beginning, Once upon a time.

  The rest of the day scrolls by from a distance and when the afternoon bell rings, the cherry red doors fling open and the kids pour out like spilled birdseed. When I return to the shop, I narrowly miss being flattened by Milton, who is hot on the trail of a panna cotta squirrel. Before doing anything else I check the oil lamp and the flame is steady and I stare into it, drifting, and something sticky bumps against my hand. Milton has abandoned his squirrel. His eyes are bright and open and crimped into smiles at the corners, and he wonders what is wrong.

  I shake my head but he can read my thoughts and hear my soul. He tips his face up to mine and waits, listening earnestly, and I tell him that it is harder for me to forget today. Couldn’t Walter Lavender Sr. try a little bit harder to come back or send a sign? I am the one doing all the looking even though he is the one who is supposed to be here, to teach me the things I do not know. The squirrel reappears in the window and I move away to make room for Milton to resume the chase but he pushes his head into my hand. You can play catch with me.

  In that way of his, he has understood the knot of things I cannot say, and he reminds me that I am home. My head clears like standing on a mountain vista and I look up to see that Lucy is waving over the crowd, trying to catch my attention. We slide behind the counter and Milton retreats to the kitchen for scraps, and Lucy presses me into her apron and she smells like gingerbread.

  “Fifteen, twenty.” A boy in an oversized jersey reaches over the counter and lays down a few coins. The woman next to him ruffles his hair and he flinches and she says to Lucy, “We’ll definitely be back—have to make up for all the time it took us to find you!” She laughs and widens her eyes at the same time. “We’ve lived around the corner for years and we just always—walked right by.” She makes a whooshing motion and glances at the boy and he ducks reflexively to keep from being ruffled again.

  “Oh, certainly,” Lucy says with a wave of her hand. “This place has a way of hiding until it wants to be found.”

  Lucy whistles and four vols-au-vent mice pile out of the display and line up at the rim of the counter. She holds out a gift box and the mice reverse-dive into the box like squeaky synchronized swimmers.

  “See that, kiddo?” The woman reaches out for a surprise attack on the boy’s hair and in response, the hair on his arm rises and sways like a field of wheat. I reach for my notebook.

  BRISTLES WITH INDIGNATION, I write, stealing another look at the boy’s arm, and I have a sudden thought because it reminds me of the prickly bassoon. I flip back to the diagram of the musician’s apartment and there is the label I have not considered: Roommate.

  Lucy sticks a gold seal on top of the box and I reconsider the roommate’s role in the case.

  “Voilà,” she says, and there it is, the why and the how: the roommate, tired of the high-pitched intrusions on his evening and the musician’s empty promises to have the bassoon repaired, had taken action right before rambling away to the other coast. The indignation was the clue; the instrument had not liked the uninvited handling by someone else.

  With satisfaction, I close my notebook and case number 84, and I head to the kitchen for a sliding handshake with José and collide with Flora, knocking over the platter she is carrying out, and I hear her gasping and the grasshopper pies splatting against the floor and that is not even the worst of it, because then the big man with little eyes ducks through the shop door.

  6

  Flora heads back to the kitchen for a mop. “Be careful where you step,” she warns.

  I nod, watching the big man as he unbuttons his expensive suit jacket with one hand and appraises the customers and the displays, stocked and vibrant and squeaking and crackling and bubbling. His eyes inflate like bloated ticks and I write, FEEDING A GROWING APPETITE.

  He bows at four women on their way out the door and grabs a box of double butterscotch pops without looking at them and strides toward the register.

  Lucy smiles at him. “Hello there. Did you find what you were looking for today?”

  He puts the box down on the counter and extends a hand with fingernails like broad polished plates. “I’m the new landlord,” he says, and my thoughts spiral and even as I am checking his other hand for a crowbar I am thinking, He would never, and I look around his feet for a sledgehammer and think, He couldn’t, could he? I take a step back, sliding on the smashed pies.

  Lucy’s hand shoots out to steady me. She releases my elbow and pleats her forehead. “Did something happen to Albert?”

  “Oh—nothing like that. Didn’t mean to worry you.” He shows his palms like he’s surrendering and my lungs are tight and starting to burn. “He was ready to retire, that’s all. I figured I would stop by, introduce myself, take a look around. New kid on the block and all.”

  “Then it’s a pleasure to meet you. Welcome to The Lavenders,” Lucy says, reaching for the butterscotch pops. “Let me know if you have any questions.”

  “Actually, I do, if you can spare the time,” he says, and I shiver as the words slip down my back like cubes of ice.

  Lucy turns to Flora, who is steering a mop and bucket out of the kitchen, and says, “Can you take over the register?”

  I reach for the mop and the landlord says, “Wonderful,” and wrestles out of his suit jacket. “Place looks great,” he adds, his breathing labored, and when he drapes his jacket over one arm there are dark half-moons welling under his armpits where the heavy silk of his shirt pinches too tightly. “Between you and me, I think I prefer you to my other new place—the Italian bakery? It looks a little . . . dingy. Empty, too. They’re underutilizing a prime location—so much more could be done with the space.”

  “That’s the beauty of it,” Lucy says, sliding out from behind the counter. “The place is an institution.”

&nb
sp; And so it is, like the Dickson brothers’ hardware store—unchanged as time swirls and eddies around it, for as long as anyone can remember. It is a connecting thread in the fabric of the neighborhood, a place where people go to buy pizzelles and bump into old friends.

  “It appears you have an affinity for bakeries,” Lucy continues, and the landlord laughs in a voice thick and robust as our house-made jam and says, “Guilty—voracious sweet tooth.”

  They head away toward the front window and I let out a trapped breath. The big man does not have a crowbar tucked into his belt and there is no sledgehammer crew waiting to barge inside; he did not come here to seize the shop after all, but to consider it, and I think we have passed his test because he is at ease, making small talk with Lucy with his elbow propped on the Book’s display case.

  I do not like him because of what I saw at the Second Chance House and I do not like him eyeing the shop like he could swallow it whole, but now that he has met Lucy and tried the butterscotch pops and seen how the shop is filled with satisfied people, he has no reason to take it away from us.

  I wring the mop and push it across the floor and the misshapen pies hop away from it. This would be a lot easier if Flora had been bringing out the molasses cinnamon rolls instead, and I lean against the mop and wait for the pies to grow complacent. Lucy and the landlord are still standing over the display case, only now they are both looking at the Book and there is a sailor there too, kneeling next to his daughter as she tips her head back, and I know Lucy is telling them the story of the shop’s new beginning.

  She always starts it with the line from the first page—“It was a dark and stormy night”—and she continues with the stranger at our doorstep and the gift that was given and accepted. Then she removes the Book from the case and flips through each page, recounting how the scenes pulled her in and sang to her, and the first was the breathy croon of a city furious and driving as the elements, and the second was an anthem of adventure as a girl sweeps in on a carpet of wind and her cloak swirls behind her, made of a hundred tangled snowflakes and stars.

  On the third page, a young man catches a glimpse of the girl on the other side of the subway platform, framed by the white-blue glitter of her cloak, icy and immaculate and needing no one. He falls in love with the idea of her and the love ballad soared on into the fourth page as the girl sheds her cloak of ice. But that shatters the illusion the young man has of her and Lucy broke out in goose bumps to hear the broken chords of the fifth page as the girl lies abandoned on the floor, and the haunting choir of the sixth as she wanders the streets in search of her lost love, memories lurking between buildings and taking on human forms as they slip behind the girl like shadows, like a city of the lost, and on the last page a gentle lift, an open question, the stormy wilderness retreating to the corners as a banner of light tumbles across the page, from the door that has unexpectedly opened.

  The artist had found a way to tell, in her own voice, the story of how she found herself at the shop’s doorstep—of how she arrived in the city a young woman in search of excitement, and there she found love and lost it and continued to search in vain for her lost love until she lost herself too. Then, on a lonely winter’s night, a door opened, and through that doorway—that gesture of kindness—she saw how there could be more for her, a realm of possibility beyond the seventh and final page.

  When Lucy closed the Book that night, she thought back to a simpler time and a voice she missed, telling a different story but with the same ending, of a life changed by one kindness. She lifted her head and blinked and looked around, and it was the shop that seemed like the dream.

  After Lucy finishes telling the story, the landlord and the sailor and the daughter take a good hard look at the Book because it looks completely ordinary in the display, the spine soft and the pages ragged on the edges and the cover old and worn like a favorite pair of jeans, whiskered with dark scratches and lighter where the leather is rubbed thin from handling.

  Under their scrutiny, the Book remains as plain as the shopfront, and if they are perceptive they will ask next, “So was it her? Was the wandering artist also Walter Lavender Senior’s mermaid?”

  Lucy will just smile and lift a shoulder. “I like to believe she was. Wouldn’t that be something?”

  It would be the rarest kind of story, not confined to a static and linear space that begins in the one place and ends in the other. Rather, it is told and retold so it is never really over, growing bigger each time it loops back and starts again. Walter Lavender Sr. never taught me to play catch or ride a bike or fix a blown fuse or grow to be a man. He left only one lesson for me and the Book is the embodiment of it: physical proof of how much a gesture can matter and how it can even expand across time and place—passed on and on again from a mermaid to a father to a mother, a sketch that became an invitation that became a second beginning that became everything, to a son who had already lost so much.

  7

  I am glad to see the landlord leave after Lucy’s story, and José helps me pour out the swamp-colored mop water and then it is time for the mail to arrive. I make a quick trip to the window and sure enough, Mister Philipp is coming up the sidewalk, pushing his mail cart with its swollen blue mailbags. Milton is already sitting under the shop’s mailbox, looking around vigorously for him because he always has a jar of dog treats on hand.

  Milton waits for the mail cart to come to a full stop, and then he uncurls and approaches and wags his tail in friendly greeting. As he crunches away on a rock-hard biscuit, Mister Philipp reaches back into the blue bags and pulls out stacks of mail, balancing them on his arm like cocktail platters. I don’t have to open the door to know that he is whistling while doing this, because he’s been on this route for as long as I can remember.

  He knows my name and Lucy’s name, and his own name is among the first that people moving into the neighboring walk-ups come to know. Every December he grows a beard and puts on the same tattered red hat and drops off letters from the North Pole with our names inscribed in the same gel ink he has us use to sign for packages. The employees at the bodega leave dripping bottles of tamarind soda out for him in the summer and when Lucy makes bird’s milk cake she saves a slice for him so that the cake slice and Mister Philipp can whistle in harmony until the raspberry Jell-O top wobbles.

  I step out and he looks the same as he always does, round face and round glasses and a blue uniform that has a brass watch chain hanging out the front pocket.

  He hands me the mail and before I can rifle through the stack, he says, “Not today, son.”

  That is the first thing he says whenever I meet him at the mailbox, which is whenever I am not too busy with the shop or with my finding. I can’t remember when he started working this route but I do remember when he began to notice me waiting behind the window. He stopped whistling then and said, “I know that look. What are you waiting for—package from Aunt Geraldine, letter from Uncle Gilbert? I’ll see if I have it.”

  I shook my head and did not say anything, and even if I could, what would I say? That all this time nothing had come—a tip, a scrap of news, some unmistakable sign that points to Walter Lavender Sr.—but that I knew I would recognize it when I saw it, even if I did not know what form it would take or where it would come from? It made sense that the mailbox would be a possibility, where messages and news arrived every day from all over the world.

  I passed so many hours wondering what the sign might be that I could fill the mailbox a hundred times over. I imagined a cracked bottle containing Walter Lavender Sr.’s hurried final message, or a padded envelope from a fisherman who discovered Walter Lavender Sr.’s wedding band in the belly of a four-hundred-pound tuna. Maybe it would be a charred lotus flower salvaged from the ashes and pressed between leaves of paper, or a short article clipped from the middle of the newspaper by a vigilant stranger—aircraft wreckage washing up on the rocks, a cruise liner in the Arabian Sea picking up
a black box.

  Mister Philipp probably got to talking with Lucy because the next time he caught me watching behind the window again, he crooked his finger and whistled as he waited for me to come out.

  “Tell you what,” he said, “I’ll keep an eye out for you, save you some time. The second I see anything about your dad, you’ll be the first to know,” and the next day he said, “Not today, son,” in place of Hello, and arched deftly to scratch a spot in the middle of his back.

  He does that now, reaching around his back, although with more difficulty. “I reckon that’s my last delivery to you. I’m transferring to another route—they say it’s gonna have less stairs to climb. Even issued me a truck to get there,” he says, struggling to reach the trouble spot. I know about it because he joked once that he had to buy a bamboo back scratcher to relieve the itch since he was losing flexibility and had a hell of a time reaching it, and there was no one around to scratch it for him because he lived alone.

  “Chin up, son. Tell Lucy for me, too.” He smiles and I wave, and he whistles the ice-cream truck song as he walks away but to me it sounds a little blue because of the parting of ways, and I watch until he disappears into the door of the next walk-up.

  I step back inside the shop, where the shadows have lengthened and Lucy is announcing the fifteen-minute closing call. The last customers make their selections and trickle out and Lucy locks the windows and doors after them and flips the sign to Closed so stragglers don’t stumble in as we go through the steps of putting the shop to bed.

  The closing routine has become a nightly ritual, cemented over the years, and it is as comforting and familiar to me as the lines on my palm. We fill the sinks with soapy water and submerge trays and baking sheets; wipe down the refrigerators and tabletops and chairs; empty the displays and scrub them clean; remove the Book from its case for dusting and replace the Book with care, open to the first page; mop the floors and dim the lights and lower the heat and blow out my oil lamp and the final turns of the lock, one and two.