by Elle Casey
He grins again. “That’s right. You and me, we’re survivors.”
I smile, kind of sadly. I want to do more than just survive for a change. “Have a good one. I have to get back to work.”
“Have a blessed day,” he says. “Keep that smile on, pretty girl. You know you’re gonna have a great day with a smile like that.”
I leave him to shuffle down the sidewalk with his eighty-three cents. I could have given him part of my rent money, but if I did that I’d be checking into the homeless shelter with him and I’m not ready for that. I like showers too much. Maybe one day I’ll have to go down that road, but not today. Please, not today.
Today is going to get a lot better; I have a feeling about it. Giving money to Mel always makes me feel this way, like life is just about to turn a corner. Hello, corner. I’m so ready for you and all you have to show me.
Chapter Eight
I LEAVE THE SHOP WITH a promise to return after lunch for an extra hour of work, to cover for Belinda while she goes to the dentist. Even though I don’t even have the money for the hot dog I claim to want, I go boldly out the door, acting like all is well with my world.
My true goal: to find a jeweler who will look at the laser etching on this diamond and tell me who bought it, so I can track him down and give it back to him. Maybe he and his girlfriend have made up and she regrets throwing it away. Maybe they’ll be so grateful that I returned it, they’ll give me a reward. Or maybe I’ll just be so glad to not be carrying this damn thing and the weight of its implications around, I’ll be glad to see it go.
No matter what happens, it’ll be way better than being tempted to keep it. I’m a huge believer in karma, and I know that keeping something that isn’t mine — that’s worth half a million dollars, no less — will have karma kicking my ass for the rest of my life. No. Thank. You. Bad karma, stay away from me, you asshole.
The first jewelry store I go to is much like the one I visited the day before — way too pretentious. I can see the man’s trigger finger twitching near that secret alarm button I know is just under his countertop. Snob.
I leave there in a hurry and decide to ride the subway a little farther north. There, I find a small hole-in-the-wall type place that has stuff in the window I wouldn’t wear if you paid me. Perfect.
Stepping inside, the first thing I notice is the smell. It’s mildew. Things are looking so much better than they were a half hour ago. The man behind the counter is nearing ninety if the number of wrinkles in his face is any indicator. He’s bent over with a big hunchback that appears almost painful. I realize I am in Quasimodo’s jewelry shop. I always wondered what happened to that guy after he left the church. Ugly jewelry. Makes sense.
He looks up at me through thick glasses. “Hello.”
I smile. “Hello.”
He stops moving something around in his display case and stands as straight as he’s able, resting his hands on the edge of the glass. “May I help you?”
“I’m not sure.” I hike my purse up higher on my shoulder, suddenly nervous. It doesn’t matter that this guy is so old he probably doesn’t even know there’s an Internet. I’m freaking out all over again, worried I’m about to be arrested for some crime I’m not even aware I’m committing. Jail. Butchy lesbian girls wanting to sleep with me. No thanks.
He smiles, his eyes a watery blue, huge behind his thick glasses. “Are you looking for a pretty necklace, perhaps, to match your eyes?” He points to some below the glass. “I have some nice emeralds here.” His finger is gnarled and bent, but the nail itself is neatly trimmed and the cuticle perfect.
“Actually, no … I have a ring.” I take a few steps closer.
He looks up and blinks several times. “You have a ring?”
“Yes, I have a ring. And I know the value of it, but I’ve lost the certificate. Or I should say my mother lost the certificate. So I was wondering if you could read the laser-etched number on it and tell me where I could find the seller so I could get a copy of the certificate. For her, not for me. For my mother.”
His face goes slack and he stares at me.
My nerves are instantly frazzled. Here come the hives and the lies. Dammit.
“See, my mother got the ring from her husband, but the marriage didn’t last long on account of the fact that he was actually a woman but failed to mention that until after the ceremony, so she gave it to me. The ring, I mean, not the marriage. But she never got the certificate, so she wanted a copy. In case we decide to sell it.” Oh my god...I’m so nervous, I’m making up more transvestite stories. I sense a theme. Not a good one, either.
“Ah,” he says giving me a polite smile of forgiveness. I’m not sure what I’m being forgiven for, but I’ll take it. “Do you have the ring with you?”
I nod like a crazy person — which apparently I am — as I pretend to dig around in my purse. I turn around slightly so I can grab it out of my bra without him seeing and then pretend to have found it in my bag as I turn back toward him.
“Here it is.” The wad of tissues around it that used to look so smooth and pristine now look like used snot rags. My ears get hot over the judgment I’m sure he’s making of me. No, I’m not a cat lady.
The old man pulls a stool close to the counter and sits on it, taking a loupe out of his vest pocket. From the nest of tissues I offer him, he lifts out the ring, placing it on the end of his first finger and drawing it closer where he can look at it.
“This is a very large stone,” he says, adjusting the loupe under his eye. I’m not sure how his fingers are even working, they’re so bent.
“Yes. It’s about seven carats.” I wipe the sweat from my upper lip and chin. Who sweats on her chin? Yep, that’s me — sweaty-chin girl. Prreeeetty.
“D in color,” he says.
“Almost colorless,” I offer, pretending I know what I’m talking about.
“Mmmm…,” he says.
I don’t know what he means by that. Maybe he’s agreeing. Or maybe he’s saying, Yes, and I’ve just pressed my secret silent alarm button, and your ass is about to be thrown in jail.
I hope it’s the former.
“There is a number here,” he says, reaching over with his loupe-holding hand and pulling a pad of paper and pen toward him. He puts the magnifier down and licks the end of the pen before posing it over the paper.
His handwriting is what I imagine chicken scratch would be like. I can’t tell if he’s putting letters or numbers there. He writes a couple things, puts the pen down, picks up the loupe, looks at the ring for a few seconds, puts the loupe down and writes again. This goes on for probably only about two minutes, but it feels more like ten. Ten loooong minutes. Quasimodo be slow.
When he’s done writing a string of numbers, he turns the ring all around, looking at different parts of it, and writes a few more things down. Then he hands it back to me and puts his loupe in his vest pocket.
“So, do I understand that you want to get a duplicate certificate for this diamond?”
“Yes. That’s exactly what I want.” I’m filled with relief that I’ve expressed myself properly and that he doesn’t sound like he’s accusing me of doing anything wrong.
“And then what will you do with it? Sell it?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. Probably not. I mean, it’s a beautiful ring, right?”
“Absolutely. A little big for my taste…” He looks up at me with a lifted eyebrow.
“Yeah. It’s pretty showy.”
“You could trade it.”
“Trade it?”
“Most jewelers will take a piece in trade. You could get something else you prefer. Several things, in fact.” He gestures around the store.
For a moment I’m tempted, imagining the diamond earrings I’d get with matching necklace, the pretty thin watch with diamonds on each number that I saw in the first jewelry store, the band of gold with multi-colored stones I saw at the last place… But then I stop myself. Those things wouldn’t make me feel any les
s guilty than keeping this thing would. Screw you, bad karma! I will not fold!
“Can you track down the seller for me?” I ask, wrapping the ring up in my tissues and putting it in my purse.
“Perhaps. Can you come back tomorrow?”
I pause, panic settling in. “Tomorrow? You can’t do it today?”
He gives me a patient smile. “I don’t keep a computer here. Too easy to steal, and it won’t fit in my safe.”
“Oh.” And here I thought this old dude didn’t know what the Internet was. “Okay. I guess I could come back tomorrow. What time?”
“Come back around noon. Same time as today. I should be here.”
I take one of the business cards from a holder on his counter. “Are you Mr. Goldman?”
“Yes, I am.”
I smile. “That’s a great name for a jeweler.”
“That’s what my mother always said.” He smiles back at me, this time warmly.
I wave the card at him as I walk out the door. “See you tomorrow.”
“Until then.” He gives me a brief wave, his bony hands the last thing I see before I’m out the door.
I find myself out on the street again, rain coming down on me, the only girl on the entire block without an umbrella. Of course. That’s me. Water-logged crazy girl.
I take off running to the subway and don’t stop until I turn the corner into the underground entrance and run into a wall of a man.
“Oooph!” The breath is smashed out of my lungs and I’m thrown to the ground with the force of the impact.
My purse goes flying, and I realize as I watch it sail away that it has the ring in it. It lands about five feet from me, and I scramble toward it like a madwoman on hands and knees. A hand reaches down and grabs it up before I can get there.
“That’s my purse!” I roar, ready to tackle the thief.
The guy I bumped into holds it up over his head, the long strap making it so the bag hangs by my face.
“Easy!” he yells. “I’m just trying to help you!”
I grab the purse and hug it to my chest like it’s got a half-million dollars in it, which of course it does.
When I realize who’s standing in front of me and the ring is no longer at risk, my eyes bug out of my head.
“It’s you,” he says, looking confused and then annoyed. He looks down at his chest. “Am I covered in sweat again?”
Oh my god. It’s that guy! Is he following me?! Is he calling me a sweaty girl? Why is he so gorgeous all the time?!
To be fair, I have gotten a few drops of rain on him. I’m pretty much soaked. But it’s not my problem that he doesn’t look where he’s going.
“Oh, shut up,” I say, moving away, trying to get around him and the few people who stopped to watch the scene.
“You really should look where you’re going!” he shouts after me.
“And you really should get out of people’s way!” I shout back. “Stupid jerk,” I mumble mostly to myself. “Stalker.”
I realize as I put more space between us that my paranoia is getting the better of me. How could he be following me when he’s always walking in the opposite direction as I am? This ring is a nightmare. I have to get rid of it soon. Talk about bad juju.
I know it’s the ring causing me most of my anxiety right now, but that guy almost ruined my life, so he’s not off the hook for some of the blame. Here I am, all ready to be an altruistic do-gooder, sacrificing my own happiness for someone else’s by giving this ring back, and he almost made me lose it. What if a thief had been standing there when my bag went flying? How would I have done the right thing if he took off with everything inside?
I have to stop and feel inside my bag for the tissues. I find them there in a lump at the bottom of my purse, the hard ring easily detectible by a squeeze of my fingers. Thank God.
I take a deep breath. Then I realize. Dammit. I’m sweating again. I am a sweaty girl after all, it’s not just the rain.
As I stand on the subway platform headed back to work, I try to focus on the fact that tomorrow I’m finally going to unload this albatross from around my neck. But try as I might, I can’t get the image of that indignant guy’s face out of my mind. What was he all pissed about? I’m the one who ended up on the disgustingly dirty ground. He has some nerve acting all offended toward me. It wasn’t sweat that got on him before, it was fountain water. That stuff has bleach in it; it’s totally safe and non-toxic, right? I think?
I snort, seeing him in my mind’s eye with that tailored suit and silk tie on. He’s probably so busy thinking about how important he is, he doesn’t even pay attention to people walking around him. I’m one of the invisible peasants not worthy of his time. That’s why we keep bumping into each other; I’m invisible to him. How rude.
He’s like all those other businessmen I see running around Fifth Avenue, totally obsessed with their work and their suits and their beautiful girlfriends. None of them take a single second to think about how much of their lives they’re wasting on materialistic things. Dopes.
I’d love to educate him on the fact that happiness cannot be found in the bottom of a Gucci shopping bag, but I know it would be wasted effort. You could never say that to a guy like him. He’d just laugh and call you a cretin and then you’d feel stupid for trying to care about important things like being environmentally conscious or trying to eat organic. And who needs that? Not me. Live and let live, that’s my motto. And stay out of the way of people like him. Done. I’m over it. I’ll never see him and his stupid tie again anyway.
Chapter Nine
I GET BACK TO THE store ten minutes late and hug Belinda so hard she forgets to lecture me about not being on time.
“What are you so happy about?” she asks from the front of the store as I drop my bag on the back room floor and tuck the ring into my bra.
“Oh, I don’t know. Just feeling grateful for my life, for my friends, for everything.”
“Did you get drunk on your lunch hour?”
I join her in the front, smiling. “No, but I kind of feel like I did.” I’m high on life and it feels good. I’m walking on sunshine. Just thinking that reminds me of the man on the roller skates and I smile even harder. I’m going to give this ring to its real owner and settle things with karma. All will be right in my world in no time.
“Tell me what hotdog vendor you used so I can go have a word with him. I told you that stuff is pure poison.”
“I know.” I kiss her on the cheek. “But don’t worry. I didn’t eat any hotdogs. I just wandered around and cleared my head of some garbage.”
She points to the air around us. “That’s the lavender talking. I put it in the diffuser earlier to help you get rid of that nervous energy that was flowing all over you.”
“Whatever you did, it worked like a charm.” I go over to the table of quartz and amethyst crystals and start arranging them according to size and color.
“Don’t you have an appointment to get to?” I ask.
“No, it was cancelled.”
I stop with my arranging. “Do you want me to clock out?”
“No, work the extra hour,” she says, lighting an incense stick and putting it on the counter. “I can swing it.”
The crystals get my attention again. I’m glad to have the extra hour in my paycheck, even though it’ll only mean another ten bucks to add to my pot.
“Did you eat?” she asks.
I kind of mumble my answer, but she sees right through me.
“Go get the yogurt in the fridge back there. Go. Now. I don’t want you fainting away on me because you haven’t eaten.”
“As if. I have enough extra weight on me to keep me in calories for six months without eating lunch.”
“Regardless … go eat it.”
I sigh, but leave my crystals to do what she says. I do kind of feel like I have a hole in my stomach where a hotdog should be.
I’m scooping up the last bit of the slightly sour, yogurty goodness when I hear the f
ront door bells jangle. At first I was going to let Belinda deal with it, but then I hear her reaction.
“Oh, no you don’t, mister. Out!”
I drop the yogurt and spoon on the counter and run through the layers of beads that close the store off from the back room, to find Mel standing in the entrance of the store and Belinda spritzing him with patchouli oil.
“Mel, what are you doing?” I ask, coming forward to intervene.
“He’s here to beg you for more money,” she says. “He has no shame. Go on, get.” She waves him toward the door.
“Belinda, stop,” I say, putting my hand on her arm. Mel never just walks in after getting a cup of coffee from me. It would be unusual for me to see him more than once a week. Usually I have to go hunt him down at one of his haunts to bring him lunch or a snack. He’s only shown up here a few times in all the months I’ve known him.
“Mel, what’s up?”
He’s swaying on his feet. “I dunno,” he says, his words slurred together. At first I think he’s suffering from an overexposure to patchouli oil, but then I quickly realize it’s a lot more than that.
“Belinda, call nine-one-one.” I take him by the arm and put my hand behind his back, trying to keep him from tipping over.
Just as she’s walking away, he falls to the side, landing on me and shoving me into the table full of crystals.
I try to hold him up, but the combination of his weight and the unholy stench that’s wafting out of his clothes makes it impossible. My brain wants to support him, but my self-preservation instincts are telling me to run from the ebola that’s hiding in the folds of his trench coat. We lose our balance and together crash to the floor, bringing a shower of quartz and amethysts down with us.
“Oh my god!” Belinda screams.
“Ack! Mel! Get off!” It wasn’t very nice of me to yell like that, but I couldn’t control it. The smell on him is making me physically ill.
“Hello, nine-one-one?” Belinda is yelling now too. “Man down! Man down! We need help over here, stat! Belinda’s New Age Wonders on Church Street.”