Pallbearing

  Norm nodded and then she was looking past him and her smile turned into a glare. Norm looked behind and saw Beata slowly walking down the ramp out of the hall, helped by two of her children. He winced at the scene that sprung to mind — the sisters screaming, both blaming him. But Hilde seemed to sense his concern and said, “Don’t worry. Your secret is safe with me.” She laughed a little, and then said to her husband, “Let’s leave that old hag to her garbage violin and go home.”

  They got into the car and started out of the parking lot, Hilde laughing and waving goodbye to Norm. He smiled and shook his head, and when he saw Beata looking confused, he decided it was time to go inside and help with the cleanup.

  Low Risk

  Ruth spent a long time thinking about it. A friend of a friend had mentioned that a friend of his up in the city was selling some candy machines for forty bucks a piece. They were an easy way to make money, he told her. You buy the machines, get the candy in bulk, and set them up around town. He was honest about no one having ever gotten rich with candy machines, but he thought it was a good way for someone to bring in a little extra cash.

  Ruth was always behind. She raised three kids on welfare and picked up whatever under-the-table work she could as a cook. It never amounted to much, so she sublet the unfinished basement of their split-level rental out on the highway to keep her rent down, and her boyfriend, Tom, lived with them and helped out whenever he could — whenever he had work. Life was a struggle, and she always seemed to need money for some unexpected extra thing: a school trip for the kids or an unexpected repair on her old station wagon or some broken appliance in the house. The extra money brought in by the machines could be just the thing to take the pressure off.

  Which was what she kept telling Tom, who just didn’t think it was a good idea. They talked about it while she tried to get the kids away from the TV to eat their dinner and while she tried to get them to clean the dishes that they left behind so they could go watch more TV. As she slopped the leftover spaghetti piles into Tupperware, Tom asked why the guy who told her about the machines didn’t buy them if they were such a sure thing. She figured it just wasn’t worth the guy’s time. He was making good money at the mill, what was a couple of hundred extra dollars? It was just a drop in the bucket for him. But for them, it could change a lot. “It could be the difference between eating spaghetti every night or having a lasagna every once in a while,” she said. “Imagine what a little extra could do?”

  Every time money came up, she’d bring up the machines again. When a faucet broke and they needed to scrape together ten dollars for a new one, Ruth pointed out how a little extra money would help. When Tom had to patch a flat on his truck rather than a buy a new tire, she pointed out how a little extra money would help. When her youngest got hit in the face with a soccer ball and needed to see the dentist and she had to borrow money from Tom, she pointed out how a little extra money would help. Eventually, Tom had to admit that, at the very least, it seemed pretty low risk. It’s not like the machines would lose value; if it didn’t work out, they could sell them and just be out the cost of the candy. But he really thought she should have a few places lined up to take the machines before she shelled out any money for them. Ruth agreed he had a point.

  She called a few friends. Norma, who worked at a garden shop out on the highway, said the guys there were always complaining about not having vending machines. That was enough for Ruth to ask Norma to ask her boss if she could set up her machines there. Norma wasn’t so sure, but after a bit of pressing she said she’d see. A few calls later the answer came back. Norma’s boss didn’t see why not.

  With her first customer lined up, she called the guy who had the machines. He told her they were actually fifty dollars each and he wanted to sell them all at once, so two hundred for the four. She didn’t have that kind of money on hand. “Could you hold on to them for me for a little while?” she asked.

  “No guarantees” was all he would say.

  Ruth tried to get the money together. First from Tom, who said he couldn’t help; he’d been driving without insurance for the past month because he couldn’t afford even that. Her tenants weren’t interested in loaning her money against the next month’s rent, and any time she did scrape together a little extra it seemed to disappear into a hot lunch at the kids’ school or some sports day or a spike in gas prices. Every time she came up short, Ruth thought how that extra couple of hundred a month would make these inconveniences less of a strain.

  Every week she called the guy to make sure the machines were still there, always having to remind him of who she was and that she had called before. He would always say, “Oh yeah, sure,” in a way that made it seem like he didn’t remember her. But at least the candy machines were still there.

  Her break finally came when one of the cooks at the restaurant she filled in at got sick for a week. She got enough extra shifts to have a bit of extra money for the first time in months. She drove up to the city to get the machines and was surprised when the directions took her to a warehouse out in the industrial part of town. She’d thought she was buying them from a regular guy, not a dealer. The front of the warehouse was set up like a pawnshop, with shelves and glass cases filled with electronics and kitchen gadgets and other junk. The guy sitting in a beat-up old recliner by the door didn’t know anything about her calls, but seemed to think he’d seen a few candy machines in the back.

  He led her through a gap in the shelves into the open back of the warehouse. It smelled of engine oil and mould. They walked through and over piles of paint cans and old car parts to a cold, damp corner with some old arcades and a half-built motorcycle. The candy machines were behind a pile of bike frames. The guy said, “This is them.”

  “They’re a little more beat up than I expected,” she said.

  He shrugged and said, “I don’t really know anything about them.”

  She reached over the bikes to feed a quarter into one of the machines. She gave the handle a spin; the crank inside where the candy would be spun at the same time. It looked like it worked. She asked, “Can I get my quarter back? I want to try the others.”

  The guy seemed put out, but went looking. He eventually came back with a key that opened the money collector. She pulled her quarter out and tried the other three. They all seemed to work okay, but without candy in them she couldn’t really be sure. She asked the guy about that. He shrugged and said, “As is.”

  “Fifty seems a bit much. The paint is coming off and this one has a chip.”

  “Can’t do anything about the price,” he said. Ruth wasn’t sure what her next move was; she’d hoped he’d haggle a bit. They stood there, both staring at the machines. He seemed to realize something more was needed. He said, “You know, these are the big industrial type, not the crappy plastic ones you find at kid stores.”

  On the drive home she went over the numbers again. She had tried to be conservative in her guesses about how much money they’d bring in, but she figured that each machine had to get at least eight spins a day; so, two dollars per machine per day. That was sixty dollars a month, times four machines, which was two hundred and forty. After the cost of the candy, which she’d pick up from the bulk store out on the highway, she was looking at six weeks until she turned a profit. That wasn’t too long. And once she was turning a profit, she could finally pay for the things she had to tell her kids they couldn’t do, and they could eat some decent meals every now and then. And if things went really well, she could use those profits to buy a couple more machines. She tried to keep her thoughts realistic, but she started imagining moving up to proper vending machines. Maybe even pop.

  After she got home, she spent the rest of the day cleaning up the machines with a rag in the carport. One had some rust on the spinning thing inside that she hadn’t noticed, but once the candy was on top, no one would see it.

  When Tom got home from work he said, “Well, here they
are.” He spruced them up with some bright red paint. They stood together watching it dry and agreed the machines looked great. Tom said, “You might be on to something here.” Her youngest asked if he could have some candy. She told him, for the hundredth time, no.

  Ruth called Norma after dinner and let her know the machines were ready. Norma asked, “What machines?”

  Ruth said, “The vending machines we talked about for your store, remember?”

  “Oh, you got those?”

  “Yeah.”

  “. . . I should double-check with the boss.”

  Ruth didn’t see the point, since Norma had already talked it over with her boss and he’d said he was interested. And Ruth lived so close it was no problem to just pop by.

  The next day, Ruth put on her best dress and carefully laid the machines on cardboard in the back of her station wagon. She put towels between them so they wouldn’t bump into each other, and took the bags of candy out of the basement freezer where she’d hidden them. She had six different kinds: gumballs, chocolate almonds, Skittles, M&M’s, jelly beans, and Reese’s Pieces. She’d figured the guy might want to pick his flavours.

  Ruth found Norma on the sales floor stacking hoses into a pile. Norma said, “You should have called. The boss isn’t in today.”

  “Well,” Ruth said, “I can just set them up somewhere.”

  “I really think we ought to check.”

  “I thought you had checked. Isn’t it okay?”

  “I ran it by him and he said it could work.”

  And then a woman was there telling Norma, “We need you to help unload the delivery once you’re done helping this customer.”

  Ruth explained she wasn’t a customer, and asked if she was the manager; as it turned out, the woman was the owner’s wife, Gladys. Norma stared at the ground while Ruth explained how Norma had talked to the boss about the candy machines and how the guys wanted them and how he had thought it was okay if she set them up somewhere in the store.

  Gladys looked at Norma, who said, “Well, he mentioned it could be okay.”

  Gladys said to Ruth, “No, we don’t need those.”

  “But Norma ran it by —”

  “Grown men can buy their own candy. Why would we want those?”

  “Well . . .” Ruth hadn’t thought she’d need to explain anything; it was supposed to be all set up. And now this woman was staring at her like she was wasting everyone’s time and she felt like she had to say something. She looked around the store and saw an out. “There’s lots of kids coming in here.” She pointed at a toddler standing by a rack of shovels.

  Gladys looked at the kid, considering. “So, what’s in it for us? Why would we let you set up a machine on our property?”

  Ruth hadn’t thought of that either. She’d always just assumed that she could drop the machines wherever anyone would let her. But she felt like she was close. The woman knew there were kids, kids who wanted candy, and now she was waiting for a reason to put the machines in. Ruth said, “Well, it doesn’t cost you anything.” She knew that was the wrong thing to say as soon as she said it.

  “No,” Gladys said. “This whole place costs us something. We pay for every square foot. And we’re not in the habit of just letting people make money off of it for nothing.”

  Ruth didn’t know how to respond to that. She felt it slip away — the potential future money she thought would make things easier. It was like the woman was taking it all away from her. She felt a growing panic, but all she could say was, “I thought this was all okayed.”

  “We don’t want them. Excuse me.”

  Gladys went back into the office and Norma said something about having to get back to work, leaving Ruth alone on the sales floor. She thought of following Norma, then thought about going into the office and trying again. She ended up just heading to her car, where she sat until she saw Gladys looking out the window at her. Ruth pulled onto the highway and headed home and put on the TV to take her mind off things.

  That night, Tom asked why the machines were still in the back of the car. Ruth explained the whole thing to him, saying how Norma had led her on and how awful the owner’s wife had been. Tom tried to be sympathetic, but at the end he said, “Well, it’s no reason to start crying. It just means you’ve got to find somewhere else to set them up.”

  “But where?”

  “Are you kidding? There’s got to be a hundred places in town. Remember, you were going to expand to other locations anyways. This just means you have to look a bit sooner than you’d planned.”

  Tom set the kids in front of the TV and pulled out the Yellow Pages. They sat at the kitchen table and went through the listings, underlining the addresses of likely shops, and then they made a list that started on the north side of town and ended on the south. The next day, after Ruth got the kids to school, she’d work her way down the list.

  Tom lent her ten bucks for gas the next morning and she set off, wearing her best dress for the second day in a row, excited about her prospects. She even treated herself to a doughnut at the coffee shop on the south end of town. When she left, she saw four candy machines against the wall that she had never noticed before. She took them as a good sign — clearly some people were okay with vending machines being in their business. And it actually opened up a whole new line for her; she hadn’t thought places that served food would want these machines.

  She started at an industrial business complex with several shops just outside of town. The first place made trusses. Ruth wasn’t too sure what those were but gave it a try. The manager was in and gave her a very quick “not interested” — no kids ever came into his shop and his guys didn’t want candy. She tried the custom fabricator next door and got the same answer. The transmission shop, the ATV shop, and the custom carpentry place all said no. At the brake shop she was excited to see the manager was working his way through a bag of M&M’s. “You can always have some on hand,” she pointed out.

  “But these haven’t been sitting in a machine for five months.”

  “Well, it’s only a quarter.”

  “For a handful. Sorry, I go to Costco and get a box for, like, twenty cents. I don’t need a machine in here.”

  The last place in the complex was a cabinet maker. The nice old man who worked there said, “It’s just me here now and I can’t have sugar anymore on account of my diabetes.” He smiled at her reassuringly and added, “I’m sure someone in town will want one of your little candy machines.”

  Ruth skipped the next few places on her list. They were all industrial shops outside of town, so she knew there wasn’t much point wasting her time with them. She drove to the mall. There were machines by the entrance, which she knew about, but she thought that the toy store inside might be interested. As it turned out, they had their own machines. Theirs had toys and prizes in them as well — little plastic domes containing sticky hands, mini ring-toss games, stickers. She hadn’t thought of any of that.

  From the mall, Ruth walked down Main Street, popping into likely shops. She was surprised by how many of them had machines. Those that didn’t weren’t interested.

  She went back to her car and started driving around. She figured the bowling alley already had machines but checked to be sure — they did — and then tried the laundromat next door. The guy at the wash-and-fold counter seemed interested, but then said, “I could just get one myself. What does one of those cost, like, thirty bucks?”

  “They’re more than that,” Ruth said.

  “Well, whatever it is, I’m sure I can afford it.”

  Ruth wasn’t sure what to do with that. She didn’t think it was fair for him to just go and get his own machine after she had given him the idea, but she knew she couldn’t say that. Instead, she tried to think of a reason that he should go with hers, but when she couldn’t she started to feel the same panic she’d felt the day before. She was s
o close — someone had been interested, even if it had only been for a second — and now she was losing the potential future money again. The wash-and-fold guy said, “Are you all right?”

  Ruth said, “Thanks for your time,” and walked quickly to her car.

  On her way home she tried not to think about the money she’d wasted on driving around without managing to find a place for one of the machines. At home she made a sandwich and ate it at the kitchen table and went down her list again, first crossing off all the places she’d been and then crossing off the ones she’d passed by after deciding there was no point. Then she went through it again, crossing off the ones she figured wouldn’t be interested. The list was a lot shorter, but there were still a dozen places. She thought about heading back out, but then turned on the TV and ate a few handfuls of M&M’s and tried not to think about the money she’d wasted that day and how, if only the machines were out there, they’d be bringing in enough money that losing ten dollars wouldn’t mean a thing.

  She was warming up leftovers for the kids when Tom got home. She watched him get his tool belt out of the back of his truck and walk by her station wagon. He looked in the back and then headed up the deck stairs. He didn’t say anything about it while they ate dinner and she didn’t offer anything.

  It wasn’t until they were doing dishes that he asked, “No luck today?”

  She shook her head.

  “Well, there’s always tomorrow, right?”

  Ruth lay in bed that night thinking about tomorrow. She thought about how easy it should have been — the machines in a shop by the door, not in anyone’s way; every few weeks she’d come by to refill them and take out the two dollars a day in quarters that was going to make things so much easier. And then she thought about all the people she talked to and all the ones she would talk to, and how they could just go buy their own if they really wanted to. She thought about how stupid she was not to have seen that before and she thought of how horrible that guy was for telling her it was easy money and how horrible Norma was for telling her there was a place for them and, finally, how horrible it was that she just hadn’t thought the whole thing through properly.