Chapter 1: The Last Owner
The funeral director had put Norman’s reading glasses in a plastic evidence bag.
I kept looking at them instead of the casket. The bag lay beside the guest book, sealed at the top with a strip of blue tape, his glasses folded crookedly inside. One arm had a chip in the tortoiseshell where he’d dropped them on the stockroom floor and insisted they were fine. I had told him they were going to give him a headache. He’d said headaches were cheaper than new glasses.
The funeral director had labeled the bag PROPERTY. No one had asked him to do that. No one had asked him to put it on the table, either, but there it was, just below the spray of white flowers Norman would have called aggressively expensive.
My phone sat in my lap. I had not turned it off. I kept checking the screen for messages I knew would not arrive, then locking it before anyone could see what I was doing.
Veronica sat on my left in a black suit that fit like she had argued with it until it gave up. Her hand covered mine. She had held it through the service, the short walk to the graveside, and the first round of people who came up to tell me Norman had been one of a kind.
I wanted to ask which kind. The one who remembered a customer’s favorite director but forgot the store’s water bill? The one who brought me soup when I had the flu, then ate half of it before I woke up? The one who could spend forty minutes talking a teenager through the difference between a good monster mask and a licensed mask, and still call me at midnight because he’d locked himself out of his own office?
Instead, I nodded until the mourners moved on.
A man from the neighborhood said Norman had made Baltimore better. A woman I knew from the store said he had changed her life. A former employee I hadn’t seen in years told me he’d taught him how to love movies. They had all met Norman. That was the problem. Everybody had their own claim, and every one of them seemed reasonable.
When the last prayer ended, I stood because the people around me stood. The casket lowered out of sight. The funeral director gave us room to watch. I felt a small, stupid urge to tell him to stop. Norman was going to need his keys. He’d left his wallet at the store twice in the past month. There were three boxes on the back counter with things he meant to sort, and I had made a list so he could not forget again.
The list was still in my jacket pocket.
Outside, late July had turned the cemetery paths slick with heat. The sky was the flat gray Baltimore gets when the air has decided to sit on your shoulders. Veronica found the car and opened the passenger door for me.
«You have to eat something.»
«I had coffee.»
«Coffee is a liquid. It is not lunch.»
«You sound like my mother.»
«Your mother brought you a sandwich and you left it in the funeral home.»
I looked at her. She looked back without the slightest hint of triumph. I had, in fact, left it in the funeral home. It was probably on a folding chair beside a stack of hymnals now, turning warm.
«I’ll eat at the store.»
«You’ll eat in this car. I have a granola bar.»
«I don’t want your emergency granola.»
«You don’t get a vote.»
She pulled one from the center console and set it on my lap. The wrapper had a cartoon mountain range on it, the kind of packaging that promised an adventure and delivered dry oats. I tore it open and took a bite because Veronica had a court filing due Monday and would absolutely sit there until I finished the thing.
At the store, the bell above the door gave its familiar double jangle. I turned toward the counter before I remembered there would be no one behind it.
The place smelled like warm cardboard, dust, and the lemon cleaner I used on the glass cases. Graveyard Shift was narrow at the front and seemed to keep going after it should have ended, past the shelves of used DVDs, the locked cases, the office door, and the little screening room in back. Norman had added stock wherever there was a surface. A stack of VHS tapes sat under the counter because he had run out of shelf space sometime around 2004 and decided the problem could wait.
I’d unlocked the front door for the first time since the accident because I needed to check the mail and turn off the little radio Norman left on overnight. I had not planned to stay. I had also not planned to bring his glasses back from the funeral. They were in the passenger seat of my car now, beside the empty granola wrapper.
I reached for my phone to text him about the mail.
There was no message to send. I put the phone on the counter and turned the radio off.
A handwritten tag hung from the key ring in the drawer: OFFICE SPARE. Norman’s block capitals leaned forward, impatient even on a piece of masking tape. For years he had labeled everything as if the world might end before anyone could ask him what a thing was. The world had not ended. He had.
The shop phone rang. I jumped, then hated myself for jumping. It rang again before I picked up.
«Graveyard Shift.»
«Regan? It’s Marisol. I’m so sorry, honey. I didn’t know if you’d be there.»
«I’m here.»
«I found the flyer for the August screening in my bag. Norman said you were going to pick the films. I thought maybe we should postpone.»
I glanced at the old calendar behind the counter. Norman’s handwriting filled the margins: Halloween VHS night, effects demo, ask Regan about the thing with the fake blood. He had written October in red ink three times. The August screening was in my handwriting.
«Let’s leave it on the calendar for now,» I said. «I’ll call you tomorrow.»
«You don’t have to make decisions today.»
«It’s one screening.»
«I know.» Marisol paused. «I just wanted you to know there’s no rush.»
We said goodbye. I kept the receiver against my ear for a second after the line went dead, then returned it to the cradle. The store was quiet except for a delivery truck rattling down the commercial strip and somebody’s air conditioner fighting for its life upstairs.
Veronica came in carrying two paper bags. She had left her jacket in the car, but she was still wearing the funeral blouse and the expression she used when a witness had given her a very bad answer.
«I brought food.»
«I had the granola bar.»
«That was a courtesy snack. This is a meal.»
She set the bags on the counter and looked at the chairs near the back screening area. One of them had a tear down the side. Norman had said he would fix it before the next event. I had reminded him twice.
«You can say it,» I said.
«Say what?»
«That he wasn’t perfect.»
«I wasn’t going to.»
«You’ve been listening to people describe him as a saint for two hours.»
«I thought you were the one doing that.»
I started to object, then noticed the program from the service folded beside the register. I had put his best photograph on the front. Norman in front of the shop, wearing his old leather jacket, one hand on the shoulder of a kid who must have been fifteen. He had looked happy. I had chosen it because it was the version of him that belonged to everyone.
«He was good at making people feel like he had all the time in the world for them,» I said.
«He was.» Veronica opened the bag and took out two containers. «He was also bad at paying bills on time and let you cover too many of his shifts.»
«He didn’t let me. I offered.»
«You offered every time.»
«The store needed someone.»
«And he knew you’d be there.»
She didn’t say it cruelly. That made it harder to swat away. I pulled one of the containers closer. The lid was fogged from the heat. Veronica had brought rice and chicken from the place on the corner, the one Norman liked because they never asked him to repeat his order.
«He was going to fix the roof,» I said.
«He told you that for three years.»
«He had a plan.»
«He had a bucket.»
I opened my mouth, then shut it. The leak had been getting worse since June. There was a brown stain above the storage-room door and a blue bucket underneath it. Norman had insisted the bucket was temporary. I had changed the bucket twice.
Veronica tapped the container with her fork. «You don’t have to defend him to me.»
«I’m not.»
«Okay.»
She sat on the edge of the battered counter stool, leaving me room on the other chair. She didn’t ask what I was feeling. I was grateful and annoyed by this in equal measure.
We ate in the screening room. The overhead projector was still on its cart, aimed at the blank wall. Norman used to test the focus before every screening, even when we were showing something that looked better with the picture slightly washed out. I picked at the rice and listened to Veronica tell me about a client who had shown up to court in a shirt that said NO BAD DAYS. She didn’t make the story into a lesson. She just described the judge’s face, which was a good one.
I finished half the meal. She didn’t congratulate me.
By four, the front windows had gone gold with the low sun. I sorted the mail into piles: bills, store flyers, a postcard from a distributor, two envelopes addressed to Norman personally. I put the personal envelopes aside without opening them. The estate lawyer had told me not to make decisions about his papers. I did not know whether mail counted as papers. I left it in the drawer.
Norman’s old coffee mug sat beside the register, a black ceramic thing with a white skull printed on it. A chipped crescent was missing from the rim. I picked it up, meaning to move it to the office, then heard his voice in my head saying not to put it there because he’d forget where it was.
He had said that about everything. Keys, receipts, tools, his reading glasses. The shop had been arranged around what Norman might forget.
The mug went back beside the register.
Veronica had stepped outside to take a call from work. I could hear her through the open door, speaking in the measured tone she used when someone was trying to change the facts mid-sentence. I turned my phone over. The screen lit with a notification from a neighborhood group. Someone had posted the funeral details and a photograph of the shop. There were comments beneath it, all warm and full of exclamation points.
I opened my messages. Norman’s name was near the top because I had texted him every day. The last message was from me, about a shipment of imports arriving late. He had replied with a picture of a cardboard box and the caption “It has chosen violence.” I had sent him a skull emoji. The shipment had arrived the next morning.
I typed: The mail came. Two letters for you.
Then I deleted it.
The door bell rang again. Veronica returned and put her phone away.
«I have to go by the courthouse. I can come back tonight.»
«You don’t have to.»
«I know.» She slid my keys across the counter. «I’m going anyway.»
I took them. She waited a moment, then gathered the empty containers and left the bag on the counter for me to throw away. I watched her cross the street to her car, stopping once to let a cyclist pass. The afternoon had gotten brighter, the kind of sun that made the blacktop shine without cooling it.
I locked the front door after she left. The shop was still open on the August calendar. The event was still written in my hand. Norman’s mug stayed by the register, and the two letters stayed in the drawer.
I spent the next hour answering messages from customers who wanted to know when the store would reopen. I told them I didn’t know. I said I’d keep them posted. I did not say that I had no authority to promise them anything, because I had never needed authority to keep the store going before.
At seven, I turned off the lights and walked the length of the shop, checking the lock on the office and the basement door. I paused at the front window. A little paper bat Norman had taped there for last year’s Halloween was still hanging by one wing. I pressed the tape back into place.
My phone rang while I was reaching for the deadbolt. It was the estate lawyer.
«Regan, I’m sorry to call late. I wanted to let you know that Norman’s son is flying in tomorrow. Frederick Thompson. He’d like to meet with you about the store and the estate.»
I knew the name. Norman had mentioned Freddy in the easy, infrequent way he mentioned most of his family: a work trip, a new apartment, the fact that he’d stopped using the nickname at work. I knew he lived in California. I knew he was around my age. I knew Norman missed him, though he usually covered that with a complaint about time zones.
«Tomorrow?»
«He’ll be in Baltimore by the afternoon. I gave him your number.»
I looked at the paper bat. Its taped wing held for now.
«All right,» I said. «Tell him I’ll be at the store.»
The lawyer thanked me. I ended the call and remained by the door with the keys in my hand. Behind me, the dark shop kept its rows of films and dusty cases. Norman had been its last owner. By tomorrow, his son would be here to decide what happened next.
