Chapter 1: The Price of Brass
The lamp was the only thing in the pawn shop that did not appear to be waiting for somebody to regret a decision.
Mara Whitfield stopped in front of it with a cardboard box pressed against her hip. Outside, November rain crawled down the windows. The road beyond them led toward Corinth, where she had spent two days sorting the belongings of a cousin she had known chiefly through Christmas cards.
She had come inside looking for packing paper.
“That one’s not a teapot,” the old man behind the counter said.
“I wasn’t planning to make tea.”
“Good. Had a lady bring it back for that.”
He folded his newspaper with the solemn care of a person interrupting important national business to discuss a ridiculous object. His name, stitched above his shirt pocket, was Otis.
Mara put down the box. The lamp was small enough to fit between her hands, tarnished brown around its handle, with an uneven patch of gold beneath the spout. At first the decoration appeared to be a pattern of reeds. When she leaned closer, the reeds became a succession of doors.
She turned her head. Reeds again.
“May I?”
Otis hesitated, then pushed a square of felt toward her.
“Use that. Leaves marks on your hands.”
Mara lifted the lamp through the cloth. The weight surprised her. She restored antique metalwork for a living, which meant she had spent years being disappointed by things advertised as old brass. This was brass. It was also assembled in a way she could not explain. The handle flowed into the body without a solder line. The underside bore no stamp.
“Where did you get it?”
“Fellow in a burgundy suit. Long time back.”
“Did he give you a history?”
“Said I ought to keep it somewhere nobody would fuss with it.”
Mara glanced around at the shelves of drills, clocks, fishing reels, and ceramic angels. “Naturally you put it in a shop.”
Otis scratched his cheek. “Wasn’t my finest business decision.”
Something tapped inside the lamp.
Mara looked at him.
“Expansion,” he said.
“It’s cold in here.”
“Contraction, then.”
She smiled despite herself. For the first time since entering her cousin’s silent house, she felt an interest in something that had nothing to do with death, paperwork, or how much grief could fit inside a rented storage unit.
Her aunt June would have loved the lamp. June had collected things that demanded questions: a broken compass, a crooked silver candlestick, a little painting of a boat that nobody could identify. Her Beaufort house had held them all comfortably, as though it understood that usefulness was a poor measure of company.
Now that house belonged to Mara. So did its leaking kitchen window, its unpaid renovation bills, and the empty chair on the back porch.
“How much?” she asked.
Otis named a price low enough to make her examine the underside again.
“Is there something wrong with it?”
He looked at the lamp, then at her. For a moment the humor left him.
“I wouldn’t make promises to it.”
“I rarely promise anything to the inventory.”
“Probably wise.”
She should have asked another question. Later she would remember that moment with exceptional clarity: the wet window, the felt square, Otis rubbing his thumb over the edge of his newspaper. But she was tired, and the lamp was beautiful, and the price would leave enough money for gasoline.
Her hatchback was packed to the windows with boxes, a framed mirror, and a lamp of the ordinary electrical variety. She asked whether he shipped purchases.
“Where to?”
“Beaufort. South Carolina.”
He found a clean carton beneath the counter. “You going straight home?”
“After one night somewhere with a mattress that doesn’t come out of a sofa.”
He wrote her address on a receipt. She checked the spelling, paid for the brass lamp and shipping, and bought the packing paper she had originally come for.
Otis wrapped the lamp without polishing it.
“You always handle things that carefully?” she asked.
“Only the ones I’m pleased to see leave.”
Mara laughed. She thought he was joking.
At the door she stopped to pull up her hood. Her phone buzzed with a photograph from Cal Bennett: her porch steps, newly repaired, with a crooked piece of old lumber propped beside them.
Found the source of the wobble, his message said. Structural optimism.
She typed, Did you bill me for the diagnosis?
Friend rate. Two sandwiches.
She looked at the picture longer than she needed to. Cal had been her friend before she understood how much damage that little word could conceal. He had held the ladder while she climbed out of June’s window at seventeen. He had carried June’s coffin last spring. Between those two things stretched twelve years of telephone calls that had become less frequent, then awkward, then suddenly precious again.
Home tomorrow, she wrote.
His answer arrived before she reached the car.
Good.
No extra words. Cal had never wasted them when one would make her chest hurt perfectly well.
She drove away with rain tapping the roof and the receipt tucked in the pocket of her coat.
Inside the shop, Otis finished the wrapping. He set the carton beside the outgoing parcels and went back to his newspaper.
The box knocked.
He did not look up.
It knocked again, harder.
Otis rose, fetched the tape dispenser, and added three strips across the lid.
“I told you,” he informed the carton, “I wasn’t dealing with that.”
A muffled protest came from inside.
Otis carried the package to the highest shelf, switched off the counter light, and put on his coat. At the door he glanced back once.
“South Carolina,” he said. “Try to behave.”
The bell above the door rang behind him.
For a while there was silence.
Then something inside the package laughed.
