Chapter 1 — The Woman at the Counter
The first thing the saleswoman took away was the stool. She caught it with the toe of one black pump and pushed it under the counter before Miriam Bell could sit down. The second thing was the tray.
“You’re just like the others. It’s cheaper across the street.”
For a woman who had spent the last twenty minutes studying an account that was short four million dollars, Miriam found herself absurdly interested in that stool. It had a little brass plate on the crossbar. She knew what the plate said because she had been nine years old when her father screwed it on, and she had held his coffee while he worked. FOR ALL THE TIRED FEET, it said. Her mother had thought that funny enough to engrave.
Behind her sunglasses she looked at the woman’s name badge. Claire Mercer. Below the name, in lettering so small a customer would have to lean across the glass to read it, were the words Senior Client Associate.
“You act like you own this place.”
Claire let out a little breath through her nose. For a second the two women stood looking at each other in the bright, expensive light. Then shoes struck the marble behind Miriam. Peter Vale, general manager of the Bell Arcade flagship, came running up on her left. At fifty-eight he had a slight limp, and Miriam heard the uneven beat before she saw his reflection.
“Madam Chair. The transfer papers just need your signature.”
He put the open folder into Miriam’s left hand. A square yellow flag marked the signature line. In his other hand he held the green fountain pen her mother used to keep in a flour jar because nobody ever looked for a fountain pen in a flour jar.
Miriam took off her sunglasses. The blonde woman’s gaze had dropped to the green pen. That, interestingly, was what frightened her.
“Why is someone like you working in my store?”
The words came out considerably colder than Miriam felt. Around them, the ordinary sounds of the shop stopped. No rustle of tissue, no clasp clicking shut. A tiny diamond earring slipped from the hand of a young man at the piercing counter. They heard it strike the glass.
Claire opened her mouth. Before she could answer, a small voice spoke from near Miriam’s elbow.
“Could I have my number back?”
The girl must have been there the whole time. She had on a red school cardigan, with a paper daffodil pinned to the pocket, and she stood on tiptoe to see into the case. One of her front teeth had grown in crooked. She was watching Claire’s right fist.
Claire’s fingers opened. In her palm was a little pink square folded into quarters.
“I thought you left,” she said.
“You said to get somebody grown.”
“I did say that.”
“I got her.” The girl pointed at Miriam.
Until this moment Miriam had been unaware of her promotion to somebody grown. She set the transfer folder down on her side of the glass, keeping her thumb on the yellow flag. “What’s your name?”
“Alma.”
“Did you come over and ask me something, Alma?”
“I was about to. Then she said it was cheaper across the street. I think she thought we were together.”
Behind the counter, Claire had taken on the look of somebody who has missed the last step in a dark house. Peter indicated the folder with his pen. “Miriam, the trustees are on the phone upstairs. We have until noon.”
It was eleven eighteen on a Thursday in the middle of April. Outside the store a man in a paper crown was handing out samples of orange juice. Cars went down Dean Street with their windows open, and from the bus shelter across the way a recorded voice told a waiting passenger that the number seven was coming in six minutes. Later, when Miriam tried to remember exactly when she had decided to risk the sale, she would remember those six minutes. Long enough to look at a piece of paper. Long enough for a bus to come and take a child away convinced that what happened here was what grown people meant by business.
“Give Alma her number, please.”
Claire laid it on the glass. Alma carefully unfolded it. Inside was a repair ticket for a yellow gold wedding ring, half round, narrow, with a shallow dent opposite the solder seam. The handwriting in the space marked RECEIVED BY sloped steeply uphill. Miriam knew the hand. It had signed every school report and every birthday card until her mother lost the strength to hold a pen.
The date was more than twenty years old.
“Who gave you this?”
“My dad. He’s outside moving the car. He said just ask if it was ready, because sometimes old people get real upset when you ask a whole bunch of questions.”
“That’s very considerate of him,” Peter said. He had taken half a step closer. Miriam noticed a little bead of green ink hanging from the nib of his pen.
“I meant my grandma is old. I wasn’t calling anybody here old.”
“I’ll bear up,” said Miriam. For the first time the girl smiled.
She was not smiling a moment later, when Peter turned the ticket over with his forefinger and said, “That can’t possibly be one of ours.”
There was blue print on the back. There was a telephone number with the old area code, a promise to give an estimate before undertaking repairs, and the sentence her mother had added after fighting with three different printers who all said it was a waste of space. You may ask to see your property at any time.
Miriam had been named board chair the previous autumn. Her mother’s family still owned the land, the building and fifty-one percent of Bell Arcade Jewelers. The transfer on the counter would buy the other forty-nine percent from the estate of her mother’s partner and bring the repair business, which had been operated separately for years, back under one roof. At the end of the week Miriam would finally be able to say she owned every inch of the floor she stood on. In the ordinary way of things she would have signed at ten, taken the noon train home and been at her son’s school in time to see him play a tree in The Wizard of Oz.
In the ordinary way of things a little girl should have been able to ask for a ring.
“Get me the repair book for that year,” Miriam said.
“There isn’t a book on the sales floor anymore,” Claire said. “They took the desk out.”
“Then where do you send people who want things fixed?”
Claire looked across the street. In the bus shelter, the waiting passenger stood and folded his paper. Behind him, between a bakery and a payday lender, a narrow yellow sign read PRICE & DAUGHTER, WATCHES AND REPAIRS.
“I see,” Miriam said. “When you said it was cheaper over there, you meant me to go to that shop.”
“Yes.”
“Was that supposed to help me?”
There was still time for Claire to say yes and let everybody have an easier morning. She looked at Alma. “No.”
The girl refolded her ticket along the worn creases. Through the glass doors a man in a blue work shirt hurried in carrying a parking receipt between his teeth. He was about forty, with the broad shoulders of somebody accustomed to lifting things by himself. He took the receipt out of his mouth.
“Baby, I told you to wait inside the door.”
“Dad, I got somebody grown.”
“So I see.” He recognized the ticket before he noticed Miriam. His thumb brushed an old crack in the paper. “Okay. What did they say?”
“They’re looking,” Alma told him. With her whole face turned up toward her father, the words sounded like a promise someone else had made on Miriam’s behalf.
Peter put the cap back on the green pen. The trustees were still waiting, he reminded her quietly. No one had guaranteed an extension.
“Tell them I’ve found property that may belong to a customer,” Miriam said. “Tell them I’m reading the schedule of liabilities again.”
“Over one wedding ring?”
She saw the first real fear come into his face, quite unlike Claire’s. Claire had looked as if somebody had finally turned the lights on. Peter looked as if somebody had found the switch.
“No,” she said. “Over the fact that you knew it was a wedding ring before you read the ticket.”
Chapter 2 — What the Glass Kept Out
Alma’s father was called Daniel Ruiz. He worked nights maintaining the ventilation systems at the public hospital and had been up since a quarter to seven the previous evening. He explained this as a courtesy in case he said something that made no sense. His mother, who was called Beatriz, had never left her wedding ring anywhere that she could remember. According to her, the ring was in her bedroom in a wooden bowl shaped like a pear. For years there had been no reason for anybody to check.
“Then she got it into her head she wanted to give it to my brother’s wife,” Daniel said. “They’re having a baby and Mom has the idea it’s important the baby should have something its grandpa touched. She’s got a dozen pictures of him holding me. Apparently I don’t count.”
“You’re not a thing, Dad,” Alma said.
“That would explain some of it.”
He had the kind of smile that invited a stranger into the family joke without giving her permission to laugh at his family. Miriam drew the stool out from under the glass for his daughter. She asked Claire to bring a chair for Daniel too. He took the chair but stayed standing behind it, his two hands on the back.
Peter had gone upstairs. From behind a mirror over the pearl counter came a brisk ticking. The furniture, the lighting and the faces had all changed since Miriam had worked here summers, yet the building retained small peculiarities that could make her ten years old in an instant. That ticking was a pipe supplying the sink at her mother’s old bench. It ticked whenever somebody upstairs ran the hot water down to cold.
“Was there anything else in the bowl?” she asked.
“A clasp from a baby bracelet. My first apartment key. One of those little screwdrivers you get in an eyeglass kit. All things she hadn’t seen in years. Down in the bottom there was the ticket.”
“Why come today?”
“Thursday’s when she lets me borrow the car.”
It was such an ordinary answer that Miriam was embarrassed by having imagined a complicated one. For the last six months almost everybody who called her had needed something to happen before a meeting or after a vote. She had started to believe that everybody else’s life worked that way too.
At the next counter the young man who had dropped the stud was on his knees with his phone flashlight. Other customers were looking at a screen of miniature clocks with the extravagant discretion of people listening to a quarrel over dinner. Miriam suggested moving into the little room at the back where engaged couples used to try rings. On hearing this, Daniel finally removed his hands from the chair.
“I’ll go back there if you come with us,” he said. “The last place said if I wouldn’t leave my ticket they couldn’t look.”
“What last place?”
“The one across the street. Lady there said she needed the number. I heard she needed the ticket. We got our wires crossed. It was my mistake.”
He was being careful. Later she would hear him speak freely, and the difference would make her ashamed of the easy patience she had mistaken for his character.
Inside the little room there were three portraits of European men in waistcoats, none of whom had anything to do with the business. The walls used to be covered with photographs of couples in ordinary coats wearing brand-new rings. Her mother had put them up with tape and left them until the corners turned brown. One couple had sent a photograph every year afterward, standing in the same position with gradually less hair and more children. Miriam wondered where all those pictures had gone.
She took her phone out and photographed both sides of the ticket with Daniel’s permission. In the enlarged image she could see the number clearly. B-6148. After the eight was a little sideways stroke she had taken for a check mark. She touched it with her finger and suddenly remembered something in the top drawer of her father’s desk.