Danny wanted a cup of coffee that did not taste like burnt radiator water, and he wanted his friend Marco’s twenty-year-old hatchback to stop making a noise like a silverware drawer falling down the stairs, and more than anything he wanted to put the car in reverse, cross the long iron bridge over the river, and be back on the interstate before anyone inside the store looked out the front window.
Instead, he pulled the emergency brake until it clicked six times. He got out on Front Street with his canvas duffel bag hooked over one shoulder.
The air smelled like wet river shale and fryer grease from the Riverside Diner across the street. Up the hill, the brick rowhouses climbed the steep grade in crooked teeth, and down at the bend, the old rolling mill sat behind its rusted chain-link fence with weeds growing through the loading bays. Everything in Calder looked like it had been washed in cold tea.
Danny stood at the curb in front of the plate glass window. Somebody, probably his sister Jo, had taped up a butcher-paper banner with red marker lettering: EVERYTHING MUST GO. Above the transom hung the long wooden sign his grandfather had painted in 1961. DUNMORE, it read in block cream letters on dark green, and screwed underneath the main plank on two rusted steel straps hung the narrower board: & SON. Walt had been the son then. Danny had never been anything more than cheap Saturday labor.
His thumb hooked the car keys in his pocket. Four days. He just had to haul boxes, sweep sawdust, keep his mouth shut until Wednesday night, and disappear before the turkey went in the oven on Thursday. He had eighty-four dollars in his checking account, no job as of Tuesday afternoon, and a lumpy corduroy sofa waiting for him in a Baltimore walk-up. If he left right now, he could be back on that sofa by noon.
Through the glass, behind the display of snow shovels and galvanized buckets, he saw his mother’s white head move past the register.
Danny let go of the keys, pushed the brass thumb-latch down, and walked in. The cowbell on the leaf spring above the door clanked twice.
The smell hit him right under the breastbone: cut brass from the key machine, raw linseed oil soaked into eighty-year-old maple floorboards, and the sweet, dusty millet scent of the bulk birdseed bins.
The store was already half full of people rooting through card tables of marked-down socket sets and loose plumbing traps. Down at the main counter, perched on a tall wooden stool with an aluminum cane hooked over the edge, sat Walt. His father looked smaller inside his flannel shirt, his bad leg stuck out stiffly toward the center aisle, his gray hair trimmed high and flat above his ears. Next to him, Jo was pricing boxes of drywall screws with a red grease pencil, and Ruth stood by the old manual cash drawer with a stack of brown paper bags.
Jo saw him first. Her mouth pinched. She did not put down the grease pencil.
Ruth’s hands flew up from the paper bags. “Danny,” she said, coming around the counter with her brisk, flat-footed walk. She smelled like peppermint and tally sheets. She grabbed him by the elbows, kissed his stubbled cheek, and patted his shoulder twice, hard, as if checking a melon. “You found parking. Put your bag in the back. There’s coffee in the percolator.”
“Morning, Ma,” Danny said. “Traffic was murder on the bridge. Two pigeons and a guy on a tractor.”
He looked past her shoulder at the stool.
Walt looked up from a clipboard of inventory sheets. His eyes were pale behind his bifocals, the skin under them pleated like walnut shells. He looked at Danny’s face, then down at Danny’s duffel bag, then at the wall clock above the pegboard.
“You’re late,” Walt said. “Nails need weighed.”
“Good to see you too, Pop,” Danny said, grinning with his teeth together. “Let me just roll out the red carpet, grab my tiara, and we’ll get right on the ten-penny commons.”
Nobody laughed. Jo didn’t even blink; she just drew a hard red 50% across a box of toggle bolts. Walt tapped the brass scoop beside the big wooden nail carousel with the tip of his pencil and looked back down at his clipboard.
“Drop your coat in the office, Danny,” Ruth said mildly, turning back to a man holding three cans of tung oil. “Mrs. Ocampo is going to be here in ten minutes for her thistle seed and I don’t have the two-pound bags made up.”
“Heard,” Danny said.
He walked down the center aisle, the oiled boards groaning in the exact spots he remembered from when he was fifteen, dropped his bag behind the office door without looking inside, and came back out rolling up the sleeves of his thermal shirt. He grabbed a stack of brown kraft sacks, slid the brass weight along the balance beam of the counter scale to one pound, and plunged the heavy scoop into the bin of eight-penny finishing nails. The iron slid through the scoop with a dry, metallic rush that set his teeth on edge and put him right back in tenth grade.
By ten o’clock the front door wasn’t closing all the way before the next customer caught it. Word had gone around Calder that Keystone Lofts was gutting the building come December to put in exposed-brick studio apartments for commuters, and half the county had turned out to buy forty-cent washers and look at the floorboards one last time.
Danny fell into it the way he fell into a Friday night dinner rush on a six-burner line.
“Behind you, Jo,” he muttered, side-stepping her in the narrow paint aisle with two gallons of porch enamel in each hand, spinning on his heel before she could snap at him. When three guys in hunting jackets crowded the bolt bins arguing over carriage threads, Danny waded in, plucked the right sizes out by thumb-feel, twisted them into brown paper squares, scribbled the prices on the outside with a carpenter’s pencil, and had them moving toward Ruth’s register in ninety seconds flat.
“Still got the hands for it, Danny,” said Earl Kemper, leaning his forearms on the plumbing counter. Earl was eighty-two, had plumbed half the bathrooms on the south slope, and wore a braided leather cap that looked like it had been oiled with bacon fat. He held up two copper elbows and a roll of thread tape. “Put these on the house sheet, will you? I don’t carry folding money on Saturdays.”
Jo didn’t look up from her clipboard. “House accounts closed yesterday, Earl. Everything’s cash and carry until Wednesday. Thirty percent off.”
Earl frowned at the copper fittings as if they had insulted him. “Walt,” he called down the counter. “Since when don’t I have an account in here? I put the cast-iron stack in your upstairs toilet during the Nixon administration.”
Walt didn’t shift on his stool. “Pay the girl, Earl. Ledger’s closed. Knock forty percent off, Jo, he’s going to complain about it at the barber shop either way.”
“I’m right here,” Earl said, digging a flat leather coin purse out of his overalls while Danny bagged his fittings. “You back for good, Danny? Heard you was cooking fancy down in Maryland. Duck livers and whatnot.”
“Mostly whatnot, Earl,” Danny said, folding the top of the bag twice. “Steaks, chops, high-speed heartburn. Just up to help clear the rafters.”
“Well, they’re clearing ’em,” Earl said, looking up at the pressed-tin ceiling before shuffling toward Ruth.
Right behind him came Mrs. Ocampo in her quilted lilac coat, pulling a two-wheeled wire shopping cart that squeaked on the left axle.
“Every Tuesday for thirty-one years,” she told Danny as he hefted a ten-pound sack of black oil sunflower seed and two smaller bags of thistle into her cart. “Where am I supposed to go now, out to the highway? Those big orange stores smell like fertilizer and nobody knows where the suet cages are. Who’s going to feed my cardinals in January, Walt?”
From his stool, Walt’s voice actually softened half a notch. “I gave you three sacks for the price of one, Clara. Keep it in a dry trash can on the porch so the mice don’t get in it. Those birds are fatter than groundhogs anyway.”
“They are not,” Mrs. Ocampo said, patting Danny’s forearm with a gloved hand before wheeling her cart toward the door. On the way out she stopped by the front table, picked up a stubby red screwdriver, and added that to the basket too.
Ten minutes later a young couple in clean boots came in looking dazed, holding an empty red steel toolbox. They had just bought the old Kowalski rowhouse on Fourth Street, they explained, and didn’t own a hammer.
“Say no more,” Danny said. “First house? Do not buy the cheap Phillips-head, the tip strips out the first time you look at a cabinet hinge sideways. Take this one, sixteen-ounce claw hammer with the hickory handle, slip-joint pliers, tape measure that actually locks, utility knife, extra blades, and a roll of gray duct tape for when you get tired and want to cry. Twenty-two bucks at the register, tell my mother I gave you the newlywed discount.”
From the end of the counter, Walt watched him over the tops of his glasses. He didn’t say a word. When Danny glanced down that way after sending the couple off with their rattling toolbox, Walt looked back down at his clipboard and scratched a mark beside Hammers, 16 oz.
“Fourteen hammers left,” Jo said aloud, slapping a yellow sticky note onto a shelf edge. “Sixteen cans of stain, four snow shovels, eighty-two days since my brother returned a phone call, and three hours of him acting like the mayor of Front Street while I reconcile the vendor returns.”
“Heard, chef,” Danny said, lifting a crate of galvanized gutter spikes onto the mark-down table. “Want me to tally the snow shovels or just throw myself off the bridge now to save you the paperwork?”
“Don’t do it on company time, Daniel,” Jo said. “I’d have to fill out an incident report.”
At one o’clock Ruth disappeared into the back office and came out with a butcher-paper platter of thick white-bread sandwiches spread with chickpea salad she had mashed up with celery and pickle relish, along with a thermos of vegetable broth. She set two sandwiches on a paper towel right next to Danny’s elbow while he was untangling extension cords, and put cheese and bologna down for Walt and Jo.
“How’s the kitchen down there, Danny?” Ruth asked, pouring broth into four mismatched mugs. “You still at the harbor place with the copper awning?”
“Oh, you know how it is, Ma,” Danny said, talking around a mouthful of bread so he wouldn’t have to look her in the eye. “Hot, loud, full of guys named Carlos who can julienne twenty pounds of onions while watching soccer on their phones. Busy season coming up.”
“You look thin in the neck,” she said.
“Clean living and stairwell sprints. Eighty-six the motherly concern, I’m eating the second sandwich right now.”
Around three in the afternoon, the crowd thinned to a few old men picking over loose drill bits. A guy in a borough maintenance vest came in needing four duplicates of a padlock key for the water department shed.
Jo was down in the basement checking boxes of furnace filters, Ruth was in the bathroom, and Danny was on his knees at the bottom of aisle three bundling garden stakes with twine.
Behind the counter, the aluminum cane clattered against the wood floor.
Walt had slid off the stool. He had the four brass blanks and the master key in his left hand, his cane hooked over his wrist, shuffling sideways toward the heavy cast-iron key machine bolted to the back bench.
“Pop,” Danny said, getting up off his knees. “Stay on the stool, I got the keys.”
“I cut keys in here before you were born,” Walt said to the wall. “Go bundle your sticks.”
He wedged the master key into the left-hand vise jaw and reached across to tighten the right-hand wing nut over the first blank. That right clamp had been stripped slightly on the third thread since before Danny was born; if you didn’t lift the brass collar with your thumb while you turned the wing nut, it bound up sideways. Walt’s thick fingers twisted the nut. It stuck. He leaned his weight into it to force the turn, his right foot slipped on a scattering of dry millet seed beneath the counter, and his bad hip gave out with a sharp, ugly hitch.
The cane flew sideways into the nail bins. Walt went down toward the iron corner of the paint shaker.
Danny didn’t remember crossing the eight feet of floor. He vaulted the low gate at the end of the counter, got his left forearm under Walt’s armpit and his right hand across Walt’s collarbone, and took the dead weight against his own thigh before his father’s head could clip the steel clamp of the shaker.
For three seconds they stayed wedged together between the counter and the nail bins. Walt’s chest rose and fell hard against Danny’s ribs. He smelled like wintergreen rub, wool, and old paper. Under the flannel shirt, his shoulder blade felt as thin and dry as a slat from an orange crate.
Walt’s hand gripped Danny’s wrist with surprising iron strength, pushed down once to get his good foot under him, and then shoved Danny’s arm away.
“Floor needs swept,” Walt muttered, his face gray around the mouth.
Danny bent down, picked up the aluminum cane, and held it out handle-first. He didn’t look at his father’s face. “Here.”
Walt took the cane. The man from the water department was staring at the ceiling down by the front door, pretending to read a display card of tap washers.
Walt stumped two steps back to his stool, eased himself onto the seat with a slow, tight intake of breath through his nose, and sat still until the color came back into his ears. Then he pointed a blunt finger at the key machine.
“Bring that blank here,” he said.
Danny unscrewed the jammed vise, lifted out the chewed-up brass blank, and stepped back to the machine with a fresh one. Walt didn’t stay at the register; he slid off the stool again, slower this time, and came to stand six inches behind Danny’s right shoulder.
“You’re forcing the collar,” Walt said, his voice low so the water department guy wouldn’t hear. “Thumb under the lip. Lift while you turn, quarter inch left, then snug it. The spring’s flat on the bottom.”
Danny put his thumb under the cool brass lip, lifted a hair, and turned the wing nut. It slid home smooth as butter.
“Keep your elbow down when you bring the carriage across,” Walt said behind him. “Let the wheel bite on its own. Don’t push it.”
Danny flipped the toggle switch. The tiny motor whined up to pitch, and he guided the brass blank across the rotary cutter. A bright yellow curl of brass dust sprayed across his knuckles, warm from the friction. When the cut finished, he switched the motor off and took the wire brush to the teeth to knock the burrs off, just the way Walt had stood behind him on an upturned milk crate and made him do it in 1993.
Walt took the finished key, squinted at the teeth against the fluorescent light, and dropped it onto the counter. “Do the other three,” he said, and went back to his stool.
* * *
By Monday night the store looked like a mouth with half its teeth knocked out. Whole sections of pegboard stood bare, showing pale ghost-outlines of saws, wrenches, and trowels that had hung in the same spots since the Kennedy administration.
Walt and Ruth went home at five-thirty after Walt’s hip started stiffening up in the November damp. Danny and Jo stayed behind to haul the remaining seasonal stock out of the back storage room and consolidate the front tables for Tuesday.
It was cold in the stockroom. A single bare bulb hung on a braided cord between towers of cardboard cartons. Danny was up on the third rung of the wooden stepladder, handing down boxes of canning jars and rubber faucet washers to Jo, who was stacking them on a flatbed hand truck.
“What’s this box in the corner?” Danny asked, squinting into the dust behind the furnace flue. “Looks like fifty pounds of sash weights.”
“Leave them,” Jo said, slapping her palms against her jeans. “The developer’s contractors can scrap them. My lower back is done.”
“Look at you, leaving inventory behind,” Danny said, climbing down and wiping his forehead with his sleeve. “Who are you and what have you done with the warden?”
“I start at the county assessor’s office on December second,” Jo said. “Eight-thirty to four-thirty, health insurance, paid holidays, a swivel chair that doesn’t have duct tape holding the foam in, and zero people asking me why a three-quarter-inch galvanized union costs four dollars more than it did in 1987. The developers can burn the sash weights for warmth.”
“Gonna miss the glamour of retail, though,” Danny said, leaning against the doorframe and pulling a crushed pack of gum from his pocket. “The perfume of mouse droppings. The thrill of sorting metric hex nuts.”
Jo stopped with her hands on the handle of the hand truck. Under the bare bulb, the lines around her mouth looked deep, cut into the same stubborn jawline Walt had.
“Don’t do that,” she said.
“Do what?”
“Make a cute little routine out of it.” She shoved the hand truck six inches forward so the iron wheels clanged against the threshold. “Twenty years, Daniel. While you were down in Baltimore playing chef and changing your phone number every time a lease ran out, I was in here six days a week. I was in here when Owen had chicken pox sleeping on a cot behind the paint mixer. I was in here the morning my divorce went through at the courthouse, ringing up snow melt for people who wanted to know why my ex-husband’s truck was parked down by the tavern.”
Danny looked at the stick of gum in his fingers, then folded it back into the foil. “Nobody chained you to the register, Jo.”
“Yes, you did!” Her voice cracked off the concrete block walls. “The day you cleaned out the operating account and walked out that front door, somebody had to stay! Dad couldn’t lift fifty-pound sacks by himself even back then, and Mom had the books, and the bank wanted to call the credit line after you bounced the distributor checks. You took the money, you blew it on a dining room with linen napkins that lasted four months, and you got to leave. I got the store.”
Danny stared at the concrete floor between his boots. There was an old stain there where a gallon of barn red had split open twenty-five years ago.
“I paid it back,” he said quietly. “Every dime, Jo. Two hundred and twenty-two dollars and twenty-two cents a month for three years.”
“You think a check in an envelope pays for twenty years of Dad sitting on that stool looking at the front door every time the bell rings?” Jo swiped the back of her wrist across her eyes, furious that they were wet. “You get to swan in here for four days, tell jokes to Mrs. Ocampo, pack your little bag, and go back to your kitchen and your apartment and your life where nobody owes anybody anything.”
Danny let out a short breath through his nose. He leaned the back of his head against the wooden doorframe and looked up at the exposed joists.
“I got fired on Tuesday,” he said.
Jo stopped with her hand halfway to her face.
“Place got bought out by a hotel group,” Danny said, his voice flat and conversational. “New executive chef brought his own line crew from Philadelphia. Gave me two weeks’ severance in cash, which went to my landlord so he wouldn’t throw my pans on the sidewalk, and since Wednesday night I’ve been sleeping on a five-foot purple corduroy sofa in Marco’s living room above a laundromat. If I roll over after two in the morning, the springs poke me right in the kidney and the spin cycle downstairs shakes my teeth.”
Jo stared at him. The stockroom was dead quiet except for the pilot light hissing in the water heater.
“You don’t have a job?” she said.
“Currently accepting applications for dishwasher, pantry boy, or charming village idiot,” Danny said, flashing a quick, crooked grin. “Hey, look on the bright side. If I stay on Marco’s couch till Christmas, my clothes will smell like dryer sheets for free.”
Jo didn’t laugh, and she didn’t yell. Her shoulders dropped an inch inside her cardigan. She looked at his worn work boots, the frayed cuff of his thermal shirt, and the gray circles under his eyes that he’d been hiding behind fast talk since Saturday morning.
“Why didn’t you say anything to Mom?” Jo asked quietly.
“And say what?” Danny pushed off the doorframe and grabbed the handles of the hand truck before she could. “Hey, Ma, forty-three years old, no savings, no restaurant, brought my laundry home in a duffel bag? Come on. Clear the aisle, I’m bringing the canning jars out.”
He wheeled the load past her into the darkened store. Jo followed him out, and when they locked the front door twenty minutes later, she didn’t call him Daniel once.