Chapter 5

My mother wasn’t home, but I heard my sister, Mindy, chattering on the phone (Quelle surprise!), so I went up and took a nap. I was awakened roughly by Mindy pounding on the closed door, shouting, “Hey! Dinner’s ready!” Some things never change.

I washed my face to wake myself up, and went down to dinner. I got some raised eyebrows when I said I’d found a summer job.

“You haven’t even been home for, what, two days, Tom? Are you that anxious to get out of the house?” asked my mother.

“I’m nearly broke. If I was going to get a job, I needed to do it before all the high school kids start looking in earnest.”

She asked where it was and what I’d be doing, and I filled them in.

“I’ve never heard of it. Have you, dear?” she asked my father. He shook his head.

“It was new to me, too. Apparently they don’t do any local advertising, don’t even have a sign on the door. It’s all catalog sales, with the occasional walk-in; the address is on their catalog. Mostly phone and mail orders.”

“I’d be curious to see what they sell. Bring home a catalog, if you can.”

She moved on, then, homing in on Mindy, who had finals approaching and hinting, not very subtly, that she’d better get her act together if she wanted to get into college.

Mindy looked like she didn’t really care much. She’d never been much interested in the academic side of school. It was merely a convenient place to hang out with her friends and flirt with boys.

I’d made an effort last Christmas to implant a sense of satisfaction from learning in order to encourage her, but I wasn’t sure how much of a long-term effect it had had. I should probably follow up on that. I had set myself a pretty strong boundary early on about messing with the heads of my family, and it had taken some convincing myself to break that rule with Mindy.

Even though it was Mindy’s turn I stepped in to help with the dishes so my mother would cut me some slack if I needed to borrow the car.

The phone rang and Mindy was off like a shot. Time, tide and gossip wait for no one, so get to the phone as fast as you can. After a few moments, I heard, “Tom, it’s for you.” I could hear the disappointment in her voice.

For once, she didn’t stay by the phone to tell me to hurry up, that she was expecting a call.

“Hello?”

“I didn’t interrupt dinner, did I?”

“Oh, Karen! No, we’d already finished, we were just doing the dishes. Nice to hear your voice. What’s up?”

“Oh, nothing much. I’m just getting myself mentally prepared to start work tomorrow. I know I should be grateful to have a job that pays decently and uses at least some part of my brain, but sometimes the days there are just so tedious. So that’s why I called. To have someone to complain to.”

“At last. A purpose to my life. To hear your complaints and commiserate with you at the injustice of it all.”

“Are you going to give me a hard time, too? I thought I could at least count on you to tell me how underutilized I am.”

“Well, you are that, for sure. But at least it occupies some of your idle hours. Oh, I meant to tell you, I got a job today.”

“I didn’t know that you were looking. What is it?”

I filled her in with the few details I had, and she said she’d never heard of the place.

“Yeah, that’s what my parents said, too. Apparently they don’t do a lot of local business, mostly mail order and phone sales. Weird place. It looks like a hoarder’s garage, no organization to it at all, at least to the shop part of it, which is all that I saw today. I hope the storage area is better organized.”

“If you’re that close, maybe we can have lunch together some days. I don’t get that much time for lunch, but you won’t be that far away from the bookstore.”

“That would brighten my day, having lunch with you. You’re on.”

“Okay. Maybe you should come over for dinner later this week. My dad’s back into his grilling mania with a vengeance. The fridge is getting a bit filled with leftovers. I told you he always cooks too much, right?”

“You did, and I’ll do what I can to help make a dent in the food surplus.”

“I knew I could count on you! Okay, I’ll let you know what day works. I have to see what his work schedule is this week. Good luck tomorrow.”

“Thanks. Same to you. Talk to you soon.”

She hung up and I realized that I had a small smile on my face. Seeing her, talking to her, reading her emails, they all put a smile on my face. I wondered if other guys reacted the same way with their girlfriends.

I read for a while, then set my alarm clock and went to bed. I wasn’t sure what tomorrow was going to be like, but I wanted to be rested up for it.

When I woke in the morning, I had a quick breakfast and hopped the bus. It was crowded with people also headed to work. Normally I rode it in off hours, when it was only half-filled, but today I had to stand all the way, holding on to a stanchion.

I found my way back to Wallace Specialties without getting lost. Not quite nine AM, but I wouldn’t get dinged for arriving early.

The door was open, but there was no one in the shop. I was about to call out when Ted poked his head out of the door behind the counter.

“Ah, Carter. I thought I heard the bell. Glad you’re here. Ready to get started? Lemme show you how things work. Follow me.”

He led me into the back, and it was as chaotic as I’d suspected. There was a corridor behind the wall which seemed to extend all the way down the ell, serving all the storefronts. The ones closest to Ted’s storefront had open doors, but the ones further down, belonging to other stores, were closed and presumably locked.

“Okay. I know it looks like a hoarder’s den,” he said as we went into the first open door, “but there’s a logic to it. Really. We store things by catalog number.”

There was metal shelving lining the space from front to back, with narrow aisles between the rows.

“Each row of shelving has the range of catalog numbers in that row posted on the front end, and each shelf has -- or is supposed to have -- the catalog numbers of the item that’s supposed to be stored there. Sometimes stuff gets shuffled around as we try to find something, so look around if you don’t see it right away.

“Most of the items are small enough that we can fit anywhere from a few to a few dozen on the shelf. We keep more of the popular sale items on hand. The slow movers might only have a couple.

“The exceptions are the big or unwieldy items, which we keep in the last bay. You’ll learn to recognize the item names soon enough and know when an item is likely to be in the last bay so you don’t waste time looking for them.

“When you pull the last item from a shelf, or you see there’s only one or two left, make a note for me so I can get more -- we have a small warehouse nearby we can refill from.”

We toured each bay and he pointed out certain fast sellers or gave tips about how to pack them. In the last bay, I was taken aback. It looked like a garage sale, with things stashed willy-nilly, most of them on the large size.

“Okay. This is where things get fuzzy. Obviously, stuff like this won’t fit on shelves, and half the time doesn’t even have a catalog number on it. So here you have to try to match it from the catalog description or the photo in the catalog.

“Most of this stuff doesn’t move well, and I’d just as soon get rid of it, but my dad is insistent that we keep it around for the loyal customers who expect to be able to re-order something they’ve bought before. I’d just as soon not put it in the catalog, but that’s not a battle that’s worth fighting with him. He has his ways and it’s not worth the hassle right now.”

“Oh, I see. Does he work here, too?”

“No. He’s retired. So he says. But he still tells me how to run the business. That’s why we’re here in the mall, by the way. It dates to a time when people still wanted to see the item before they bought it, to hold it, smell it. So having a storefront was important to him. When the business grew, it was increasingly mail order, but he still felt like he was a shopkeeper, so he just rented the adjacent storefront and used it to store his stock.