Seventeen Against the Dealer

by Cynthia Voigt

  “Yeah.”

  “Well.” Mina surveyed the room. “I suppose it could have been worse. They could have trashed the place.”

  Dicey shrugged. They could have not broken in at all. But there wasn’t any use thinking of could-haves.

  She continued sweeping up glass while Mina scrubbed at the cement floor. Those two jobs done, they lifted the two boats back onto the rack. Dicey went carefully around each boat, checking for nicks or dents.

  “We’ve got to figure out some way of covering that window,” Mina said. “Probably a sheet of plywood nailed over it.”

  “They took all my tools,” Dicey admitted. “Everything. I don’t even have a hammer. So we can’t nail anything.”

  Finally, Mina had another suggestion. “Dad keeps a toolbox in the car. We can use the flat of a wrench, and at least hang up a sheet of plastic.”

  Dicey just went along with whatever Mina suggested. She held up the plastic while Mina hammered little nails through it and into the wooden frame of the door. “Did you call the police?” Mina asked.

  “What’s the point?”

  “To prove somebody stole something from you, for your insurance company.”

  Dicey shook her head.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t have an insurance company.” Even Mina assumed Dicey had insurance. Dicey guessed she wasn’t as smart as she thought she was, but she didn’t much feel like talking about that. Not right now.

  “How about your landlord?”

  “He’s not insured against theft of whatever’s in the building,” Dicey said. “Just the building.”

  They stood there, the two of them, in the damp, chilly air. Mina was worried, Dicey could see that. She didn’t know what she was. Whatever it was she was, it was clogging her up inside, leaving no room for anything else. She was afraid Mina was going to make an angry, sympathetic speech, but Mina didn’t. “You going to be okay?” was all Mina said.

  “Yeah,” Dicey said. She didn’t see how she was going to be okay, because without her tools she couldn’t build, and she didn’t have time or money to go around finding another set, not to mention getting them into working shape—whoever had robbed her of the tools had robbed her of the hours she’d spent on them, too—as if they’d taken up a box filled with minutes and hours and days, and stolen it. She didn’t even know what new tools cost, although her guess was she couldn’t afford them. That made her realize she hadn’t built up a big enough savings account before diving into this whole project. It had seemed like so much money, but it wasn’t enough. She should have worked another six months, or at least three. She hadn’t planned it realistically. Dicey didn’t know what she was going to do now. But Mina, who had her own problems, putting herself through college, didn’t need to hear about Dicey’s troubles, especially since there wasn’t anything Mina could do about them. “Yeah,” Dicey said again, “I’m okay.”

  Then, as if repeating it made it true, she knew she would be. She’d faced worse, and gotten through it. She had money in the bank, and a check in her pocket. Besides, maybe no matter how much money you had it wouldn’t be enough, because money itself wasn’t enough. She had her plans and she knew how to work hard. She would be okay, she made herself that promise. “I’ll figure out something,” she told Mina.

  “You always do.” Mina stood there in the darkness, big and warm, sure of what she was saying.

  And why shouldn’t Mina be sure, since it was true. Dicey filled her lungs with energizing damp air. “Yeah.”

  Something made Mina laugh again.

  “What’s so funny now?” Dicey demanded.

  “Sometimes, I look at the two of us and—I’m gonna leave old Dexter to his honey babe, and get on with my own life. You never liked him that much anyway, did you?”

  “Half the time I like him a lot,” Dicey said. “The other half—well, he’s so arrogant and you do your supportive-female act and—I don’t mind the arrogance, but I mind you—so I guess no, not that much. Although he’s interesting—”

  “Oh, yeah, that boy has brains enough,” Mina agreed. “And ambition.”

  “For himself,” Dicey pointed out.

  “I know. Being Dexter’s woman—I guess I just don’t want to be any man’s woman. I guess maybe that’s what’s really behind all the jive he says I’ve been giving him. I go back to school tomorrow morning. You know what I wonder? I wonder if all this school isn’t a way of running away. You know? A failure to choose, and get down to the business of life. I don’t think so, but I have the suspicion that a really free woman wouldn’t ever wonder.”

  “I dunno,” Dicey said. “Maybe that’s true, but it seems like a lie, because how can you not wonder?”

  “Well, I wish I knew how,” Mina said, laughing. “I know what I want to do, and I think I know why I want to, but what if—Oh, well, if worse comes to worst, I’ll work for you, okay? You can hire me. I know I don’t know anything about boats, but I’m a quick learner.”

  Dicey wouldn’t mind a bit working with Mina. “I can’t afford to hire anybody,” she pointed out.

  “We can worry about that at the time. It’s still a couple of years before I’ll get a chance to fail to get into law school. By then, who knows? By then you may be the Sara Lee of boatbuilders.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” Dicey answered, smiling at the idea. She wasn’t aiming for that, not even close. Earning a living, that was what she was aiming for.

  After Mina left, Dicey turned off the lights and locked the door. She didn’t know why she was bothering. First thing in the morning, she’d need to get a pane of glass and set it in. Except for the glass itself, she could find whatever else she needed—putty and a screwdriver to pry apart the wooden window frame, and a hammer to put it back together with—at home. She went on home.

  Despite the hour, there was a light on in the kitchen. When Dicey had covered the larch with plastic sheets, she went inside. It was Gram who was awake, sitting at the table, drinking a cup of tea, wearing a faded plaid bathrobe. Gram had dark circles under her eyes. “You should be in bed,” Dicey said. “You shouldn’t have waited up.”

  “That’s for me to decide, isn’t it. You sounded on the phone as if something unpleasant had happened. Are you going to sit down?”

  “No.”

  If Dicey sat down they would talk for a while, and Gram should be in bed asleep, she should have been asleep an hour ago. “I’ll tell you in the morning,” Dicey said. “I’m back, as you see, home safe—and I expect to see you get up from that chair and go to your room.”

  Sometimes you just had to boss Gram around, she was so stubborn.

  As if she was pretending not to be doing what she’d been told, Gram got up, went to the sink, rinsed out the cup, and dropped the teabag into the garbage. Dicey just waited. She stood and watched and waited, not saying a word, until she saw the door to her grandmother’s bedroom close. Then Dicey went upstairs to her own room, to take a look at her checkbook and try to figure out where she stood, to revise her plans.

  CHAPTER 6

  Dicey awoke the next morning with the sense that she was ready to solve problems, the way you often do, as if the time of sleep were a long journey to a distant country where alterations in geographical formations, in light, in ways of living, in language even, enable you to see your own world more clearly.

  It was early. The sky outside her window shone dark, glassy blue. Night with its stars had traveled on, leaving the field of sky clear for approaching sunlight. But the sun had not yet arrived.

  She crossed the dark hall to the bathroom. All around her, the house breathed gently in sleep. When she returned she sat at the desk. There, she pulled out paper and worked the figures: $75 a month for rent, including utilities, plus about $20 for the phone. That gave her, in the bank, more than three months, without taking anything out for supplies. Even with supplies her bank account could cover the next three months. Her income was $75 a month, from storage fees�
�and she’d sent out the bills for December, so that money should be coming in—plus an extra $150 when she’d completed maintenance work on the three boats. Although, she’d have to subtract from that the price of whatever supplies she’d used up getting the boats ready. Even after subtracting, however, she could look forward to the extra hundred-odd dollars.

  That completed one column, one side of the paper. On the other side, she had more question marks than anything else. She would have to get some insurance, she guessed, and some way of shuttering the door. Plywood would do it, a piece of plywood hung down over the inside of the glass. It was too possible that whoever had robbed her once might return, the same way a crabber returns to put his pots down in a spot that worked well once for him. She needed the extra security of some kind of window covering that could be put on and taken off. And she needed tools, but she didn’t know how much to estimate for that. Maybe $250. She’d never bought new tools. She didn’t have any records of how much she had spent on her old tools, over the years, her own tools that she’d—she stopped thinking along that line.

  Dicey compared the numbers. If she took $250 out of the account, that would get her down to barely two months. The $75 she gave to Gram every month, for room and board, were seventy-five dollars she could ill afford. For a second, Dicey imagined that she might not give Gram the money, but she knew that she couldn’t fail to pay her own way at home.

  When she had the figures all written down in front of her, Dicey added in the $500 check that was in her pocket. That would pay for tools and supplies. She didn’t like the idea of spending it, because it meant she was spending her profit before she’d made a single cut in the wood, before she’d even unloaded the wood into the shop. It meant she was spending what she hadn’t earned.

  Dicey leaned her head on her hands, and looked at the numbers. Looking at them, at how they didn’t change, at their balancings between debits and credits, she made herself look again at Claude’s offer. You had to balance time and money. She had to weigh the time she’d have to waste working on Claude’s boats against the money that work would bring in.

  Working full-time, which was about a nine-hour day, she could probably get the thirty boats done in two months. If she put eight or nine hours a day into Claude’s boats, and if she were willing to work longer hours, then she could still spend two or three hours a day on the boat for Mr. Hobart.

  Dicey could work, she knew that about herself. What she didn’t want to do—and she didn’t want to do it so much that it was the same as not being able to do it—was borrow money, even against future earnings, or fail to pay Gram the monthly room and board.

  That looked like the decision, then. She couldn’t call it a choice when there was nothing else she could really choose to do. All she was deciding was that she would be able to do what she knew she’d have to do.

  Dicey took another sheet of paper and roughed out a work schedule: with eight weeks, she’d have to do three or four boats a week. It would be tight, because she had to allow time for the coats of paint to dry, but it could probably be done. She didn’t want to do it, didn’t want to spend her time on that kind of work—but doing it was the only way she could see to stay in business. At the end, she’d have three clear weeks to concentrate on Mr. Hobart’s boat.

  It wasn’t a decision she liked, but it was a decision made, and she felt better for it. She lifted her head from the pages of numbers and looked out the window. The sun had come up, dragging low gray clouds behind it. Dicey got dressed, fast, and went downstairs.

  Gram was ahead of her in the kitchen, with a batch of pancake batter in a bowl and the griddle hot, the table set, and the bottle of maple syrup warming in a pot of simmering water. That was one of their few extravagances. They bought real maple syrup, the cheapest kind, but still the real thing, and real butter, too. Everywhere else the Tillermans pinched their pennies, hard.

  Sammy stumbled in while Dicey was still eating. He’d always woken up slowly and reluctantly. Dicey watched him clumsily pull out a chair, sit down on the edge of it and then slide cautiously over to the middle, look at the fork and knife as if he’d never seen utensils before; she lowered her face to hide her smile. The first ten minutes of Sammy in the morning were as much fun as puppies. After two plates of pancakes, his eyes brightened and he began speaking at normal speed. Dicey asked him then to help unload the wood at the shop, first thing. Maybeth, scrubbed and brushed, asked if she could help too. “There’s a lot to do,” Dicey said, saying it quickly, to get it over with, “because someone broke into the shop last evening. They took my tools,” she told them, keeping her eyes on her plate, “but the boats are okay. I don’t want to talk about it, if that’s okay.”

  “Neither would I,” Gram said. “Neither do I.”

  * * *

  With the three of them working at it, the lumber quickly piled up beside the long side wall of the shop. Dicey looked at the crowded room and wondered how she was going to find enough space for Claude’s boats, but she couldn’t worry about that. She was going to do what she had to do, because she had to do it in order to do what she wanted to do. She’d always been able to live that way. That was the way of living that always worked for her.

  She picked up the phone, intending to call Claude, but dialed Jeff’s number instead. “If,” Jeff said, “you come over here around noon, we can go up to Salisbury, to replace those tools.”

  Dicey didn’t say anything, because her throat had closed up tight.

  “Dicey? Are you there?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, that sounds good,” she said, forcing the words out.

  “I’ll put in a morning’s work on this paper, and see you between twelve and one sometime.”

  It was just like Jeff to know what needed to be done. She hadn’t known why she called Jeff first, but now she did—because she could count on him.

  Claude, when she got ahold of him, was smug. “I knew you’d change your mind. You’ve got more sense than to turn away profitable work, girlie.”

  Dicey didn’t bother to enlighten him.

  “We’re leaving Monday, so you better stop by before then to pick up the keys. I been thinking, I’ll pay you by thirds. When the job’s a third done, write me up a bill. It’s a good thing you called back this morning. I was about to call a couple of other shops and give them the work.”

  Dicey almost wished he had. Why didn’t you? she wanted to ask; or, Why don’t you go ahead and do that? But she wasn’t free to. “I’ll be by later” was all she said. He didn’t thank her and she didn’t know why. She knew why she didn’t thank him.

  With Sammy and Maybeth’s help, she went through the morning’s chores. First, they got a piece of plywood and a couple of fittings, so that Sammy could make a cover for the inside of the door window. At the hardware store they also picked up a pane of glass and a box of glazier points. Dicey paid cash but kept the receipt in her wallet, to send along with next month’s rent to Claude. Returning her brother and sister to the shop, to replace the window, she went back downtown, to deposit the $500 check and find an insurance agent. That took longer than she’d planned, because by now everybody she had business with had heard about the break-in, and wanted to say something to her about it. Most of them, especially the insurance agent, looked at her in that self-satisfied way people have when the bad luck is yours, as if they would have told you so if you’d asked them. Dicey didn’t let any of them get through to her, not Gerry at the hardware store, who had graduated in Jeff’s class from the high school, nor Mrs. Pommes at the bank, who dyed her graying hair a carroty red and wore long filigreed earrings, nor even Mr. Snyder, who filled out forms and told her where to sign, then took her hundred-dollar check for a year’s insurance of whatever was in the shop, valued at $10,000. It was for a whole year’s insurance, Dicey said to herself. She’d have to pay it only once a year. With the $500 for Mr. Hobart’s boat she’d just put in, she had $1,107.87 in her account.

  “Well, Dicey, you’ve got the barn door
locked now,” Mr. Snyder said to her, clipping her check on top of his pile of forms. Mr. Snyder had springy gray-white hair and a fleshy face; his little round eyes behind little round glasses looked as if they were laughing. Dicey didn’t think there was much to laugh about. The whole thing was leaving a bitter taste at the back of her mouth and she felt as if she ought to apologize—

  Apologize to whom, she demanded of herself. She was the one who’d been robbed. Since Mr. Snyder was making money out of the deal, she didn’t see that she needed to tell him she was sorry and she’d never do it again. She’d made a mistake and she’d learned. She should have had insurance and now she did. She should have known, she guessed—if the dinghies had been damaged she’d have been in real trouble. She should have asked somebody what it was she ought to get done, in order to go into business. Anyone who knew would have included insurance on the list. But it was too late now, and now she had insurance so it wouldn’t happen again.

  Let that be an end on it, she thought, getting up from the wooden chair she’d pulled up to Mr. Snyder’s desk, shaking his hand, not returning his smile. She ran down the wooden staircase, not because she felt like running but because it felt good to slam her sneakers down hard, and feel the whole structure rattle under her.

  Some days, she wished she were a lumberjack. She would like that feeling, the swing of the ax, the bright cuts into the wood, the patient work and eventually the crack, the long breaking fall of the tree. Sometimes, that was the kind of work she wanted to do, up in some harsh northern country, moving through the silent forest, using her strength to bring down the marked trees.

  CHAPTER 7

  When she knocked on the door to the house Jeff and his father lived in, then turned the knob and entered the tiny kitchen without waiting for Jeff to let her in, it felt as if she was walking into Sunday afternoon. For a second, she felt dislocated in time, and cross with herself for forgetting that stores would be closed on Sundays.

  Jeff was sitting where she knew she’d find him, at a long table that faced the big glass living-room doors. He turned around in his chair to welcome her. Books and papers were spread out over the tabletop. “Do you want to hear something wonderful?” he asked her.