The Store

by Bentley Little

  "I'd better get ready," Ginny said, walking around him. She went into the bathroom, and he heard her brushing her teeth as he prepared his toast. She emerged a few minutes later, makeup on, purse in hand. "Hi ho, hi ho. It's off to work I go."

  "Me, too." He walked over, kissed her.

  "Will you be home for lunch?"

  He smiled. "I think that's a safe bet."

  "Good. Then you can finish the dishes."

  "Ah, the joys of telecommuting." He followed her to the front door, kissed her again, then watched through the screen as she walked down the porch steps and across the drive to the car. He waved as she drove away, then closed the door, finished eating his toast, washed his hands in the kitchen sink, and walked through the living room and down the hall to his office.

  He sat down at his desk, turning on the PC. As always, he felt a thrill of almost guilty pleasure as the computer booted up, as though he was getting away with something he shouldn't. He swiveled in his chair, looked out the window.

  This might not be _exactly_ the life he had imagined -- but it was pretty damn close. In his mind, the house had been a large, glass-walled, Frank Lloyd Wrightish structure, and he'd been seated at a huge oak desk, looking out a giant window into the forest while classical music wafted into the room from a state-of-the-art stereo. In reality, he worked out of this cramped back room, the walls of the office little more than an extension of his bulletin board, with magazine articles and Post-It notes affixed to nearly every conceivable space. And he wasn't nearly as cultured in his real life as he was in his fantasies -- instead of classical music, he usually listened to classic rock on a portable radio his daughters had discarded.

  But everything else was on the mark. The room did indeed have a big window, and that big window did look out onto the forest. And, most importantly, he was doing what he wanted, where he wanted. His reach may have exceeded his grasp, but he had not sold out. He had not given up his dream and settled for a lesser fate, choosing the least offensive alternative. He had stuck to his guns and here he was, a telecommuting technical writer, working for one of the country's largest software firms a thousand miles away from the corporate office, communicating with his superiors by modem and fax.

  The computer finished booting up, and he checked his E-mail. There were two messages from the company -- reminding him of his deadline, no doubt -- and a message from Street McHenry, who owned the electronics store in town. Smiling, he called up Street's message. It was two words long: "Chess tonight?"

  Bill typed a quick reply and sent it back: "See you there."

  He and Street had had two separate chess matches going for most of the past year -- one online and one on a traditional board. Neither of them were really chess fanatics, and they probably would have stopped long ago were it not for an interesting and unexplainable fact: he won all the computer games; Street won all the board games.

  It shouldn't have worked out that way. The mediums were different but the game was exactly the same. Chess was chess, no matter what pieces were used or where it was played. Still, that was the way it broke down.

  Every time.

  That oddity was enough to keep both of them interested in the matches.

  Bill fired off a quick E-mail message to Ben Anderson, informing him of tonight's game. The newspaper editor, the other member of their online triumverate, had only recently learned of the Great Juniper Chess Mystery, as he called it, but he was fascinated by it and wanted to be present at all board games and eavesdrop on all online matches to see if he could detect any patterns in their playing, any logical reason why they won and lost as they did.

  The situation until this point had seemed lighthearted, their approach to it curious but not serious, their manner half-joking, but as Bill stared at his E-mail screen and thought of their past year of chess games, he was reminded for some reason of The Store.

  _The sign_.

  _The deer_.

  Suddenly, their win-loss pattern didn't seem quite so benign, and he wished he had canceled out on tonight's match instead of agreeing to it. He already knew what the outcome would be, and he now found that a little unsettling.

  He looked out at the trees for a moment before finally turning back to the computer. He wasn't in the mood to jump straight into work, so instead of calling up his two messages from the company, he exited E-mail and logged on to Freelink, his online service, in order to check out this morning's news.

  He scanned the wire service headlines.

  THIRD STORE MASSACRE IN A MONTH.

  The words jumped out at him. There were other headlines, more important stories, but he did not see them and did not care. Feeling cold, he displayed the text of the article. Apparently, a sales clerk from The Store in Las Canos, New Mexico, had come to work with a .45 caliber pistol tucked into the waste band of his pants, hidden beneath his uniform jacket. The clerk had worked from eight to ten in the morning, as always, then, on his break, had taken out the gun and started shooting his fellow employees. Six people were hit before the clerk stopped to reload and members of The Store's security team wrestled him to the ground. Five of those . six people were dead. The sixth was in critical condition at a local hospital.

  According to the article, similar incidents had occurred at the chain's stores in Denton, Texas, and Red Bluff, Utah, within the past month. In the Texas store, it was a customer who had started firing on employees, killing three and wounding two. In Utah, it was a stock boy who had opened fire on customers. The stock boy had had a semiautomatic weapon, and he had managed to mow down fifteen people before being shot by an off-duty policeman.

  Corporate officials of The Store would not comment on the incidents but had issued a press release stating that the possibility that the occurrences were related was being investigated.

  Bill read the story again, still feeling cold.

  _The deer_.

  He signed off Freelink and stared at the blank screen in front of him for several long minutes before finally getting back into E-mail and accessing his messages from the company to start his morning's work.

  TWO

  1

  Greg Hargrove looked down at the contract on his desk, frowning. He didn't like doing business this way. It might be the wave of the future and all, but he still liked to deal with his clients the old-fashioned way -- in person. All this faxing and phoning and Fed Exing might be fine for Wall Street investment firms, but, damn it, the construction business wasn't a service occupation, or a paper-pushing job. It was manual labor. It involved real work by real men. Men who created something with their hands, who produced something tangible.

  And it didn't seem right to approach it this way.

  He picked up the contract. This was the biggest job he'd ever had, maybe the biggest job he ever would have, and it just didn't sit well with him to be communicating through paperwork. He wanted to see a face, to feel a handshake, to hear a voice.

  Well, he'd heard a voice. Several voices, actually. All talking to him over the phone. Official-sounding corporate voices that talked at him, not to him, and didn't seem to give a damn what he had to say.

  The past few days, there hadn't even been that. There'd been only the forms and the lists and the specifications and the requirements.

  It was especially annoying that so much of the paperwork was faxed to him overnight. It was bad enough not being able to do business with an honest-to-God human being, but doing it when he wasn't even there? Having to find out in the morning, after the fact, what was going on? That really bugged the shit out of him.

  He was used to being able to show a client around a site, to explain what was being done and why, to walk him through the various stages and steps, to answer questions and allay fears.

  He wasn't used to filing reports.

  And having his reports critiqued.

  That was what bothered him the most. The loss of control. On all projects before this one, he had been the one in charge. He had been the one to call the shots. Sure
, he had built to suit, he had carried out the client's will, but within that broad framework, he had been the one making the decisions. Now, though, he was just another worker, following orders, not allowed to think.

  He didn't like that.

  And they were just in the planning stages now. God knew what it would be like when actual construction started.

  Better, he told himself. It had to be better.

  There was a knock on the doorframe behind him, and Greg turned around. Tad Buckman stood on the porch of the office, grinding his cigarette into the cement slab with his work boot. "Ready to roll, boss? We're going to start surveying."

  Greg sighed, nodded. "Yeah," he said. "I'll be right with you. Just let me get my spec sheets." He dropped the contract back on the desk and walked over to the file cabinet for the specs, stopping by the fax machine to pick up this morning's modifications.

  2

  Her period was late.

  Shannon closed her locker and twirled the combination lock, shifting the textbooks from her left hand to her right. She was never late. Some girls, she knew, varied all the time. But she was as regular as clockwork. Her menstrual cycle had never been so much as a day off in her life.

  Now her period was three days overdue.

  She held the books in front of her as she headed down the hall toward Algebra, her first class. It was stupid, and she knew it was impossible, but she felt unbearably conspicuous, as though she were already showing, and she tried to cover her belly as she walked.

  Maybe her mom was right. Maybe she should be eating more. That way she could attribute her expanding abdomen to weight gain rather than pregnancy.

  Maybe she wasn't pregnant.

  She sighed. With her luck?

  No, she was almost certainly pregnant.

  Probably with twins.

  In movies, in books, in magazines, girls always shared this stuff with their sisters, but there was no way she could do that with Sam. She'd like to be able to have one of those after-hours bedroom conversations while their parents were asleep, to be able to explain her problem to her sister and get some sympathy and advice, but there was no way that was going to happen. Sam was just too perfect. She was pretty, she was popular, her grades were always good, she never got in trouble. Although boys had been chasing after her since she was fifteen, Shannon doubted that her sister had had sex yet. She'd probably wait until she was married.

  If anything, Sam would be even more disapproving of her than her parents.

  No, she couldn't talk about it to her sister.

  She couldn't talk to Diane about it, either. Diane was her best friend, but she was still a blabbermouth, and Shannon knew that if she even hinted about her fears to Diane, the news would be all over school by the next day. And greatly exaggerated.

  She didn't want that.

  The only one she could tell was Jake. And she knew he wouldn't be happy to hear it. She didn't know exactly what his reaction would be, but she had a pretty good idea, and just the thought of the ensuing conversation made her stomach knot up with tension.

  She wished she knew for sure. That would make it easier. It was the not knowing that was the worst part of it. If she knew that she was definitely pregnant, at least she could make plans, plot a course of action. As it was, she could only worry and wonder, her mind vacillating back and forth between scenarios.

  She'd buy one of those home pregnancy tests and perform the test here in the bathroom at school, but she knew that no matter where she bought it, word of the purchase would eventually get back to her parents.

  One of the many disadvantages of living in a small town.

  That was one good thing The Store would bring, she thought. Anonymity.

  The Store.

  It was pathetic how excited everyone here was about The Store. You'd think Neiman Marcus was coming to Juniper, the way everyone was talking, not just some chain discount retailer. It was like Her left foot slid backward beneath her.

  She hadn't been paying attention to where she was walking, and she realized instantly that someone had spilled something on the floor and that she'd slipped in it. Scrambling to maintain purchase, trying not to fall, she clutched her books hard and stumbled backward, accidentally bumping into Mindy Hargrove.

  "Hey!" Mindy said, pushing her away. "Watch it, Davis."

  Shannon regained her footing. "Sorry. I slipped."

  "I'll bet."

  "It was an accident."

  "Right."

  Shannon frowned, moving way. "Oh, eat me, Mindy."

  "You'd like that, wouldn't you?"

  There was a chorus of whoops from the smattering of kids still in the hall. Shannon held up her middle finger and continued walking toward Algebra.

  Seconds later, Diane came running up next to her, laughing. "That was great."

  "You saw that, huh?"

  "You smacked right into her. Practically knocked her over."

  "There was water on the floor or something. I was spacing and I slipped on it." "Serves that stuck-up bitch right."

  Shannon looked mock-offended. "Stuck-up? Mindy?"

  Diane laughed, and the two of them walked into class just as the bell rang. She didn't see Jake until History. She'd been half hoping that her period would come sometime during the morning, during one of her classes, but it hadn't. She desperately wanted to talk to him, wanted to tell him, but though they sat together in class, there were too many people around and it was not a good place to bring it up.

  She decided to wait for lunch, but when the time came, she couldn't think of a way to broach the subject. The two of them sat alone together, on a wall near the Junior Circle, eating in silence, and Shannon started to tell him several times, but then she thought of the way he'd probably react to the news, and she couldn't decide how to begin.

  Her distress must have been obvious, because halfway through lunch he took her hands in his and asked, "Is something wrong?"

  She almost told him.

  Almost.

  But then she thought that her period might come at any minute, might come before the end of lunch, might come during her next class, and she shook her head and forced herself to smile and said, "No. Nothing's wrong. Why?"

  3

  Ginny sat in the staff lounge, eating her lunch as she watched the kids on the playground. The blinds were half-closed, but she could still see the tetherball and hopscotch courts as well as the bottom portions of the slide and monkey bars. Amidst the chaos of activity, she saw Larry Douglas chase Shaun Gilbert across the asphalt and through a hopscotch game, causing the girls involved in the game to scream for one of the lunch monitors.

  Ginny smiled as she finished her Cup O' Noodles. Meg Silva, who taught sixth grade and had been staring out the window as well, shook her head. "Those Douglas kids are all troublemakers. I had Billy Douglas last year. I heard he just got suspended from junior high for vandalizing school property."

  "Larry's not a troublemaker," Ginny said. "A little overactive maybe, but he's not a bad kid."

  Meg snorted. "You learn to spot 'em. Talk to me in another fifteen years."

  The older woman crumpled up her sandwich wrapper and threw it in the trash can under the table before getting up from her seat and walking slowly over to the couch. Ginny watched Meg settle in, then looked back toward the playground. She wondered if she would be as burnt-out when she was Meg's age. She didn't think so.

  It was possible.

  But she didn't think so.

  She liked teaching grammar school. Her father wondered why she didn't teach high school, thought she was wasting her talents here, but she enjoyed working with young children. She felt as though she had more of an influence on them at this age, that she could do more to help mold and shape the way they turned out. Besides, grammar school kids were nice. Junior high students were brats, and high school students were too involved in their own teenage world to pay any attention to adults. But students this age still listened to her, still respected her authority. And
, most importantly, she genuinely liked working with them. Sure, there were a few bad apples. There always were. But overall, they were good kids.

  Mark French, the principal, walked into the staff room and over to the coffee machine. "Looks like culture is finally coming to Juniper," he said.

  Ginny looked over at him. "What?"

  "The Store." He held up the newspaper in his hand. "It says they're going to have a cappuccino and sushi bar instead of a regular snack bar. And they're going to carry videotapes of foreign films. For sale and rental. Northern Arizona is finally entering the twentieth century."

  "Just as it's ending," Meg said.

  "Better late than never." The principal finished pouring his coffee and walked out of the lounge, nodding good-bye. "Ladies."

  "Ladies?" Meg snorted.

  Ginny laughed.

  She stared back out the window at the playground, feeling good.

  Cappuccino? Sushi? Foreign films? This was like a dream come true.

  She couldn't wait to tell Bill.

  He was going to be so happy.

  THREE

  1

  He awoke to the sound of blasting.

  At first, Bill thought it was part of his nightmare. He'd been battling creatures from an alien world, and when he heard the explosions, he thought they were merely a continuation of the dream. But Ginny was stirring next to him, and it was obvious that she'd heard the sounds, too.

  She turned toward him, her eyes still half-closed. "What is it?"

  "Blasting," he said.

  "Blasting?" she said groggily. "Are they widening the highway or something? We would've heard about it if they were."

  "No," Bill said. He pushed the covers off and rolled out of bed.

  She shook her head. "What?"

  "Nothing. Go back to sleep."

  He slipped into his jogging suit as she silently snuggled back under the blankets. He knew what was happening, and it wasn't roadwork. There was only one major construction project in town this fall.

  The Store.

  His alarm wasn't set to ring for another fifteen minutes, so he turned it off on his way out of the bedroom. In the bathroom, he splashed water on his face to fully wake himself up, then went into the kitchen and downed a quick glass of orange juice before quietly sneaking out of the house.