by Susan Gloss
Her mother’s expression softened. “You’re right. I’m just overwhelmed about getting the house on the market.”
Violet wished there were something she could do to make her mom less stressed, less weary. She pressed her cheek to the fox-fur collar of one of her grandmother’s wool coats. “Can I have some of this stuff, if no one else is gonna take it?”
“Sure,” her mother said. “I suppose you could sell it in your store. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that.”
“I’m not going to sell it, Mom. Geez. I just want some things of hers, to remember her.”
Her mother shrugged. “Well, I’m just saying. It would all just get donated anyway, so no one would mind if you did decide to sell it.”
Violet shook her head, annoyed at the suggestion.
“Anyway, I came back here because everyone’s asking questions about you,” Celeste said. “And I don’t know the answers.”
Violet realized that was her own fault. Since she left Jed, she’d spent as little time in Bent Creek as possible, and her parents had yet to make the two-hundred-and-fifty-mile trip to Madison to visit her. Her mother didn’t like to drive on the interstate, and living in a county crisscrossed by deserted two-lane roads, she’d never really had to conquer her fear. Violet’s father, who operated a farm supply store, couldn’t visit Madison for the same reason Violet couldn’t often visit Bent Creek—he didn’t want to leave his shop in anyone else’s hands.
“Okay,” Violet told her mother. “Just give me a couple more minutes.”
After her mother left the room, Violet reached for a striped hatbox on the shelf. If she was going to go out there and answer a dozen questions about what had happened to her marriage and whether she was seeing “anyone special” in Madison, she would need help from her grandmother—a little piece of Grandma Lou’s strength and style.
She opened the hatbox and, inside, found a lime-green cloche decorated with grosgrain ribbon and an iridescent peacock feather. She took the hat out of the yellowing tissue paper and put it on.
She stepped over to her grandmother’s vanity, pushing aside trays of makeup and a crystal ashtray so she could lean closer to the mirror. The vibrant color of the hat lent a cheerful contrast to her black peplum jacket and pencil skirt. Violet could have sworn that, with the hat on, she looked a little bit like her grandmother did in pictures from when she was younger.
Violet turned off the closet light and left the room. With the hat on, she knew she was sure to get some raised eyebrows from her aunts and uncles, and probably even from her parents, but she didn’t care. Grandma Lou would have approved.
Chapter 9
INVENTORY ITEM: fur coat
APPROXIMATE DATE: 1950
CONDITION: fair
ITEM DESCRIPTION: Blond, hip-length mink coat. Pink silk lining, some bare spots at the elbows.
SOURCE: moving sale
Violet
THE NEXT EVENING, VIOLET leaned toward the bathroom mirror, humming to a bluegrass album while she applied red lipstick. Tonight was the night she’d promised Karen they’d go out for a night on the town like they used to do.
Back when Karen lived in an apartment down the street, she would often stop in at the boutique on her way home from work. She usually had a line on whatever was going on that night, whether it was the opening of a new restaurant or an indie film festival. Some evenings they’d just share a half carafe of Cabernet at their favorite bistro in Machinery Row. Other nights they’d dance to live funk music until dawn, sweating alongside strangers in a crowded bar.
Men were often a part of those nights, either men they met or men they invited along. Karen, with her long, pale limbs and fiery hair, fetched admiration everywhere she went. Violet never resented her for it, though. In fact, she usually was grateful for the deflection of attention. In the early days after her divorce, Violet wanted nothing more than to enjoy her newfound freedom. If she met some interesting men along the way, great, but they were beside the point. After Karen got married and built a house with Tom out in the suburbs, she and Violet’s adventures became much less frequent, and they dropped off almost altogether when Karen soon got pregnant. Violet couldn’t blame her. They weren’t all that young anymore, and if she were in Karen’s shoes, she wouldn’t have wasted any time in starting a family, either.
Violet had some time before Karen arrived, even after she’d finished the always-difficult task of selecting something to wear from her full-to-bursting closet. For tonight, she’d selected an all-black pantsuit with a halter neckline from the 1970s. She’d added some beaded silver earrings made by a customer who sold jewelry, and she was set.
While she waited for Karen to show up, she pulled a box out from underneath her bed and lifted off the lid. Inside it, untouched for years, were all of her mementos from Bent Creek. She took out the dried, shriveled carnation corsage Jed had given her at the homecoming dance where she’d spilled schnapps on her dress, a teddy bear she’d taken everywhere with her as a child, and the gold band that had served as both her engagement and wedding ring. She set these all aside on the carpet. At the bottom of the box, she found her yearbooks. She took them out and curled up on the couch with Miles to page through them.
Inside the book for her sophomore year, Violet flipped to the index. She ran her finger down the list of names until she found Sam Lewis. Pages 39 and 94. Out of curiosity, Violet looked up her own name. It took three lines to list all the pages where pictures of her appeared.
She flipped first to page 39, where she found Sam’s junior class photo. He smiled through braces and a face full of acne. She remembered who he was now. He’d been one of the kids whom Jed and his buddies picked on.
She turned next to page 94, where she expected to see a photo of Sam with the band, or chess club, or some other extracurricular activity. Instead, Sam’s other photo in the yearbook was a candid photo taken in the lunchroom. The subject of the photo was a group of kids posed, arm in arm, around a crowded lunch table. Sam wasn’t one of those kids. He appeared in the background of the photo, at a noticeably emptier table, with a slice of pizza stuffed halfway in his mouth. She peered at the awkward, teenage Sam and thought, Hang in there. You’re going to look a lot better in twenty years.
She heard a knock, followed by barking and the sound of Miles’s claws on the wood floor.
“Hello?” Karen called.
“I’m in here.” Violet stepped out into the living room, where her friend stood holding two large tote bags. Karen’s red hair curled around her face, competing for attention with the room’s leopard-print pillows and ethnic textiles. She put down her bags and slipped off her trench coat to reveal a thin-strapped green camisole and tight black pants.
“Whoa, mama,” Violet said, hugging her friend. “You look good.”
“You really should lock your doors,” Karen said.
“I usually remember to lock them when I leave, but I don’t lock them when I’m at home. Well, except when I go to bed. Anyway, the neighborhood is safer than it used to be. Haven’t you seen the trendy new restaurants up and down the street? The pet salon?”
“Well, when I lived in this neighborhood in law school, there was a crack house on the corner, and guys used to sit on their porches drinking forties every day. Sorry if I’m a little paranoid.”
“Those days are long gone, honey. It’s all professor types and hipsters now. I doubt the liquor store even carries forties anymore. They’re too busy selling six-packs of microbrews made with organically grown hops.” Violet gave her friend a teasing smile. “The neighborhood has changed a lot since you moved out to your country estate.”
“Speaking of country estates, cabs won’t go out there, so I’m sleeping over tonight.”
“What about Edith?”
“Tom’s got her. It will be good for me to have a night away.”
“If you’re worried about getting home after a few drinks, I can take you. I don’t mind being the designated driver.”
Karen shook her head. “I need a sidekick. And I need to have some fun. Do you have any idea what it’s like to have a little person attached to you for most of the day?”
“Can’t say I do,” Violet said. Then she added in a wistful voice, “And I probably never will, either.”
“Well, it’s not easy.” Karen walked over to the galley kitchen connected to the living room. She grabbed the bottle of whiskey from the top of Violet’s refrigerator. With the familiarity of someone who’d been to the apartment many times, she opened up a cabinet and grabbed two crystal tumblers. Without asking Violet if she wanted any, she poured two fingers’ worth into each glass. “Ice?” She opened the freezer.
“Oh, crap, I forgot to make some,” Violet said.
“That’s okay, I like mine neat anyway.” Karen took a long sip from her glass, then scrunched up her forehead, which already looked more lined than the last time Violet had seen her. “How do you forget to make ice? You just refill the trays.”
Violet shrugged. “No one’s around to complain.”
Karen handed her one of the glasses and Violet took a sip, feeling the pungent liquid warm the inside of her throat. She sat down on the sofa and patted the cushion beside her to invite Karen to sit down. Miles, misunderstanding, jumped up and settled in next to Violet. She rubbed his velvety ears.
“How’s Edith doing?” Violet asked. “She’s so adorable.”
Karen sat on the other end of the sofa. “You don’t really want to hear all of the sappy baby stuff, do you?”
Violet prickled a bit at Karen’s assumption that she didn’t want to hear about Edith just because she didn’t have kids of her own. But Violet knew her friend was just trying to be considerate. In the pre-Edith days, Karen and Violet had often hung back in the corner at baby showers, drinking mimosas and rolling their eyes. It had been mostly Karen, though. Violet loved babies. She just didn’t like all the pressure and worry surrounding them.
Karen crossed her long legs. “So have you heard anything from your landlord?”
“Nothing new,” Violet said. “As far as I know, I still need to be out by the end of August or they’ll get a court order to kick me out. Have you come up with any brilliant ideas in that legal mind of yours since we last talked?”
Karen walked over to the kitchen. She poured herself more whiskey and then held up the bottle. “This is the strategy the senior partners at my law firm always take in particularly hard cases.”
“Don’t you have to breast-feed?”
“Give a girl a break, will you? I can count the number of drinks I’ve had in the last year on one hand. And anyway, I’ll be pumping and dumping tonight.”
Violet held her palms in the air. “I’m not judging, just curious. Anyway, sorry for bugging you about legal stuff. That’s enough for tonight. You said you needed to get out and have some fun, and I bet you weren’t thinking you wanted to spend it talking about my landlord problem. So what should we do?”
“There’s a drag show at the King Club I was thinking we could check out tonight,” said Karen. “It’s called ‘Queens at the King.’”
“I was thinking we’d watch an old Marilyn Monroe movie and bake cookies—mostly so we could eat the dough. Any chance I can convince you?”
“No. But we still might see Marilyn.”
And sure enough, on a blue-lit stage later that night, Violet and Karen watched a six-foot, buxom blonde belt out “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” while a drummer dressed as Rita Hayworth banged out a cymbal roll, ending in a “ba-dump-bump” rim shot. The performance concluded with a high-end fashion show, with pouting queens stalking up and down the stage in nineties Versace and sixties Pucci.
One of the drag queens even wore a mink coat that Violet could have sworn he (she) had purchased at Hourglass Vintage. She remembered the peach silk lining, which the model flashed when she opened the coat to show off a purple velvet wiggle dress underneath.
Seeing a garment from her store onstage sparked an idea in Violet’s mind about how she might make some money to put toward a down payment and, just maybe, convince a bank to lend her money to buy her building.
When the house lights came back on after the show, Violet turned to Karen. “Hey, can I bounce an idea off you?”
“Pretty much everything bounces these days, as far as I’m concerned.” Karen pinched her stomach, which boasted a barely perceptible fold of skin where there once had been nothing but flatness, even concavity.
“You’re still less bouncy than me and I haven’t had a baby,” Violet said.
Karen tipped her head and peered at Violet with half-lidded eyes. “Do you think you ever will?”
“Considering that the thought of getting married again terrifies me, and that I’m not even in a relationship, the odds aren’t looking good.”
“You don’t need a man, you know,” Karen said.
A broad-shouldered queen passing by said, “That’s right, honey.”
Violet felt a lump in her throat, afraid to answer for fear of giving away the envy she felt toward her friend. But Karen was tipsy and the two of them always spoke freely with one another. They sorted through each other’s clumsy and uncalculated words to look for the truth underneath, like panning for gold.
“I don’t know.” Violet stared down into her drink, which had started off as a whiskey and soda but was now just melting ice cubes. “I’ve always thought a baby would be part of my life, but I’m two years shy of forty. I’ve got to be realistic.”
“No interesting prospects, even?” Karen asked. “Not for daddyhood, necessarily, but just for dating?”
Violet though of Sam. “Someone interesting did come into the shop this week. I gave him my number, but he hasn’t called yet. So we’ll see.”
“Oh?” Karen raised her eyebrows. “Tell me more.”
Violet shook her head. “I just met him, and I don’t want to make it all weird by obsessing. And anyway, I might not hear from him.”
“Okay, fine.” Karen pouted, then took a sip of her cocktail. “So what was the idea you wanted to talk to me about?”
Violet waved her hand toward the stage. “I was thinking I could do something like this to raise money for the store.”
“A drag show?”
“Well, more like a fashion show, but sure. We could have drag queens, too. It would be a good way to show off some of my high-end merchandise and boost sales. What do you think?”
“I think it sounds great,” Karen said, covering a yawn with her hand.
“Yeah, you look really intrigued.”
“Seriously, I think it could work. But I’m exhausted. I haven’t slept for more than a four-hour stretch in months. Forget what I said about you having a baby. You can have mine.”
Chapter 10
INVENTORY ITEM: formal dress
APPROXIMATE DATE: 1970s
CONDITION: excellent
ITEM DESCRIPTION: Off-the-shoulder bridesmaid dress. Light green polyester and white lace, with matching cape.
SOURCE: Brought in by Karen’s mother
April
AS APRIL WALKED TO work on the last Saturday morning in June, she envied the customers leaving the coffee shop next door to Hourglass Vintage. She looked longingly at their paper cups of fair-trade Peruvian or shade-grown Guatemalan, or whatever the blend of the day was, wishing she hadn’t already downed her one cup of coffee for the day before she even left the house. April felt exhausted from a sleepless night of trying to get comfortable lying on her side—the position her doctor had recommended during pregnancy. She preferred sleeping on her stomach, but that simply wasn’t possible anymore. The fact that today would have been her wedding day didn’t help April’s insomnia, either.
It had been a month since she and Charlie had spoken—a month since he’d called off the wedding without so much as talking to her about it. April figured that in the weeks they’d been apart, Charlie’s parents had probably already started introducing him to other girls to t
ake her place—beautiful, well-bred girls without a history of mental illness in their families.
When April arrived at Hourglass Vintage, Violet stood hunched over the register counter, writing in a notebook with an intense expression on her face.
“Hi,” April said. The weather had finally started to warm up, and she wiped a drop of sweat from her forehead. With it, she tried to wipe from her face any indicator of the pain she felt. She counted on work to distract her from it.
“I’m glad you’re here.” Violet set down her mug. “I have an idea. It popped into my head last night when I was at the King Club with my friend Karen. I thought, what if we put on a fashion show to raise some money?” She gave April a hopeful look. “We could call it the Hourglass Revue. We’d get women to audition as models and have them wear merchandise from the store.”
“Hmmm,” April said. The number-crunching part of her brain was already trying to estimate how much it would cost to put on an operation like that.
“You don’t seem very excited,” Violet said.
“No. I mean, yes. It sounds like it could be fun. It’s just . . . well, how would you raise money, exactly? Wouldn’t there be a lot of expenses involved?”
“Sure, but we’d make up for it in ticket sales and, hopefully, make a profit auctioning off the clothes and accessories we show on the runway,” Violet said. “I have some really high-end things in the back that I don’t put on the sales floor all at once because people don’t tend to buy them. Madison is a pretty casual town, and most people are happier wearing a pair of Chaco sandals than a pair of Louboutin heels. It’s really rare that someone comes into the store looking to drop eight hundred dollars on a fur coat or two grand on a vintage Hermès handbag.”
Did you just say two grand for a purse?” April asked, blinking.
Violet nodded. “It’s a gorgeous bag. Shiny red leather, with light blue suede on the inside. Remind me to pull it out and show you sometime. Anyway, two grand is nothing. Some vintage Hermès bags can go for ten thousand or more.”
