by Lorrie Moore
“Weren’t they insured?”
“I don’t know, May. I suppose they had some insurance but how much could it have been? One was just a kid out of college.”
“Whatshisname, the vegetable.”
“Harold, May.”
“What about whosis? He was no kid out of college.”
“George died protecting my store, May.”
“Some protection. The black bastards got away with over fourteen hundred bucks.” When the police called to tell him of the very first robbery, May had asked if the men had been black. It hurt Ellerbee that this should have been her first question. “Who’s going to protect you? The insurance companies red-lined that lousy neighborhood a year ago. We won’t get a penny.”
“I’m selling the store, May. I can’t afford to run it anymore.”
“Selling? Who’d buy it? Selling!”
“I’ll see what I can get for it,” Ellerbee said.
“Social Security pays them benefits,” May said, picking up their quarrel again the next day. “Social Security pays up to the time the kids are eighteen years old, and they give it to the widow, too. Who do you think you are, anyway? We lose a house and have to move into one not half as good because it’s all we can afford, and you want to keep on paying the salaries not only of two people who no longer work for you, but to pay them out of a business that you mean to sell! Let Social Security handle it.”
Ellerbee, who had looked into it, answered May. “Harold started with me this year. Social Security pays according to what you’ve put into the system. Dorothy won’t get three hundred a month, May. And George’s girl is twenty. Evelyn won’t even get that much.”
“Idealist,” May said. “Martyr.”
“Leave off, will you, May? I’m responsible. I’m under an obligation.”
“Responsible, under an obligation!”
“Indirectly. God damn it, yes. Indirectly. They worked for me, didn’t they? It’s a combat zone down there. I should have had security guards around the clock.”
“Where are you going to get all this money? We’ve had financial reverses. You’re selling the store. Where’s this money coming from to support three families?”
“We’ll get it.”
“We’ll get it? There’s no we’ll about it, Mister. You’ll. The stocks are in joint tenancy. You can’t touch them, and I’m not signing a thing. Not a penny comes out of my mouth or off my back.”
“All right, May,” Ellerbee said. “I’ll get it.”
In fact Ellerbee had a buyer in mind—a syndicate that specialized in buying up business in decaying neighborhoods—liquor and drugstores, small groceries—and then put in ex-convicts as personnel, Green Berets from Vietnam, off-duty policemen, experts in the martial arts. Once the word was out, no one ever attempted to rob these places. The syndicate hiked the price of each item at least 20 percent—and got it. Ellerbee was fascinated and appalled by their strong-arm tactics. Indeed, he more than a little suspected that it was the syndicate itself which had been robbing him—all three times his store had been held up he had not been in it—to inspire him to sell, perhaps.
“We read about your trouble in the paper,” Mr. Davis, the lawyer for the syndicate, had told him on the occasion of his first robbery. The thieves had gotten away with $300 and there was a four-line notice on the inside pages. “Terrible,” he said, “terrible. A fine old neighborhood like this one. And it’s the same all over America today. Everywhere it’s the same story. Even in Kansas, even in Utah. They shoot you with bullets, they take your property. Terrible. The people I represent have the know-how to run businesses like yours in the spoiled neighborhoods.” And then he had been offered a ridiculous price for his store and stock. Of course he turned it down. When he was robbed a second time, the lawyer didn’t even bother to come in person. “Terrible. Terrible,” he said. “Whoever said lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place was talking through his hat. I’m authorized to offer you ten thousand less than I did the last time.” Ellerbee hung up on him.
Now, after his clerks had been shot, it was Ellerbee who called the lawyer. “Awful,” the lawyer said. “Outrageous. A merchant shouldn’t have to sit still for such things in a democracy.”
They gave him even less than the insurance people had given him for his under-appraised home. Ellerbee accepted, but decided it was time he at least hint to Davis that he knew what was going on. “I’m selling,” he said, “because I don’t want anyone else to die.”
“Wonderful,” Davis said, “wonderful. There should be more Americans like you.”
He deposited the money he got from the syndicate in a separate account so that his wife would have no claims on it and now, while he had no business to go to, he was able to spend more time in the hospital visiting Harold.
“How’s Hal today, Mrs. Register?” he asked when he came into the room where the mindless quadraplegic was being cared for. Dorothy Register was a red-haired young woman in her early twenties. Ellerbee felt so terrible about what had happened, so guilty, that he had difficulty talking to her. He knew it would be impossible to visit Harold if he was going to run into his wife when he did so. It was for this reason, too, that he sent the checks rather than drop them off at the apartment, much as he wanted to see Hal’s young son, Harold, Jr., in order to reassure the child that there was still a man around to take care of the boy and his young mother.
“Oh, Mr. Ellerbee,” the woman wept. Harold seemed to smile at them through his brain damage.
“Please, Mrs. Register,” said Ellerbee, “Harold shouldn’t see you like this.”
“Him? He doesn’t understand a thing. You don’t understand a thing, do you?” she said, turning on her husband sharply. When she made a move to poke at his eyes with a fork he didn’t even blink. “Oh, Mr. Ellerbee,” she said, turning away from her husband, “that’s not the man I married. It’s awful, but I don’t feel anything for him. The only reason I come is that the doctors say I cheer him up. Though I can’t see how. He smiles that way at his bedpan.”
“Please, Mrs. Register,” Ellerbee said softly. “You’ve got to be strong. There’s little Hal.”
“I know,” she moaned, “I know.” She wiped the tears from her eyes and sniffed and tossed her hair in a funny little way she had which Ellerbee found appealing. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’ve been very kind. I don’t know what I would have done, what we would have done. I can’t even thank you,” she said helplessly.
“Oh don’t think about it, there’s no need,” Ellerbee said quickly. “I’m not doing any more for you than I am for George Lesefario’s widow.” It was not a boast. Ellerbee had mentioned the older woman because he didn’t want Mrs. Register to feel compromised. “It’s company policy when these things happen,” he said gruffly.
Dorothy Register nodded. “I heard,” she said, “that you sold your store.”
He hastened to reassure her. “Oh now listen,” Ellerbee said, “you mustn’t give that a thought. The checks will continue. I’m getting another store. In a very lovely neighborhood. Near where we used to live before our house burned down.”
“Really?”
“Oh yes. I should be hearing about my loan any time now. I’ll probably be in the new place before the month is out. Well,” he said, “speaking of which, I’d better get going. There are some fixtures I’m supposed to look at at the Wine and Spirits Mart.” He waved to Harold.
“Mr. Ellerbee?”
“Mrs. Register?”
The tall redhead came close to him and put her hands on his shoulders. She made that funny little gesture with her hair again and Ellerbee almost died. She was about his own height and leaned forward and kissed him on the mouth. Her fingernails grazed the back of his neck. Tears came to Ellerbee’s eyes and he turned away from her gently. He hoped she hadn’t seen the small lump in his trousers. He said good-bye with his back to her.
The loan went through. The new store, as Ellerbee had said, was in one of the fin
est neighborhoods in the city. In a small shopping mall it was flanked by a good bookstore and a fine French restaurant. The Ellerbees had often eaten there before their house burned to the ground. There was an art cinema, a florist, and elegant haberdasher’s and dress shops. The liquor store, called High Spirits, a name Ellerbee decided to keep after he bought the place, stocked, in addition to the usual gins, Scotch, bourbons, vodkas, and blends, some really superior wines, and Ellerbee was forced to become something of an expert in oenology. He listened to his customers—doctors and lawyers, most of them—and in this way was able to pick up a good deal.
The business flourished—doing so well that after only his second month in the new location he no longer felt obliged to stay open on Sundays—though his promise to his clerks’ families, which he kept, prevented him from making the inroads into his extravagant debt that he would have liked. Mrs. Register began to come to the store to collect the weekly checks personally. “I thought I’d save you the stamp,” she said each time. Though he enjoyed seeing her—she looked rather like one of those splendid wives of the successful doctors who shopped there—he thought he should discourage this. He made it clear to her that he would be sending the checks.
Then she came and said that it was foolish, his continuing to pay her husband’s salary, that at least he ought to let her do something to earn it. She saw that the suggestion made him uncomfortable and clarified what she meant.
“Oh, no,” she said, “all I meant was that you ought to hire me. I was a hostess once. For that matter I could wait on trade.”
“Well, I’ve plenty of help, Mrs. Register. Really. As I may have told you, I’ve kept on all the people who used to work for Anderson.” Anderson was the man from whom he’d bought High Spirits.
“It’s not as though you’d be hiring additional help. I’m costing you the money anyway.”
It would have been pleasant to have the woman around, but Ellerbee nervously held his ground. “At a time like this,” he said, “you ought to be with the boy.”
“You’re quite a guy,” she said. It was the last time they saw each other. A few months later, while he was examining his bank statements, he realized that she had not been cashing his checks. He called her at once.
“I can’t,” she said. “I’m young. I’m strong.” He remembered her fierce embrace in her husband’s hospital room. “There’s no reason for you to continue to send me those checks. I have a good job now. I can’t accept them any longer.” It was the last time they spoke.
And then he learned that George’s widow was ill. He heard about it indirectly. One of his best customers—a psychiatrist—was beeped on the emergency Medi-Call he carried in his jacket, and asked for change to use Ellerbee’s pay phone.
“That’s not necessary, Doc,” Ellerbee said, “use the phone behind my counter.”
“Very kind,” the psychiatrist said, and came back of the counter. He dialed his service. “Doctor Potter. What have you got for me, Nancy? What? She did what? Just a minute, let me get a pencil—Bill?” Ellerbee handed him a pencil. “Lesefario, right. I’ve got that. Give me the surgeon’s number. Right. Thanks, Nancy.”
“Excuse me, Doctor,” Ellerbee said. “I hadn’t meant to listen, but Lesefario, that’s an unusual name. I know an Evelyn Lesefario.”
“That’s the one,” said the medical man. “Oh,” he said, “you’re that Ellerbee. Well, she’s been very depressed. She just tried to kill herself by eating a mile of dental floss.”
“I hope she dies,” his wife said.
“May!” said Ellerbee, shocked.
“It’s what she wants, isn’t it? I hope she gets what she wants.”
“That’s harsh, May.”
“Yes? Harsh? You see how much good your checks did her? And another thing, how could she afford a high-priced man like Potter on what you were paying her?”
He went to visit the woman during her postoperative convalescence, and she introduced him to her sister, her twin she said, though the two women looked nothing alike and the twin seemed to be in her seventies, a good dozen years older than Mrs. Lesefario. “This is Mr. Ellerbee that my husband died protecting his liquor store from the niggers.”
“Oh yes?” Mrs. Lesefario’s sister said. “Very pleased. I heard so much about you.”
“Look what she brought me,” Mrs. Lesefario said, pointing to a large brown paper sack.
“Evelyn, don’t. You’ll strain your stitches. I’ll show him.” She opened the sack and took out a five-pound bag of sugar.
“Five pounds of sugar,” the melancholic woman said.
“You don’t come empty handed to a sick person,” her sister said.
“She got it at Kroger’s on special. Ninety-nine cents with the coupon,” the manic-depressive said gloomily. “She says if I don’t like it I can get peach halves.”
Ellerbee, who did not want to flaunt his own gift in front of her sister, quietly put the dressing gown, still wrapped, on her tray table. He stayed for another half hour, and rose to go.
“Wait,” Mrs. Lesefario said. “Nice try but not so fast.”
“I’m sorry?” Ellerbee said.
“The ribbon.”
“Ribbon?”
“On the fancy box. The ribbon, the string.”
“Oh, your stitches. Sorry. I’ll get it.”
“I’m a would-be suicide,” she said. “I tried it once, I could try it again. You don’t bring dangerous ribbon to a desperate, unhappy woman.”
In fact Mrs. Lesefario did die. Not of suicide, but of a low-grade infection she had picked up in the hospital and which festered along her stitches, undermining them, burning through them, opening her body like a package.
The Ellerbees were in the clear financially, but his wife’s reactions to Ellerbee’s efforts to provide for his clerks’ families had soured their relationship. She had discovered Ellerbee’s private account and accused him of dreadful things. He reminded her that it had been she who had insisted he would have to get the money for the women’s support himself—that their joint tenancy was not to be disturbed. She ignored his arguments and accused him further. Ellerbee loved May and did what he could to placate her.
“How about a trip to Phoenix?” he suggested that spring. “The store’s doing well and I have complete confidence in Kroll. What about it, May? You like Phoenix, and we haven’t seen the folks in almost a year.”
“Phoenix,” she scoffed, “the folks. The way you coddle them. Any other grown man would be ashamed.”
“They raised me, May.”
“They raised you. Terrific. They aren’t even your real parents. They only adopted you.”
“They’re the only parents I ever knew. They took me out of the Home when I was an infant.”
“Look, you want to go to Phoenix, go. Take money out of your secret accounts and go.”
“Please, May. There’s no secret account. When Mrs. Lesefario died I transferred everything back into joint. Come on, sweetheart, you’re awfully goddamn hard on me.”
“Well,” she said, drawing the word out. The tone was one she had used as a bride, and although Ellerbee had not often heard it since, it melted him. It was her signal of sudden conciliation, cute surrender, and he held out his arms and they embraced. They went off to the bedroom together.
“You know,” May said afterwards, “it would be good to run out to Phoenix for a bit. Are you sure the help can manage?”
“Oh, sure, May, absolutely. They’re a first-rate bunch.” He spoke more forcefully than he felt, not because he had any lack of confidence in his employees, but because he was still disturbed by an image he had had during climax. Momentarily, fleetingly, he had imagined Mrs. Register beneath him.
In the store he was giving last-minute instructions to Kroll, the man who would be his manager during their vacation in Phoenix.
“I think the Californias,” Ellerbee was saying. “Some of them beat several of even the more immodest French. Let’s do a promotion of a few o
f the better Californias. What do you think?”
“They’re a very competitive group of wines,” Kroll said. “I think I’m in basic agreement.”
Just then three men walked into the shop.
“Say,” one called from the doorway, “you got something like a Closed sign I could hang in the door here?” Ellerbee stared at him. “Well you don’t have to look at me as if I was nuts,” the man said. “Lots of merchants keep them around. In case they get a sudden toothache or something they can whip out to the dentist. All right, if you ain’t you ain’t.”
“I want,” the second man said, coming up to the counter where Ellerbee stood with his manager, “to see your register receipts.”
“What is this?” Kroll demanded.
“No, don’t,” Ellerbee said to Kroll. “Don’t resist.” He glanced toward the third man to see if he was the one holding the gun, but the man appeared merely to be browsing the bins of Scotch in the back. Evidently he hadn’t even heard the first man, and clearly he could not have heard the second. Conceivably he could have been a customer. “Where’s your gun?” Ellerbee asked the man at the counter.
“Oh gee,” the man said, “I almost forgot. You got so many things to think about during a stick-up—the traffic flow, the timing, who stands where—you sometimes forget the basics. Here,” he said, “here’s my gun, in your kisser,” and took an immense hand gun from his pocket and pointed it at Ellerbee’s face.
Out of the corner of his eye Ellerbee saw Kroll’s hands fly up. It was so blatant a gesture Ellerbee thought his manager might be trying to attract the customer’s attention. If that was his idea it had worked, for the third man had turned away from the bins and was watching the activity at the counter. “Look,” Ellerbee said, “I don’t want anybody hurt.”
