their arms. They look like two well-behaved students. Or assistants at a library. But Annie already looks older than when they hired her only a year ago—as if working in the store has worn her down. Thomas cleans the pen and pencil jars. Standing behind the counter, he gazes around the high-ceilinged room, letting his eyes roam across the products. He thinks: Half of everything here is mine. I have done it right. Then the door opens, and a mother with two small boys enters. They’re looking for tissue paper, felt-tip pens, and a printer cartridge. Between customers Thomas reads the newspaper, and at 10:30 he goes out to the sidewalk to smoke. It’s windy. Rotten leaves billow in the air and swirl around the street; the sky is suddenly dark and overcast. Earlier he’d found a notice in the local paper: “Convict Found Dead in Prison.” He tore it out and shoved it in his pocket. As long as Maloney doesn’t start in about selling party supplies, he thinks, extinguishing his cigarette on the sole of his shoe. That has never been the purpose of Maloney & Lindström. I should also quit smoking.
Annie hands in her list before Peter does. Thomas is hungry. He drifts about aimlessly, adjusting things on shelves. Not surprisingly, the two small children left their greasy fingerprints on the silk paper. He flips over the two most visible packages. A group of twelve- or fourteen-year-old girls tumble through the door giggling and at once filling the store with their exclamations and shrill voices, their all-encompassing noise. With their eyes made up and clinking armbands. He doesn’t have the strength to deal with them. He makes eye contact with Annie and signals for her to watch them. It’s not unusual for girls that age to steal. Small flocks of girls, and always during lunch break. He suspects they go into all the stores on the street, one by one. Last time a girl stole a handful of panda bear erasers and one of the big electric pencil sharpeners. She had hidden them in her hat. He would have called her parents, but she cried in such a shameful, desperate way that he let her go. He finds Maloney staring out the office window. “What’s up?”
Maloney starts. “Halfway there.” Thomas closes the door and sits on the edge of desk. “Are you sleeping with Annie?” Maloney stares dumbly at him, then bursts into laughter. “Thomas!” he says, “What are you talking about? Annie! What thoughts you have in your little head.” Grinning, he leans back, stops laughing. He eyes Thomas. “What’s going on with your dad? Did you talk to the lawyer? Yesterday, right? Let’s go get some lunch.” Maloney’s in the habit of asking questions and not waiting for a response. They retrieve their coats from the hallway closet and tell Peter they’re going on break. Maloney orders a sandwich with extra bacon, Thomas the soup of the day and a salad. They sit in the far corner, as usual. “They’re coming to pick up the coffee automat on Tuesday,” Maloney says, shoving a rather too large bite (bacon smothered in mayonnaise) into his mouth with his finger. “I let them have it, this little underling who sounds like someone jammed a carrot up his ass, telling me all about the rules—when the fucking piece of shit doesn’t even work.”
“Maloney . . .”
“Someone has to make sure things work.”
“My sister’s taking the death pretty hard.” Thomas hears how formal he sounds—the death—but he can’t say “my father’s death.” He can’t say “my father.”
“Oh, Jenny with the blonde hair,” Maloney mumbles, chewing energetically. “I did bang her, though it was a long time ago now. But Annie? How could you think that? Ha! She’s gained weight, hasn’t she? Your sister? So has Annie for that matter.”
“She has to go to the apartment, she said.”
“Jenny’s so . . . emotional. Isn’t she? Tears and laughter mixed into one. It’s like she can’t quite control which emotions connect to which expressions. What is that called again?”
“Histrionic.”
“No, sensitive. It’s a charming character trait.” Maloney looks at him while cleaning his teeth with his tongue.
“It’s almost over, Tommy. When are you dumping him in the ground?”
“Tuesday.”
“I’ll come if you want me to. You haven’t touched your soup.” Maloney wipes his mouth with his napkin and drains his soda. With two fingers he lifts a leaf of lettuce from Thomas’s plate, then lets it drop. “I remember Jacques. His glistening gray suit. Was it grease? Was it greasy? Is that why it glistened?” He glances up from Thomas’s salad. “I’m coming to that shitty funeral, whether you want me to or not, okay?”
“Okay.”
They stop a moment to admire the show window, which they’re both happy with, before they enter the store. It’s 2:00 P.M. Customers are beginning to arrive. It’s already busy: Annie works efficiently behind the register, while Peter advises people, retrieves items from the storeroom, and crawls up the ladder if anyone wants something from the top shelves. Thomas feels a momentary pang in his stomach, a rapping in his soul, a delight for the store, for its bustle, for the fact that they actually own this place. That he’s made it this far. That he’s risen out of the shithole he grew up in. That the store’s actually successful, the employees, their employees, his shelving system (his own certain sense of style). That they don’t have carpet on the floor. Satisfaction for his satisfaction, oh, satisfaction for satisfaction. Because recently a kind of lethargy has crept into him, a certain undefined disquiet or boredom (is it boredom?). But at this moment a twinge, a pang, when he strolls through the store nodding at customers and warmly greeting the sweet visual artist with the studio around the corner; she’s looking for colored acrylics and can’t find the magenta or the ultramarine. He calls for Peter, and Peter immediately goes to the basement, and the visual artist smiles gratefully. Walk down the short hall, open the office door, get the rest of the accounting done before closing time. He’s just sat down to it when Jenny calls.
“Oh, Thomas . . .” He can’t tell whether she’s sniffling or there’s some other sound in the background. “Oh God, it looks awful here . . .”
“What looks awful?”
“This place looks AWFUL, Thomas.”
“Are you in the apartment?”
A strange sound emerges from her.
“Of course it looks awful there. What did you expect?”
She snorts hysterically.
“Call a taxi, Jenny, go home. I’m hanging up, and you’re calling a taxi. Okay?” He hears her sitting down on something soft and creaky. Must be the armchair.
“C’mon, Jenny.”
“I can’t.”
“You can’t what?”
“I can’t stand up.”
“But you just sat down.”
“How do you know that?”
“I can hear you.”
“What can you hear? You can’t hear anything! You have eyes in the back of your head, you spy!”
“You’re sitting in Dad’s moth-eaten armchair staring at the television.”
“There’s no television here anymore.” Her voice quivers. “Someone took the television, Thomas. The apartment’s been ransacked. Everything’s gone, everything. It’s so dusty here, so disgusting . . .”
“Of
