watches his boss’s lips move. Their ugly stretchy movements remind him of the eel listlessly snaking back and forth in its tank in the Chinese restaurant near Route 3.
“… but you and me, we’re the workers. We’re the ones behind the scenes, making sure when people come down Main Street they’ve got choices, a nice string of shops to go in and out of, family places.…”
Carefully, so carefully, Henry reaches his right hand over to his left wrist and pretends to scratch a spot just beside his watch. Twisting it so the face angles up and he can check the time without the giveaway wrist roll, he nods in agreement to Mr. Beardsley’s mouth, opening and shutting around the words pouring out his sales philosophy. When Beardsley glances at the front door midsentence, Henry sees his chance and successfully negotiates a quick glance-down.
It is three-fifteen.
It’s warm enough to take off the top of the Jeep. It’s been smelling like mildew lately but then again it could rain so maybe I should just keep it on.
“Hel-lo? Anybody in there?” The rapping at his skull rattles him out of his head and back to Mr. Beardsley, who is holding up the bundle that is Peterson’s pants. “I suppose I’m expected to psychically divine what I am to do with these pants balled up here behind the desk?”
“Oh, yeah,” Henry says. “I was going to do that after—”
“After what? After your daydream?” Mr. Beardsley jabbers on as he folds Neal Peterson’s pants around the tailor ticket. “Honestly, Powell, I can’t keep following you around reminding you about how the system works. You never used to need that, as I recall. What happened to those days? What happened to that energetic young man I hired not so long ago? Yes, Mr. Beardsley. No, Mr. Beardsley. Anything I can do, Mr. Beardsley? Now all I get is ‘how’s it going’ if I’m lucky.”
He shriveled up and died of boredom, Henry thinks. Rest in Peace. RIP.
Chapter three
1977
Henry parks his bicycle in front of the shoe repair shop, one store over from Baxter’s, so he can readjust his tie and run a hand through his hair. He checks over his shoulder to make sure no one is around before he studies his reflection in the window. But the shoe repairman has not washed the window so Henry does not notice the piece of tissue paper still glued by a dot of blood to his freshly shaved face. The Help Wanted sign is still propped in the corner of Baxter’s window so he knows he still has a shot. Supplemental Help, Mr. Beardsley said on the phone when he called to inquire the day before. Henry assumed “supplemental help” would be explained and so did not ask what that meant for fear of sounding ignorant.
“Ah, the young Mr. Powell.” Mr. Beardsley takes off his glasses and walks to Henry, arm extended for what ends up being a surprisingly hearty handshake for such a delicate-looking man. “How are you, son?”
“Fine, sir,” Henry says. “Thank you.”
“Right on time—” Mr. Beardsley taps the face of his watch “—I like that. How’s the season going so far? Let’s go sit over here. Take your pick.” He motions for Henry to take one of the two armchairs situated outside the dressing rooms.
“Good, we’re just practicing right now actually,” Henry says. He pulls his trousers up in front and settles into the chair, mirroring Mr. Beardsley’s erect posture. His legs are already sore from the squats and suicide drills they ran that morning.
“Good old FRCP,” Mr. Beardsley says. “You’re a lucky young man. You’ve got the world at your feet.”
Fox Run College Preparatory is uniforms, leafy walkways between old stone buildings, dowdy teachers, a mutli-million-dollar endowment, a competitive student body in love with Weejuns and bent on trying to appear indifferent. It is a private school as rich in tradition as it is in collective student body wealth, counting a U.S. president, fourteen senators and countless CEOs as alumni. Friendships forged in the dining hall were lifelong and tangled in well connectedness. Its hallways reeked of the carelessness that comes from knowing money will never be far out of reach. Few in Henry’s class knew that the bloat of money filling up the pockets of, say, the Sandersons or the Childers offset the relative obscurity of funds in the Powell family. But Henry knew. He felt it when Kevin Douglas drove his sixteenth birthday present to school. Or when tags appeared on zippers after winter break. Tags reading Aspen, Stratton, Snowbird. Or when January sunburns started to peel. His academic scholarship was, he felt, a form of parole. Should some felony be committed, Henry sensed he would be the first one called up for a police lineup. When the headmaster called an assembly to lecture the upperclassmen about pranks and threatened to keep all the seniors from graduating if those responsible for the burning effigies meant to represent himself and his deputy did not step forward, Henry was sure the remarks were directed at him. The scholarship felt creaky, impermanent.
“You understand this is a temporary job,” Mr. Beardsley says. His porkchop sideburns impress Henry.
Henry wore his hair long, below his ears—an unspoken uniform at Fox Run. But he made a mental note to aspire to Mr. Beardsley’s choice of sideburn design. Henry was conscious of his looks but not sorry for them. In other towns, in faraway regions, the Powell nose, for instance, would be attached to adjectives like huge. But in their Northeastern town Henry’s facial centerpiece might be referred to as patrician. Befitting his angular, oversize features. Gangly. His limbs long, all muscle and sinew. He had seen pictures of his father in his teens and knew this was just a phase: someday he, too, would grow into his face and body. The cheekbones that jutted out, the chin that pointed from his neck and, yes, the nose, they would all make sense someday. He told himself the girls would be sorry and until then he tried to look at people head-on, postponing the profile view as long as possible.
“We’ll see how well you do but I can’t promise anything past the winter sale. This fall you’ll get a lay of the land and then it’s trial by fire. But after the sale I can’t promise anything,” Mr. Beardsley is saying.
“No, no, that’s totally fine,” Henry says.
“You make good eye contact,” he says, scribbling something on his clipboard. “I like that.”
“Thanks,” Henry says. The mumbling, though, appears to dent Mr. Beardsley’s smile. Another mark goes onto the clipboard.
“You’d be available for overtime work during sale week, right?” Mr. Beardsley peers up at him. Suspicious. The look of a man who has been the brunt of one too many crank phone calls, Henry thinks. A bolt of imaginary lightning illuminates Mr. Beardsley: “I think my refrigerator is running …”
“Yes, sir,” Henry says. “Absolutely.”
The Baxter’s sale, heavily advertised in the County Register, begins every year on New Year’s Day and lasts one week. The towns that circle this one like a skirt invade the store during the weeklong event—an event as much about acquiring new clothes as it is a hibernation hiatus. A chance to compare Christmas gifts and vacations. Henry and his brothers had gone with their mother every year when they were little. They would run through aisles with friends while their mothers chatted and picked through bins marked by sizes.
Between working the stockroom in the fall, on the floor during the holiday season and then during the sale, Henry hopes to save enough money for the used Jeep he has his eye on. A CJ-7.
“Those suck,”
