Baker To Do the Deal

A Novel in Stories
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9913904-2-7
Verlag: Demitasse Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 228 Seiten

Meet Kenneth Bodine. He's living on the edge of the nation's capital, but he's not a power broker, oh no. He's in commission sales. The last refuge of the dispossessed, or so his wife calls it. He's a decent sort, much like you. Somewhat smart, occasionally funny. With a talent for numbers, but not for managing his own career. He's just trying to figure out what he should be doing when there isn't anything he really feels called to do. He's on a hero's journey, though he doesn't know it. This is his quest: to preserve his essential decency against the need, sometimes, to cut a corner to do the deal.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Baker, Cathy

Leseproben

1991 Take That Pull     It was while bartering with an early bird that Kenneth Bodine decided he might be good at sales. “You want $3 for this princess phone?” The stoop-backed woman was poking through boxes even as Kenneth and Jodi carried them out into the yard. She held the receiver up to her ear as if listening for a dial tone. “I’ll take it for one.” Kenneth walked over to look more closely at the phone she was holding. It had been in the house for as long as he could remember. “Two dollars.” “One and a quarter or I walk away.” Kenneth laughed to himself. As if he cared whether this old lady might leave his yard sale without buying! He looked over at his wife to see if she shared his amusement. She did not. She was arranging coffee mugs and flower vases on a card table. She wasn’t ready for customers, so she preferred to ignore them. It was left to Kenneth to say, “Sorry. One seventy-five’s our best offer.” “Pooh on you!” The woman waved the phone’s receiver at Kenneth, and its long, tangled cord swayed in the air like a snake ready to bite. She dropped it into the box where she had found it and limped toward the curb, where a beat-up old station wagon was waiting, already laden with goods obtained earlier in the day or perhaps earlier in years past. And then salesman’s superstition kicked in, though Kenneth did not yet recognize it as such, because he was not yet in sales. He looked down at the yellowed princess phone, dirt accumulated in its push buttons. He looked back at his first customer of the day leaving empty-handed, and he caved. “Hey,” he called to her departing back. “One fifty it’s yours! And I’ll throw in the toaster!” It was the first Saturday in March—a little early in the year for yard sales, but Kenneth and Jodi were cleaning out clutter to make way for their first child, who was expected any moment. A secondary purpose was to pick up some extra cash. Actually, in Kenneth’s mind the financial objective was now primary, because his job had come to an abrupt end the day before. Kenneth was still too shocked to share this news with his wife. Besides, he didn’t want to trigger premature labor. Her due date was in a week. “I added everything up last night,” Jodi said shortly after the sale had officially opened for business, but before the yard had filled with browsers. “If we sell it all as priced we’ll make $534.” “I don’t want to disappoint you, but the most we can make is $532.50.” Kenneth surveyed their enterprise. Out in the front of the lawn was the furniture handed down from his mother but not of sentimental value. Most likely to score significant dollars were the mirrored vanity table with upholstered bench, the dining chairs of dubious quality, and the solid oak bookcase from which Jodi would later and forever regret parting. Mingled among these were the scavengings that, on neighborhood walks the evening before trash collection day, Jodi would find propped against garbage cans and (Kenneth suspected) sometimes in them: the Shaft movie poster, the chandelier missing only a few prisms, the Book-of-the-Month-Club hardcovers with promising titles. A large tarp on the grass was littered with the rejected muddle from two merged households: the less-desirable toaster oven, the backlog of motorcycle magazines with girlie covers, the box of fabric pieces from a half-made quilt that would never be finished. Two card tables next to the front walk, positioned for impulse purchases, held the dollar-and-under items. Backdrop to this clutter was their 1939 Cape Cod, with its peeling, painted-brick exterior that Kenneth defended as antique and Jodi judged as ready for a new coat. Sycamores, pin oaks, and beech trees fifty years old and twice-fifty feet tall fenced in the view of sky. The boundary of the nation’s capital was barely two miles east of their street, yet except for the fact that so many of their neighbors worked for federal agencies, government contractors, policy think tanks, economic development banks, and lobbying firms, it was a place much like any other in suburban America. This particular Maryland neighborhood had one other distinction: it was so walkable. A mere block away out the back door was a small shopping center, with its family-owned pharmacy, independent hardware store, and mom-and-pop mini-mart only recently swallowed by a national chain. The post office was a block in the other direction, a co-op nursery school and an elementary school were each a few minutes away, and the middle and high schools were also within walking distance for those who still considered two miles a walkable stretch. Downhill and due south lay the bike path along MacArthur Boulevard, and even farther downhill, on the far side of the Clara Barton Parkway, lay the C&O Canal. These parallel tracks of roadways and pathways wended for miles in both directions, providing a sense of connection to the control center of the country yet also easy freedom and escape. Past the canal, the Potomac River coursed toward Washington, though even more trees—living, dead, and caped by invading ivy—obscured from view its implacable surface and dangerous undercurrents. It was an idyllic neighborhood, but hardly one Kenneth could afford. So when his mother had married a rooted Canadian and departed north, in the year of his own marriage, he had gladly worked out an agreement to buy the house with no money down and payments no greater than the rent on his College Park apartment, and moved back home. Kenneth’s second sale of the day ended up a return. At ten thirty, as he was making a quick count of mid-morning earnings—$172.50—a woman who two hours earlier had bought one of Jodi’s alley finds tapped him hard on the shoulder. “Hey, Mr. Bill of Goods,” she heckled. “You sold me a plant stand that has a broken leg.” Kenneth nodded. “Yes, this is a yard sale and I sold you a piece of vintage metal furniture for $6. You got a good deal. Can’t you see the brass etching under the rust?” “I want my money back.” Kenneth acquiesced without protest and resold the plant stand half an hour later for the same price to a man with a French accent and an insouciant air. Kenneth felt no need to stipulate as-is, but his wife did. “Just so you know,” Jodi called over to the buyer from where she stood neatening the clothing table, “it’s missing the foot of one leg.” “Bien sûr. I saw that.” Jodi approached, her curiosity piqued. “Just to know—what do you plan on doing with it?” “I have an antique store in Georgetown. I will brush down the brass, put a doily on top, and sell it for $80.” “But it has a broken leg.” “Ça ne fait rien. One can lean it against a wall.” The man hoisted the item onto his shoulder and carried it away. Kenneth saw Jodi watching the man as he stowed the plant stand in his truck and drove off. Her big belly made her stand with her feet apart. He knew she didn’t feel attractive in her pregnancy, though she was. She had resumed refolding sweaters; customers were not buying them, but they liked to paw through the pile. “You can tell by the way he handled the table that he thought it was quality,” she murmured to Kenneth. “I wonder, what’s the name of his shop.” But Kenneth didn’t answer. He was too busy haggling with a dowager who wanted him to agree to a dollar for six shirts. If Kenneth had been the type of man who applied his sense for numbers to anniversaries, he might have realized: the yard sale was exactly two years and six months from the day he’d given Watermelon the boot. That whole scene had gone down at the Montgomery County Fair tractor pull, Labor Day 1988. They had been sitting on the last row of the grandstand’s planked aluminum seating, not quite hip-to-hip as they might have been even a month earlier. They were watching a John Deere tractor painted an incongruous fire engine red make its attempt to pull 2,000 pounds. The horn sounded and the machine bolted down the track hauling its sled. Halfway across the field, it rose up and bucked like a bronco, belched a cloud of black smoke, and heaved down onto the track in a full stop. As the rescue tractor came out to hook up the John Deere and haul it away, Kenneth thought to himself, “I’m done.” Kenneth was not one to make a conscious connection between his own foundering relationship and a tractor that failed at the full pull. Jodi, however, whom he had not yet met but who was sitting three seats to his right, was more given to metaphorical thinking. She took the failed pull as a big slap on the forehead. Here’s what happened after the John Deere bounced to its humiliating end: Kenneth looked at Watermelon flirting with the stranger on her other side, a pasty-faced man who was politely accepting her attentions. He looked at the man’s companion, a sweet-and unhappy-looking woman. She was wearing a ponytail much like his own, but hitched up higher on the head. He and the woman locked gazes for the briefest of moments. Then he stood up and turned to his girlfriend. “Make your own way home, Watermelon.” “Huh?” Her mouth was open in a circle, a trace of cotton candy on her lips and pink ear plugs poking through her hair. Kenneth wondered why he had allowed himself to be so fixated on this woman’s melon-sized breasts that he had failed to notice her total lack of softness anywhere else. She stopped licking her cotton candy long enough to deliberately turn away. But Kenneth was wise to this battle tactic. And one thing about him: when he...