Deconstructed by Liz Talley
CHAPTER ONE
CRICKET
My mama always says, “Sugar, life changes before you can blink your eyes.”
The woman isn’t wrong.
Marguerite loves rattling off southern wisdom the same way Sally Field’s character did in Forrest Gump. I’m forever saying “My mama always says” the same way Forrest does in the movie, much to the dismay of my thirteen-year-old daughter.
But this year, blinkin’ or no blinkin’, I found out the choco-lates in my box were actually dog turds. Oh sure, everyone’s year had been going badly with dirty politics nailing us left and right like a bully with a dodgeball. But adding insult to injury this spring was finding out the man I loved was screwing my daughter’s tennis coach.
That I obtained this knowledge on the first truly warm afternoon was even more insulting. That morning, I had put on my grandmother’s watch and found a half-priced shirt I didn’t really like but had bought on sale wedged between two forgotten sweaters. I tugged on the floral abomination just so I could say I’d worn it. And then I dropped my daughter, Julia Kate, at school and headed for Printemps, the antique shop my grandmother had started with one of her friends because they had wanted to try their hand at importing sturdy English tables and filigreed French chairs in order to be career women. Their pastime had turned into a Shreveport treasure, boasting antiques that made merchants all over the South pea green with envy. I had inherited the business from my grandmother, who’d bought out her friend and then skipped over my mother because my mama didn’t want the “dusty dinosaur,” anyway.
But me?
I adored Printemps.
I had just finished my chicken salad sandwich and was tackling the last few issues in my new office space, which was formerly a broom closet. I had moved the store location at the beginning of the year from a rambling, leaky building in Highland to a safer and better-traveled location off Line Avenue. My husband, Scott, and I had bought the house for a song right after we’d married, thinking one day we might restore it and live there, but as time went by, we never had the gumption to oversee the costly rehab. Then the zoning shifted to commercial, and the house was there when I needed it. The old Doric home had been gutted in order to provide an expansive space to display the pieces, but storage was a huge issue.
I stood in the closet surveying shelves, trying to figure out how I could fit my filing cabinet so I could reach it from my desk without throwing out my back.
“You figure out a solution yet?” my new assistant, Ruby, asked as she passed by carrying a duster.
“I will once I take out these shelves. The desk only fits at this angle, which means my calendar will have to go right here.” I swiped my hand Vanna-style across the chipped paint where a century of broom handles had left their mark. I probably should have painted before moving in, but it was temporary. My plan was to eventually renovate the sad upstairs, put in an elevator, and create more retail space and perhaps a venue for supper clubs and baby showers. I could create a new office upstairs at that time.
Sliding the coffee creamer and extra paper towels into a box, I squinted one eye and then the other, envisioning how I could make the space workable . . . and cute. Let us not ever forget cute as a qualification for everything in life.
Ruby reversed her course and reemerged framed in the doorway. “What about moving your office to the kitchen? That filing cabinet isn’t fitting in here.” She said it like an apology. The way she always said things. As if she weren’t certain she should have an opinion.
Ruby wasn’t wrong about the filing cabinet, but I needed some privacy to figure the books, order crap, and, okay, play on Facebook.
“I can’t work next to the refrigerator. It would be dangerous . . . to my behind.” I gave her a smile, and she gave me a weird look before skedaddling off.
I stifled my sigh.
Ruby had started as my assistant when we moved the inventory to this new space. Carolyn, my former shop assistant, had decided to retire to stay home with her grandbabies, so I’d started looking for a new person to hawk Tiffany lamps and Asian ginger jars with me. Ruby came in to inquire about a position an hour after Carolyn delivered that bomb. Younger than me by a good decade, pretty in a way some might find unconventional, and seemingly eager to start as soon as I needed, Ruby seemed like an answered prayer. But still I wondered if she was the right fit. Hard to know because she held herself back like she didn’t trust me.
She probably didn’t. I knew very little of her background, but her work ethic kept reminding me that I didn’t have to be friends with an employee. Still, it would just be nice if we could have a conversation that didn’t feel so forced.
Ruby emerged again, carrying the white taffeta 1950s Givenchy cocktail dress I’d found at, of all things, a yard sale. Unfortunately, I had missed the moth holes that dotted the hem, along with the stain under the right arm. Before I realized that saving it was futile, I had thought I could dye the dress and wear it to my cousin’s black-tie Savannah wedding in late summer. Just as well, since I would have had to contract three stomach viruses and live on a diet of lettuce for five months to fit into it, and no dress is worth a life without Girl Scout cookies.
But as much as it pained me, the dress wasn’t salvageable. I had put it in the “not salable but maybe it has another use” bin I kept in the kitchen/storage area.