Just Like Home(15)

He had always smelled just a little bit like sawdust back then.

There was ample street parking available. No one was walking along the sidewalk in front of the store. No one was sitting in the little park across the street, either. Maybe the store would be empty. Maybe some college-age kid would be working the front counter, and he would be the only person Vera would need to speak to before leaving the store.

Maybe things would be easier than she thought.

Vera sat in her car with her sunglasses on, her little canvas purse in her lap. The air-conditioning breathed on her, barely preventing a sheen of sweat from taking hold on the surface of her skin. She told herself not to worry. She was an adult now. She could handle herself better than she’d been able to when she’d lived here as a child. Back then, her whole experience of the world had been limited to a place where the annual ice wine festival was the hottest ticket of the year.

She was a different person now.

She decided not to be afraid.

Vera opened the car door. Immediately she was swallowed by the wet weight of the summer. The green smell of unrelenting bloom worked its fingers up into her skull and down into her throat. She swallowed hard and swam through the thick air to the glass double-doors of Alan & Sons.

The air-conditioned cold inside made her feel damp and bare, as if she’d just shucked a rain-soaked overcoat and let it fall to the floor around her feet. The fluorescent lights high overhead made the concrete floors shine. Bright, cheerful signs hung from the ceiling advertising sales. They did little to cut through the warehouse-feeling of the place.

In spite of the restless nerves that twitched beneath her skin, Vera felt herself sinking into the familiarity of the hardware store. The layout hadn’t changed at all. It still smelled like sawdust and sunflower seeds and fresh paint. She hadn’t been to Alan & Sons in years and years, not since the days she’d spent wandering the aisles while her father picked out lengths of rope and sturdy plastic tarps and roofing nails for his projects—but it felt just like home. This had been a place they visited together, something they shared only with each other.

Vera let herself feel how good it was to be back in this place. She didn’t smile—that would be too much—but she did run her fingers along a cardboard display of paintbrushes as she passed, feeling the stiff bristles beneath her fingertips, remembering the part of her life when things had been good.

Vera passed the paint counter without looking at who was behind it, seeking shelter in the rows of high industrial shelving. She passed the plastic tubs of screws and nails and bolts organized by size, the doorknobs and the lightbulbs and the gardening supplies. She walked fast enough to keep her eyes from straying to the aisle with the huge spools of netting and rope and chain. In that aisle, you could cut whatever you needed to length and buy it by the foot. However much you wanted, for any kind of project. No one would bat an eye.

Vera would not look at those spools.

She kept her head down and walked quickly down the aisle that cut between the two rows of shelves. Alan & Sons was, of course, not empty. It would have been nice for it to have been empty, and imagining that possibility had been a worthy trick to get herself out of the car and into the store, but that’s all it had been: a trick. A trap she’d set for herself.

Necessary.

Plenty of people were in the store, having wandered inside to escape the heat like beetles huddling together under a rotting log. There were two in the garden aisle, three near the paint chips, two by the registers, and a few singles scattered throughout the power tools, and all of them had eyes.

Vera did not look at any of them, did not look at their faces, but she could feel their eyes.

She snapped the fingers of her right hand four times fast.

It didn’t work. Behind her came the teakettle hiss of a rising whisper. Someone dropped something with a heavy ceramic thunk.

It has nothing to do with you, she told herself. You’re just here to buy storage bins.

They were on the back wall of the store, their plastic bulk incongruous beside the shelves of cut lumber. Vera grabbed four big eighteen-gallon ones, stacking them inside each other so they’d be easier to carry to the register. They were thick gray plastic with locking lids. They didn’t nest inside each other perfectly, and when she lifted them she only just barely saw over the top of the stack. Vera turned to walk back through the store the way she’d come, peering over the gray plastic in her arms.

The whispers were louder now, and the weight of several stares rested heavier on her back. A few people were standing in the long aisle behind her, and even if she didn’t want to look right at their faces, it was impossible not to know that they were watching her. She couldn’t look at the floor because the gray plastic tubs were in the way. She couldn’t dodge all those eyes.

So she didn’t. She made eye contact with them. She smiled. The lip of the top tub pressed the key around her neck into the soft meat of her chest. I’m allowed to be here, she thought. I’m allowed to be here just as much as you are.

It worked until it didn’t. It worked until she made eye contact with the middle-aged woman at the end of the garden section. Vera froze at the heat of the hatred in her eyes.

The woman’s face was lean and lined in ways it hadn’t been the last time Vera had seen her. Her once-auburn hair was cut into a blunt gray bob. Her lips were pressed into a bloodless line. The remains of a large terra-cotta pot were at her feet where she had dropped it just a few moments earlier—she hadn’t moved, hadn’t bothered to pick up the shards. She had just stood where she was, hating Vera more every second.