The Carnival Papers

Antiques

(From the short story collection The Carnival Papers available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback!)

Sandra Pestona stood in the doorway of her mother’s shop, watching a seagull hop around the parking lot in search of food.  When the bird spread its wings and lifted into the air, Sandra returned to her dusty prison.  The former bait shop along the harbor still retained a fishy smell Sandra’s mother said she would stop noticing after a week.  A window with ‘New Beginnings Antiques’ scrawled in a red Old English font gave her a view of South Benton, a row of square buildings and peaked roofs perched above the harbor.  The town remained unchanged from the oil painting made a year after South Benton’s founding that hung behind the counter, between a life preserver and a rack of moldering books. 

She jumped at the throaty roar of a fishing boat’s horn as it headed out into the bay and wished she could stowaway to rendezvous with Jimmy Rathburn on Martha’s Vineyard.  He had promised to take her there as they had lain in the wet sand of Beacon Point Beach.  His parents owned a house on the island, a palace where Jimmy and Sandra could spend the entire summer playing tennis, walking the beaches, and attending lavish parties.  It sounded like a fairy tale, complete with a wicked witch in the form of Sandra’s mother.

Sandra picked up a silver compact and studied the intertwined roses stamped on its cover.  After brushing aside a mocha tress, she examined the red blotch on her neck, the incontrovertible evidence that had damned her when she came home three hours past curfew on the last day of school.  She took the compact’s puff and dabbed white powder against the hickey, but the bruise didn’t vanish.

“What are you doing?” her mother said.  The compact slipped from Sandra’s hand and crashed to the cement floor, a crack splitting its mirror.  “Now look what you’ve done.”

“It’s your fault,” Sandra said.  “You startled me.”

Her mother snatched the compact from the floor and tucked it into a pocket of her ratty gray sweater.  As she swept a hand around the store, the glasses hanging from a chain around her neck bobbed, but the brown hair gathered into a knot at the back of her head didn’t move.  She said with a librarian’s hiss, “These aren’t toys for you to play with.”

“What do you want me to do then?”

“Sit there and try to behave yourself.”

Sandra crossed her arms and curled her lip in a sneer.  “Maybe you should send me home.”

“Maybe I should ask your uncle to get you a job.”

The thought of being surrounded by greasy fishermen reeking with a mixture of fish, sweat, and beer like Uncle John made Sandra cringe; her sneer turned to a pout.  “Fine.  I’ll sit right here and do nothing.”

The door to the back room opened and Sandra flinched at the voice she had first heard three months ago when the woman had appeared at the front door to beg for a job.  “Lexie, have you seen the varnish?”  Ramona Arrington stood in the doorway with a miniature hammer in one hand and a tool belt around her waif-like hips.  The black ringlets pulled back from her forehead revealed a jagged red scar slanting across her forehead.  “Am I interrupting something?” 

 “My daughter was just playing with some of the merchandise.”

Ramona came around the counter, her olive-tinged face breaking into a smile as she patted Sandra on the shoulder.  “There’s nothing here for a girl her age to do.  She should be out with her friends.”

“She’s being punished.”  Sandra’s mother raked her fingernails across a tarnished washboard.  “I don’t suppose you have anything Sandy can help with?”