What He's Poised to Do: Stories Read Free Page B

cool on my skin. I didn’t tell him to stop, but I didn’t encourage him and I left a few minutes later.
    I don’t even know how Berne found out. Maybe I mentioned it because it seemed like such a nothing. But it wasn’t nothing to Berne—he lowered his voice almost to a whisper, which was far worse than yelling. I went out with Mr. Carr only once after that, and then just to tell him that even though I respected him as a teacher (which wasn’t really true) and liked him as a person (which wasn’t really true either) I couldn’t see him anymore because I had a guy back home who wanted to get more serious. This time I didn’t say a boy, and that was true, and before I knew it, I was Mrs. Berne Moser, and I was throwing the bouquet over my shoulder. It stayed in the air for a while, and then Sarah caught it.
     
     
    H OW CAN IT BE that my sister was in line to catch the bouquet when she had a husband who owned the local hardware store? Easy. He died. ED MCCAFFREY , 58, OWNED MCCAFFREY’S HARDWARE . That was the headline in the paper. Ed was a rough-and-tumble guy, always getting into a scrap over the silliest thing. Once he threw another guy through a window because the guy didn’t like Some Came Running , which was Ed’s favorite movie of all time. Sarah was always worried that Ed would die in a bar fight or in a motorcycle wreck. But neither of those things happened. He died of a sudden heart attack, behind the counter at the hardware store. It was the counter where I worked for hundreds of days, but when I went back there after Ed’s funeral, it didn’t seem like the same counter at all. It was still and quiet, with none of the glorious mess. The register drawer was open, which it never was, and it was empty, which it never was. One of the other clerks said that they buried Ed with his money, but I wasn’t sure whether that was a kind of knock on Ed for being a notorious cheapskate or a kind of joke about how much he loved his business, so I didn’t say anything.
     
     
    E D HAD A SON from his first marriage, Dave. Ed always said that it was in honor of his uncle Dave, and not Frank Sinatra’s character in Some Came Running . Sarah always said that she never met Uncle Dave and didn’t think he existed. Dave worked in the hardware store with me when I first started there. I was nineteen and he was seventeen. Ed wasn’t my brother-in-law yet, just my boss. So Dave was nothing to me, until he was something. We locked up late sometimes, and one time he told me that I was looking pretty, and the next thing you know we were crouching down under the key counter, kissing. Every time he moved or I moved the whole thing jingled like Christmas, so he tried to stay still and so did I. We saw each other a few times after that, and then I started going with this older guy and Dave kind of got his feelings hurt. The older guy wasn’t Berne, not yet. Berne was two guys later, and by then Dave had quit the hardware store and gone to Lincoln to try to be a painter. Not a house painter or a sign painter, either. A real painter. Ed always joked about how any man who painted was a fruit, but I know that he was proud of Dave because he hung his paintings in the back office of the hardware store. One of them was of a woman standing by a window, looking out. She was real pretty and had a faraway look in her eyes, but faraway like she was thinking about something in her past rather than in her future. Dave told me that it was a girl who posed for him in Lincoln. He also told me that she was the second girl that he ever kissed, and that she wasn’t as good as the first. Go on, I said. Flattery will get you nowhere. I didn’t tell Sarah about the woman in the painting, but we both agreed it was a nice painting because it was mostly blue.
     
     
    D AVE WAS ALWAYS REAL CLOSE to his dad. They drank together almost every day, from when Dave was just a boy until Dave left town. Ed wasn’t one to keep a boy from drinking.