All stories › Fantasy › Thirty Days, Not a Month › Episode 1
The Glass Counter
Episode 1 of 3 of Thirty Days, Not a Month by Lorraine Petty · free to read
The pen on the chain had gone dry, so I wrote Silas Nyquist’s ticket with the one from my shirt pocket.
He was maybe twenty-four, in work boots, with a warehouse badge clipped to his belt. He had both palms flat on my father’s glass counter, fingers spread, the way I’d shown him.
“Say it plain,” I said.
“A week of my luck.”
The number came up through the glass from underneath, like breath on a cold window. Three hundred dollars, in thin gray numerals. My father had been dead five years, and the counter still rounded to the nearest twenty, the way he always had.
Silas leaned over to read it upside down. “That’s real?”
“It’s what the counter says a week is worth. I lend what it says.”
“Okay. Do I feel it go?”
“Not right away,” I said. “A week is a week’s worth, taken out of all of it. You don’t lose seven days. You run a little thin every day until you redeem. You’ll notice. Now I need your ID.”
He slid his driver’s license across. I copied the number, the birth date and the apartment on the east side, and I took his right thumbprint on the back of the shop copy. The police got a copy of every ticket I wrote by close of business. Luck or lawn mower, they had never once asked which.
“Loan is three hundred,” I said. “Finance charge is twenty percent a month, so sixty. Bring me three hundred sixty by October first and you get your week back.”
“October first.”
“Thirty days, not a month. People get burned on the long months.”
“Rent’s seven hundred. I’ve got four.” He shrugged. “This covers it.”
“It covers September.”
“What happens if I don’t make it?”
“Then on day thirty it forfeits to the shop, and the shop is me. I don’t recommend it.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Not you,” I said.
He folded his copy twice and tucked it behind the license. I counted out fifteen twenties. On his way out he caught his boot on the front step, the one that sat higher than the others, and grabbed the doorframe to keep from going down.
Through the window I watched the crosstown bus pull away from the corner without him.
At noon I took the deposit to the bank, which was two blocks north and had been two blocks north my whole life.
I turned south at the door.
I knew it was wrong. My feet were sure anyway. That was what a forfeit did to whoever carried it.
Ten days earlier, Nadia Merriweather’s ticket had run out. She had pawned her sense of direction in July to make a car payment and never came back. At six o’clock on her thirtieth day it came up off the counter and into me, because forfeits go to the owner.
The owner was me.
For ten days I had driven past my own street. Twice I had walked into the stockroom looking for the front door.
Forty minutes later I stopped a kid on a bicycle.
“Which way is the bank? The brick one.”
He pointed back the way I had come. “You walked right past it, ma’am.”
Floyd Pressley came in at four. He had come in on the tenth day of nearly every forfeit since my father ran the counter. He was a big man with white hair, in a pressed shirt and a windbreaker, and he kept his cash in a bank envelope.
“Sense of direction,” he said. “Still got it?”
“Until you buy it.”
“Your father held them ten days too. I never understood it. The law says it’s yours the minute the clock runs out.”
“Ten days gives a late customer the chance to buy it back at ticket price.”
“And meanwhile you get lost going to the bank.”
“I found the bank.”
“Funny thing,” he said. “Sitting in your glass, it does nobody any good. Riding around in you, it still works for her. Wherever she is, she knows north.”
“And I don’t.”
“Not till you sell.”
“What did she pawn it for, back in July?”
“A car payment. She was going to drive somewhere new.”
He put two hundred dollars on the counter. I wrote the bill of sale and he signed it, and the moment his pen lifted I knew where north was. It came back so hard I put my hand down flat on the glass.
Sold is sold. Nadia Merriweather would turn the wrong way out of doors for the rest of her life, and Floyd would never be lost again. My father had taught me not to think about that part past closing.
Floyd folded the receipt into his envelope. Then he leaned on the counter where Silas had leaned and looked down through the glass.
“Young fellow was in this morning,” he said. “Tall. Work boots.”
“I don’t talk about customers.”
“Luck, wasn’t it?”
I didn’t answer. He smiled like I had.
“Call me when that boy’s luck forfeits,” he said.