All stories › Fantasy › Thirty Days, Not a Month › Episode 2

Two More Weeks

Episode 2 of 3 of Thirty Days, Not a Month by Lorraine Petty · free to read

Silas Nyquist’s luck did not forfeit in September, because he was sitting on my front step when I unlocked at nine on the first of October, and I never called Floyd.

He looked like a month of small things. His phone screen was cracked corner to corner. A parking ticket stuck out of his shirt pocket.

“They cut me to twenty-two hours,” he said. “Then they lost my timecard for a week.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“It’s a little bit my counter’s,” I said.

“I can’t do three-sixty.”

“Then renew. Pay the sixty and the ticket runs another thirty days. Your week stays in the glass.”

“I can’t do sixty either. Not and make rent.” He rubbed his face. “Rent went up. Seven-fifty. I’ve got three-ninety.”

“In the middle of a lease?”

“He said taxes.”

“That’s not how leases work.”

“It’s how his works. I’m not going to fight him on twenty-two hours a week.”

I knew what he was going to ask. My father had painted one line on the inside of the stockroom door when I was in grade school, and it was still there. Good collateral, you lend. It didn’t say anything about the person who brought it in.

Silas put both palms on the glass.

“Two more weeks,” he said. “Of my luck.”

The number came up slower this time. Four hundred twenty dollars.

He did the math faster than I did. “Last time one week was three hundred.”

“The counter prices what you’ve got left. You’ve got less.”

“Four-twenty is sixty for the old ticket and three-sixty for rent.” He laughed, but not much. “That’s it to the dollar.”

“Silas, you could walk away from this.”

“And sleep where?”

I wrote it. Ticket one renewed, sixty paid, new due date October thirty-first. Ticket two, four hundred twenty, finance charge eighty-four, due the same day. He signed both, and I filed the signed tickets in the drawer and gave him his copies. I said the date out loud twice, and then I handed him my pen.

“Write it on your hand.”

“I’ll remember.”

“October has thirty-one days. Write it on your hand.”

He wrote 10/31 on the back of his left hand and held it up, like a kid showing a permission slip. I counted out three hundred sixty dollars and kept his sixty in the drawer.

He made it down the step this time. He went slowly and held the rail the whole way.

At two, a woman from the high school choir came in to redeem her singing voice. She had pawned it in September to cover a dentist bill. She had her ticket and the full amount in an envelope, and she laid both on the glass with her hands beside them. I stamped the ticket paid and filed it.

She hummed one low note, then a higher one, standing between the guitars and the leaf blowers.

“Was it strange?” I said. “Not having it?”

“Like a room in my house with the door locked,” she said. “I kept walking past it.”

“That’s what it’s for,” I said, after she left, to nobody.

At three-thirty the phone rang.

“Did the boy come in?” Floyd said.

“How do you know he comes on the first?”

“Everybody pays on the first, Trudy.”

“I don’t talk about customers, Floyd.”

“You said that last month.” He hung up.

Silas came back at ten to six. The ink on his hand had smeared, but I could still read it. He stood just inside the door like he didn’t want to take up any more of the shop than he had to.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Go ahead.”

“If I can’t pay on the thirty-first. Where does it go?”

“To me. I hold it ten days in case you come in late with the money. Then I can sell it.”

“To anybody?”

“To anybody who pays.”

He looked down at the glass, where there was nothing to see. “Mr. Pressley asked about it today, when I paid him. What the ticket said and when it was due. He said if it came to that, he might buy it off you and hold it for me. He said that was a favor.”

“How do you know Floyd Pressley?”

“He’s my landlord,” Silas said. “He sent me here.”

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