All stories › Fantasy › Thirty Days, Not a Month › Episode 3
Twenty Fridays
Episode 3 of 3 of Thirty Days, Not a Month by Lorraine Petty · free to read
Silas Nyquist’s luck forfeited to me at six o’clock on October thirty-first, and by eight-thirty the next morning his landlord was waiting on my step.
I had called the number on Silas’s ticket at five. It rang through to a voicemail box that was full. I kept the door unlocked until six, and at six the three weeks came up out of the glass and into me like cold water up a sleeve.
At home I turned on the kitchen tap to fill the kettle, and the faucet came apart at the base. Water hit the cabinets, the window and the front of my shirt.
I got down on the floor with a flashlight. The shutoff valve under the sink would not turn. I wrapped a dish towel around it and leaned until my palms burned, and it gave a quarter turn and stopped.
I sat in the water with my back against the dishwasher and held the towel over the pipe until the night plumber came at two.
None of it was large. All of it was mine. Three weeks of a lucky young man’s luck ran backward on a woman in her forties who had never had much of her own.
Floyd held up his bank envelope when he saw me.
“You look terrible,” he said.
“I had a night.”
“That’s three weeks of a lucky boy running the wrong way through you. It’ll be ten days of nights.” He tapped the envelope. “Nine hundred. That’s a hundred eighty over what you lent him. I’ll take it right now.”
“The hold is ten days.”
“That’s your father’s habit. You know it and I know it. Sell it to me this morning and you sleep tonight.”
I let him in, because it was cold.
Silas came at nine. The date was gone from his hand. He stopped when he saw Floyd at the counter.
“Mr. Pressley came by my door on the thirtieth,” he said to me. “He said he’d talked to you. He said you told him the first was fine, same as always, and to save myself a trip.”
“I never talked to him about you.”
Floyd looked at the jewelry case.
“I washed it off my hand,” Silas said. “He knew your dad. I figured he knew.”
“You could have renewed both on the thirty-first. Sixty and eighty-four. A hundred forty-four dollars.”
“I had it.” He put three hundred ninety dollars on the glass in small bills. “I had all of it. Rent’s eight hundred for November. I was going to do a month. A whole month of it, and pay you something on the old ones.”
He started to put his hands on the counter. I put mine there first, flat, over the place where the numbers came up.
“No,” I said.
“I’m not asking for a favor.”
“I know. I’m not writing you another ticket. Not this month or any month.”
Floyd tapped the envelope on the glass. “Trudy. Nine hundred. He’s got three-ninety and no job to speak of.”
I looked at Silas. “Your three weeks are mine now. Forfeits belong to the owner, and I can sell them to anybody I want.”
“Then sell it to him,” Silas said. “Get your money.”
“While I carry it, it still works for you. It only works backward on me.”
He didn’t understand that yet. Floyd did. He put the envelope back inside his windbreaker.
I took out a layaway pad. My father had kept it under the register for guitars and power tools.
“Ticket price is eight sixty-four,” I said, and wrote it. “Three-sixty on the first one, five-oh-four on the second. You give me sixty-four today. Then forty dollars every Friday for twenty weeks. Layaway stays in the shop until it’s paid off. That means it stays in me.”
Silas stared at the slip. “Why would you do that?”
“Because I wrote you two tickets I shouldn’t have.”
“Twenty weeks,” Floyd said. “You won’t have a car left.”
“Then I’ll walk to the bank.”
Silas counted sixty-four dollars out of his three-ninety. His hands shook a little. While I was writing his name, his phone buzzed in his pocket, and he looked at the cracked screen.
“It’s the warehouse,” he said. “They want me back on full shift. Tonight.”
“Then go. And find somewhere else to rent.”
“My cousin has a couch.”
Floyd left without saying goodbye. He had bought from my father’s counter since before I could see over it, and he went out the door like it was any shop.
The pen on the chain ran dry halfway through my signature. Of course it did. I finished with the one from my shirt pocket and handed Silas his copy.
I walked him to the door. He went down the front step the way most people go down steps, without thinking about it at all, and the bus was still at the corner when he got there.
He cleared the step. I didn’t.