Looking for Me by Beth Hoffman

Author:Beth Hoffman
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: Romance
ISBN: 9780670025831
Publisher: Pamela Dorman Books
Published: 2013-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-THREE

It wasn’t long after that day when I sensed the first winds of a retail slowdown. Prior to Christmas I’d sold several pieces of sterling and landed a home for a Norwegian polychromed console table I’d had for nearly two years, but sales of the big-ticket furniture items had plummeted, and I didn’t know why. Whenever my shop had hit a slow period in the past, I’d wheel and deal and do whatever it took to push through the lean times, and I always managed to survive while many other shops closed their doors.

But something about this felt different.

By the end of January, I was deeply concerned; even the repair and restoration business had dropped by over 25 percent. When February came to a close, I was scared, so scared that I woke each morning with a tightening in my throat. Every Monday when Inez gave me a copy of the financial sheet, my stomach sank. She never said a word, but it was impossible to ignore the worry in her eyes.

Though I had no control over who walked through my door or what they might be looking for, I had no one to blame but myself. During the summer of the previous year, my contact in London had sent me photographs of two exceptionally rare antiques he’d found in North Yorkshire. I became greedy and purchased them both—a colossal Louis XV armoire with beautifully carved leaves and scrolls along its curved canopy and the pièce de résistance—an exquisite sterling-silver George III monteith bowl with an impressive domed lid. Crafted during the Regency period with elaborate Rococo-inspired repoussé designs, the bowl was hallmarked 1818—THOMAS GAIRDNER—a silversmith of renowned talent.

Both the armoire and the bowl were once-in-a-lifetime pieces with prices to match, but I felt it was time to raise the bar and align myself with the dealers in Atlanta and New York. It was a daring move, but one I felt ready to take.

While I suspected that the monteith bowl might take a while to sell, I was certain the armoire would all but fly out the door, and though it drew a great deal of attention, no one had made an offer. Every morning I’d unlock the front door for business, turn to face the four-hundred-pound beauty that had become an albatross, and wonder why it hadn’t sold. As for the bowl, it sat behind the locked glass doors in the illuminated display case, a glaring reminder of my lust. I could hardly look at it without feeling sick to my stomach. It had taken over a third of my yearly purchasing budget to acquire the two pieces, and each week that they didn’t sell, my funds were further depleted. In retrospect, my daring move had proved to be foolish.

My first priority was to pay Albert and Inez, and I managed to scratch up enough to make the shop’s monthly rent, but there was no money left for me to take a salary. I struggled to meet my personal financial obligations—especially Grammy’s nursing-home care.

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