Buttons and Foes by Dolores Johnson

Author:Dolores Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-05-13T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THREE

I grabbed a red plaid dress and went looking for Mack again. He wasn’t at the cleaning machines, but his assistant, Kim, grinned at me. “Boss man is out to lunch.”

Kim works hard to improve his English, and he pronounced each word carefully. The “boss man” was something he’d picked up from Betty, who calls Mack and me “boss man” and “boss lady.” I figure it’s a lot better than some other things she could have taught him to say.

He pointed in the direction of the break room, and I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to wait until Mack returned from a restaurant in the neighborhood.

I hurried back past my office to the break room, where I spotted Mack at a table just beyond the door. The finishing crew wouldn’t stop for lunch for half an hour, so I assumed we were alone.

“Look at this.” I held up the dress with its dozens of buttons. Unfortunately, it obscured my view of Betty, who was getting a soda out of the pop machine in the corner of the room. “All the dresses at the bottom of the bags have these mismatched buttons on them. I think this is what Thelma meant when she said I’d know what to do with the clothes.”

“Well, I’ll be damned.” Mack glanced from one kind of button to the next. “So what are you going to do with them?”

“What’s the matter?” Betty asked, rushing over to the table.

I hadn’t meant to share my discovery with anyone but Mack, and I tried to signal him to be quiet.

He was too engrossed with an ivory button with a winged horse on it to notice. “I wonder if this could be valuable.”

“What about buttons?” Betty asked.

“It’s nothing, Betty.”

But apparently she’d overheard the whole conversation. “I bet Les the Junk Man would know if they’re valuable or not.”

Les the Junk Man wasn’t exactly the equivalent of Betty the Bag Lady, but close. He showed up every few months at the back door of the plant with a bunch of buttons, usually just shirt buttons and mother-of-pearl.

I had no idea where he found them, but he would offer the buttons to me for a couple of dollars. I always bought them from him for the extensive collection we already had in our repair and alterations department. Since we promised to replace buttons free of charge for our customers’ clothes, you could never tell when the buttons would come in handy.

“Want me to try and find old Les?” Betty asked.

“No, Betty, I don’t want you to go looking for him.”

The last thing I needed right now was for Betty to go off on some wild-goose chase through the mean streets of Denver’s underbelly. She’d done that once before, and it had sent Mack and me on a search-and-rescue mission that I had no desire to repeat.

“It wouldn’t be any trouble,” Betty persisted. “I bet he finds buttons like these all the time.” She fingered one of the buttons— not a gem-type button but a silly one in the shape of a cow.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.