Please See Us by Caitlin Mullen

Author:Caitlin Mullen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2020-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

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WITH EVERYTHING else that was going on, finding Peaches, and the woman who had run away, gave me purpose, though the strangeness, the pressure of it all, was getting to me—I had started to jump at even the smallest of noises when I was alone, or suffer crying jags that swelled up suddenly, full-body sobs that left me feeling used up. The day after the man burned me, I forced myself to leave the apartment, even though all I wanted to do was curl up and sleep.

Out on the street, a jitney swerved around a taxi, both drivers leaning on their horns. A few drunk college students swayed down the street, bickering about where to go next. This place is a fucking joke, one of them complained. The chicks here are fucking busted.

I walked toward Zeg’s pawnshop. I hadn’t been there for a while and for once had nothing to sell, but I was lonely enough that I was willing to listen to his scolding for the afternoon, just to talk to another person, to hear my own voice out loud. I once had a vision of Zeg helping a man who must have been his father at a shoe store: his father would hold out a shoe to a customer, and Zeg would hurry into the back room to look for the proper size among the stacks of white shoeboxes. In the vision I could see out the front window to what must have been Atlantic Avenue, the marquee of the old movie house. The theater was closed now and the store across the way, where Zeg’s father’s shop would have been, was now a fried chicken restaurant. So that explained Zeg, I guessed. He was just like the rest of us. He couldn’t let go of what he had lost and would spend the rest of his days hoarding the wrong things trying to make up for it. Maybe his father had gone out of business when the casinos were built. Maybe his pawnshop was his small way of getting back: collecting gamblers’ wedding rings and lucky coins when they came to him pleading, liquor wafting out of their pores, eyes bloodshot, hands shaking, giving them a tenth of what their most prized possessions were worth. Maybe he felt like he was getting his revenge by being exacting, cheap.

A strip of bells attached to a leather strap jingled when I pushed through the door. Zeg was bent over a copy of the Press of Atlantic City, and I could see the thinning hair at the top of his head. His store was a mess, but he knew where everything was, as though at the end of the day he brought home a map of his inventory and studied it before he slept.

Below him, a glass case gleamed with rhinestone necklaces, tarnished silver spoons, gold bracelets and earrings, old watches, all stopped at different times, and a few newer ones that told the times in other cities, too: London, Tokyo.

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