The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [50]
“Skip it,” she says quickly. She’s regrouping. “You hear the weather report this morning, Mr. S?”
I tell her I didn’t.
“Mucho thunderstorms and mucho kaboom. Sky evil. ‘Course, who’d know in a mall?”
“Who’d know?” I agree.
“What’s the worst thing ever happened to you?” she asks, frowning downward at her purple fingernails. She’s arranging the foods for our sandwiches.
“The worst thing?” I wait. “How come?” I come back behind the counter and adjust my manager’s smock.
“Just curious. Yeah. Just curious.” She gives me an odd square smile.
“Hmm,” I say. “Hard to decide. I can’t think of it. Well, I’ll tell you one thing, it isn’t the worst, it’s just that I remember something, at this very moment. Here it is.” I straighten up to scratch my eyebrow. “One time, in college, a bunch of us somehow got cheap airplane tickets to Paris for a few days. We were hitchhiking once we got there. Anyhow, when you’re in Paris, you go to the cathedral, Notre Dame. Big tourist attraction.”
She nods.
“So the four of us go into Notre Dame. And Notre Dame, you know, is actually a working cathedral. People, supplicants, I guess you’d call them, go in there and pray. They have Mass every morning, despite all these tourists milling around.” She’s stopped arranging the food and looks up at me. “Well, we went in there. We started at the back. In the back of the cathedral you can buy votive candles from some nun or other and light them for a loved one who needs help, and even if you’re not a Catholic, you can still do this. And because someone I knew was sick, I bought a votive candle and lit it. I mean, a votive candle looks like a soul, doesn’t it? And then I went over to put it on the stand.”
“It’s almost nine o’clock, Mr. S.”
“I know. We’re almost ready. I got here early. Let me finish this story.” I could see some customers outside our chain security gate waiting for their morning coffee fix. “Well, we’d been traveling, so I was tired, so my hand was shaking. And these stands they have, they’re thin and spindly, like thin wrought iron, and delicate, because this is Europe. That’s where we are. And because my hand was shaking, I reached down to the holder, this freestanding holder or candelabra or whatever of votive candles, and somehow, I don’t know how this happened, my hand caused this holder of candles, all these small flames, all these souls, to fall over, and when it fell over, all the candles, lit for the sake of a soul somewhere, there must have been a hundred of them, all of them fell to the floor, because of me, and all of them went out. And you know what the nun did, Chloé, the nun who was standing there?”
“She spoke French?”
“No. She could have, but she didn’t. No, what she did was, she screamed.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, the nun screamed in my face. I felt like . . .”
“You felt like pretty bad, Mr. S. I can believe it. But you know, Mr. S, those were just candles. They weren’t really souls. That’s all superstition, that soul stuff.”
“Oh, I know.”
“No kidding, Mr. S, you shouldn’t be so totally morbid. I thought when you were telling me about the worst thing you ever did, it’d be, like, beating up a blind guy and stealing his car.”
“No. I never did that.”
“Oscar did, once. You should get him to tell you about it.”
“Okay.”
“He was drunk, though.” She prettily touches her perfect hair. “And the guy wasn’t really blind. He just said he was, to take advantage of people. It was, like, a scam. Oscar saw through all that. It’s nine o’clock now, Boss. We should open up.”
“Right.” And I unlock the curtain, and touch a switch, and slowly the curtain rises on the working day. The candles are nothing to Chloé; they’re just candles. I feel instantly better. Bless her.
The processional begins, and we have employees from nearby businesses coming in to get a cup of coffee and maybe something else, a brioche. We turn on the music: cool piano jazz to counteract the Mozart the mall is always playing on their PA system to keep the mall rats out. I look