Warm and Willing - Lawrence Block [4]
She chose a small green heart on a gold chain. The heart was veined with red like bloodstone. “It’s not very Oriental,” she began.
“It’s lovely.” The smile again. “And quite appropriate.”
That night she saw the blonde girl a second time. First she ate dinner alone at an Italian restaurant half a block from Heaven’s Door. She walked down Sixth Avenue to see what was playing at the Waverly but it was a picture she had already seen. She wandered around, then drifted over to Washington Square. The sun had gone down and the air was cool but not uncomfortable. There was a slight breeze. She sat alone on a bench on one of the less traveled paths that wound through the park and took a paperback novel from her bag. She read a few chapters, smoked a cigarette, started reading again.
When she looked up she saw the blonde girl. She was walking down another path about twenty yards away and had not noticed Rhoda. She walked slowly, her eyes lowered, and there was an air of infinite sadness about her. She might have been a character in some movie walking down the Champs Elysee in the rain with tears staining her face. That effect. Nothing so obvious, but the air.
Rhoda almost called to her, almost went to her. The girl had been friendly, but that was nothing extraordinary—customers were often friendly, and sometimes too much so. What was it? A feeling of compatibility, perhaps. A feeling that she and the blonde girl might be able to relax together, to talk, to have a meal or a cup of coffee together.
The blonde girl moved off out of sight; Rhoda went back to her book and tried to lose herself in it. She couldn’t.
She got up from the bench and went back to her room.
That night there was no dream. She slept soundly and woke easily, vitally anxious to begin the day. She had breakfast, and hurried to the shop. Nothing very much happened during the morning, but the time seemed to pass quickly anyway.
A few minutes after two that afternoon she sold a black lacquered commode for $79.95. The customer, a heavyish woman with bleached hair, paid cash for the commode and left delivery instructions. She lived somewhere on Long Island. When she had left the store, Mr. Yamatari danced out of the back room with an expression of glee on his face that was not inscrutable in the least.
“You sell it,” he said. “You sell that thing. You wonderful.”
“Well,” she said.
“Never think we sell it,” Mr. Yamatari said. “Cost…what? Sixteen dollar, fifty cent. Three year ago. Never think we sell the damn thing, and you sell it.”
She hadn’t exactly. The woman with the bleached hair had come in looking for some overpriced and foul object, poorly constructed and shabbily designed, and it had taken no special genius to guess that the black lacquered commode was just what she was searching for. From that point, the commode had sold itself.
“You get ten dollar extra this week,” Mr. Yamatari said expansively. “Ten dollar, no tax.”
That fixed her mood for the rest of the afternoon. She nearly sang as she moved around the shop. Customers who might have annoyed her did not get on her nerves, and when one woman’s young son smashed a china Buddha to smithereens she insisted that the woman forget the whole thing, that it was perfectly all right.
At four-thirty the blonde girl entered the store. Rhoda almost failed to recognize her at first, hadn’t thought of her since the night before. The blonde girl came directly over to her, and Rhoda thought that she was returning the little heart. The idea that her choice had been unsuccessful made her strangely unhappy, as though she herself had failed.
But the girl said, “I was just passing by. I thought I would come in.”
“I’m glad you did.” She hesitated. “Did your friend like the heart?”
“I don’t know. I mailed it to her.”
“Oh, you should have told me she lived out-of-town. I would have sent it right from here—”
“She’s in town,” the girl said. Her voice was oddly strained. “I just thought I would put it in the mail, just on the spur of the moment.” She paused, then looked directly into Rhoda’s eyes. Her own