The Second Wren

Chapter 7: No Returns

Nate was grinning at him over Wren's shoulder, mouthing it so only Ethan could see.

*You're welcome.*

Ethan got his wallet off the counter. Then his keys out of his pocket, then back in, because his hands needed something to do and the store had run out of things for them.

"We should go," he said.

"I've got a*****e to run," Nate said, from behind the register, in the voice of a man settling in to watch a game. "That's what I do when nobody's in it."

Ethan was already moving. His hand was out for the door when her fingers closed around his arm, above the elbow, through the sleeve — not hard enough to hurt, and not the kind of grip you could walk out of without it becoming a whole thing.

"It's a good thing," she said. "That's the part I don't understand. Somebody tells me you're good at something, and you want to leave the store."

"Wren—"

"Why did you stop?"

Nate set the pen down on the counter and left it there. "Eleven months. That's the number he'll give you and it's true. What he won't tell you is a year ago he's a sophomore. Everybody knows junior year's the busy year. Sophomore year, the kid's got nothing but time, and he's in here every other week trading games."

"Nate."

"I'm done." Nate put both hands flat on the counter, which was somehow worse than the talking.

"It was one song," Ethan said, and heard how worked-on it came out. "Today. You were standing there, and I picked it up, and I played it, and that's all it was. I'm not starting again."

The shop got quiet. Behind the register the amp ticked the way amps do when they've been on a while.

The heat came up his neck into his ears. There was nothing to be done about that, so he stood there with it, and turned his keys over once in his hand, and put them away.

Wren looked at him. Then she handed the phone back to Nate, and let go of his arm.

"Okay," she said. "You don't want to tell me, I won't ask."

Ethan waited for the rest of it. There was always a rest of it, the part where the question came back around with interest. She turned away instead and looked at the wall of guitars, and after a second she lifted her chin at the one he'd been playing.

"How much is that one."

Nate looked at the guitar, then at Ethan, and something in his face turned over, like he'd worked out the shape of the afternoon. "That's the FG5. Yamaha. Six ninety-nine, out the door. If you're just starting, I've got two in the back that'll do you fine and won't hurt your—"

"That one." She already had her phone up. "Venmo, or do I need a card?"

"Wren," Ethan said. "What are you doing."

She didn't turn around. "You keep your reasons. I'll keep my money."

"There's your answer," Nate said, and turned his phone around so the payment code faced her, and she scanned it and tapped twice and the register made its sound.

Then Nate got a gig bag down off the wall and put the Yamaha in it and zipped it and set it on the counter and stepped back, like a man who'd just sold his own car.

Wren picked it up by the neck. She turned, and held it out.

"Here. It's yours."

"I can't."

"You can. Take it."

"Wren, this is—" He had both hands up, palms out, as if she were pointing something at him. "That's six ninety-nine. If you're going to spend that on me, buy the perfume. It's one eighty-five and it doesn't need a case."

She looked at him for a second. Then she raised her voice, not much, just enough to reach the register. "Nate. Can I return this?"

Nate was holding his phone up at chest height and didn't lower it. "No returns. Store policy."

"There's no store policy," Ethan said.

"There's one today," Nate said.

Wren shrugged with one shoulder. "You heard him. I don't play guitar, and I'm not carrying a guitar around a mall all afternoon." She pushed it at him. "If you hand it back to me, I'll break it."

"You won't break it."

"I'll break it. I'll take it out on the sidewalk and put it through the window of the store with the candles in it. Then it's worth nothing to anybody, and I'll still have paid for it, and that'll be that."

He believed her. That was the thing. He stood there with the bag against his chest and believed her.

"Fine," he said. "Fine. Thank you."

"Don't thank me." She put her phone away. "It's not free."

He looked up.

"One condition," she said. "From now on, whatever I tell you to do, you do it. You don't dodge it. You don't tell me you'll do it later. You don't say no."

"That's not a condition. That's—"

"It's not forever." She held her hand out flat and dipped it, level, like a scale. "Everything I ask you for gets charged against the seven hundred. When the seven hundred's used up, you're done. You don't owe me anything, I don't ask you for anything, it ends. Clean."

Seven hundred. He did the arithmetic before he'd decided to, because that was how his head worked and he had given up being sorry about it. A favor was worth what, twenty dollars? Fifty? At fifty a favor he was looking at fourteen favors, and the honest truth was that he would rather owe her a guitar than fourteen favors.

Which wasn't the point. The point was the guitar. It had somebody's whole arm worn into the fingerboard, and a top going brown at the edges, and it sounded like an instrument that had been played by a person who knew what he was doing.

"I'm waiting," Wren said.

"I'm thinking."

"You're stalling."

"If I say yes," he said, "what's to stop you from asking me to do something—"

"Nothing. That's the deal. Say yes or give it back."

"For the record," Nate said, "I've known this kid three years. Three years, and he's never brought a person in here. Not a friend, not one. I figured he went home and turned into a video game at night."

"I'm right here," Ethan said.

"You're right there and you're going to say yes."

Ethan shifted his grip on the bag. "Yes. Fine. I agree. Whatever."

"Good." Wren clapped her hands together once, and it was the first time all morning he had seen her look like the day had gone the way she wanted it to.

Nate's phone was still up. He wasn't going to be talked out of it.

"First thing," Wren said. She took Ethan by the shoulder and turned him around to face the counter. "Go on. Haggle."

"What."

"Six ninety-nine for a used guitar is insane. He likes you. Go on."

"Hey," Nate said.

So Ethan stood at the counter, and Nate stood on the other side of it, and the two of them looked at each other.

"I'm supposed to haggle," Ethan said.

"I heard."

"...Is there a discount?"

"No."

"Okay."

"Don't look so relieved." Nate picked the pen back up and put it behind his ear. "She's got the right idea, though. Money ruins friendships. I've only got the one."

"She's not—"

"She didn't correct me," Nate said. "You notice that?"

Ethan had noticed it. He looked at the guitar on the counter instead of saying so.

Nate drank some of his coffee and set it down and wiped his hands on his jeans. "Hang on. Give me that back."

"Give you what?"

"Your phone, sweetheart. The money. I'm refunding it."

Wren had her phone out before he finished the sentence, and Nate did something on his own, and then he put it down and folded his arms.

"The guitar's free," he said. "There's a catch. There's always a catch."

"Okay," Ethan said, slowly.

"One video a month. Fingerstyle, whatever you want. My shop's site in the first five seconds and my shop's site in the last five seconds. My comment pinned on top. After you graduate it goes to twice a month. And the first one goes up next Friday."

"Next Friday—"

"Next Friday."

"I don't have a camera that—"

"Then you come in here and use mine. Tuesdays. Nobody's in here on Tuesdays." Nate picked the pen back up. "I'm a businessman first, and a friend second, and both of them are tired of watching you not play."

Ethan turned the bag a quarter turn on the counter. "So if he's not charging me, then there's no seven hundred."

"Wrong," Wren said.

"You just heard him. He's giving it to me."

"He's giving it to you for videos. I paid him, and he paid me back, and that's between me and him." She said it without heat, the way she'd said the price. "You owe me. Not him."

"Two deals," Nate said. "She bought it, I bought it back off her for reasons that stay in this store, and now it's mine to give away, and I'm giving it away because you're making me videos. You want out from under her, that's six ninety-nine to me."

"That's the same money."

"It's the same number. Doesn't make it the same deal."

Ethan picked the bag up and got it onto his shoulder. It was heavier than he expected, and it made him stand up straighter, which he noticed and did not enjoy.

"Give me that paper," Nate said.

"What paper."

"The one from before. Back pocket."

Ethan dug it out and slid it across, and Nate turned it over and wrote on the back, under the numbers, in his square handwriting, and turned it back.

*PAID — N.S.*

Under that: *1 video / mo. Site front + back. First: next Fri.*

And under that, smaller: *her side: $700.*

"You're keeping my receipt," Ethan said.

"I'm keeping the record. You keep the paper."

He folded it in half, and in half again, and put it in the front pocket of his hoodie, flat against his phone, where it wouldn't work its way out the first time he sat down.

"Thanks, Nate."

"Don't thank me. Make the video."

Outside, the street was bright and full of people, and the sun had moved over the buildings on the other side so the whole sidewalk was in shadow and the storefronts were not.

Wren was already ten feet up the block, hands behind her back. He caught up.

"The song," she said. She wasn't looking at him. "The one you played."

"Larkspur."

"That's the one." She stopped. "Five point four million people have watched it. Why that one?"

He shifted the bag on his shoulder. "You've heard me play it."

"I've watched a video of you playing it."

"You know what I mean." He heard how it sounded and kept going anyway. "You've seen me playing. In the future, did I ever—"

"Ask it properly."

She waited. A bus went by and the air moved.

"Did I ever play for you?" he said. "In the future. Did you ever see me do it."

She looked at him for a long moment. "That's a question for you."

"For me."

"Why did you stop. You're the one who knows." She took a step, then another, and he stepped back and his shoulders came up around his ears. "Somewhere in there, you know."

"I don't."

"I know you don't." She was close enough now that he had to look down at her, so he looked at the sidewalk instead. "I'm asking anyway. That's called a conversation."

Her hand came up and her finger caught him in the middle of the forehead. It made a sound. It didn't hurt, exactly.

"You were somewhere else just now," she said. "I'm standing right here and you're somewhere else."

"I was here."

"You're exactly like him," she said. "Down to that."

"Like—"

"Don't." She was smiling when she said it, which was somehow worse. "You get to the part that matters and you walk around it. He does that too."

"Do I want to know what that means?"

"No." She stepped back. "Do you know what larkspur means?"

"It's a flower."

"It's a flower." She said it back to him flat, like a total off a receipt. "God, you're dense. Come on."

"Where are we going?"

"You don't have clothes." She was already walking. "You've got one hoodie and you've been sweating in it since ten. It's September. It's going to rain and then what."

He followed her into the mall, because there wasn't a version of the afternoon where he didn't.

That was the last decision he made for a while. She took him through the whole place, floor by floor, and bought him clothes he didn't get a vote on and things he hadn't thought to worry about — socks, a charger with a longer cord, a second charger, a little plastic thing for his toothbrush that he would never have bought for himself in a hundred years. She bought things for herself and did not ask his opinion about any of them, which he appreciated, because the two times she had, he had answered wrong.

The perfume got bought after all, on the way out of the last store, without a word from either of them about it. She paid, and handed him the bag to carry, and went on talking about something else.

He carried all of it. Since nine that morning, and it was after two by the time the automatic doors let them out again. Three bags in one hand by the end and two in the other, the guitar on his back, the strap of it cutting into his shoulder along with everything else, and by then his arms had stopped being a thing he could feel. He set a bag down, shook his hand out, picked it back up before anyone noticed.

She noticed. She looked at the bags, and then at him.

"You're sweating," she said.

"It's September."

"Your hands are shaking."

"They're not." They were, a little.

She looked at the bags again, and then at him, and something in her face closed like a decision. "We're going to fix that."

"Fix what?"

"Nothing," she said, and started up the block, on the sidewalk, with her own bag and her phone, and she didn't look back.

He got the bags evened out in both hands, felt the edge of the receipt through the fabric when he shifted, and went after her.