Secret Vows

Chapter 3: Started with a Shovel

The wall behind his shoulders had been white when they put it up, and that was before Trey worked there. It had a gray stripe along it at cart height now, and a dent the size of a fist that nobody was ever going to come down here and fix. He had his back against it, one hand in his pocket, the phone in the other, and his heel going back and forth over the same square of concrete.

"Dad, if you want to buy something, buy it for Cody. I don't want it."

"Then what do you want?" His father could make the earpiece rattle. Trey held the phone out at arm's length and looked at it while his father kept going. He wasn't going to be wearing a hearing aid before he was thirty. "What are you going to do, sell appliances the rest of your life? When does this stop? You're twenty-six years old. Twenty-six, and what have you got? You've got a name tag. Are you planning on coasting like this your whole life, is that the plan?"

"Selling appliances is a real job," Trey said, when he had it back at his ear. He switched hands. "There's no such thing as a small job. Every position matters. Those aren't my words, that's the orientation video. They make you watch it twice."

"Every position matters." His father said it the way he said anything he didn't believe. "So now you're a philosopher."

"I'm saying somebody's going to run this building one day. Could be me. Stranger things have happened."

"You. A boss." His father laughed, one note, nothing in it. "You think a man gets to be a boss by talking? You flap your mouth and a business falls in your lap?"

"Hey. You know how the guy who owns this store started out?"

"Don't."

"Shovel. That's a fact. Started with a shovel, and now he's got this whole building—"

"Don't you—" the phone got loud in a hurry "—don't you sit there on the phone with your father and make a joke out of a damn shovel."

"I'm not making a joke."

"I have swung one. I dug footings for other men before you were born, and then I drove a truck for a living, and I don't need my son telling me that's funny. Where do you think your dinner comes from? Off a shelf?"

"Okay," Trey said. "Okay. I'm—I'm shutting up. Shovels are great. Nothing but respect for shovels."

"You're an i***t," his father said, and there was a laugh in it that he took back about a second after it got out. "All right. So what's the plan. Say it to me."

"There's no plan. There's a job."

"Your mother isn't sleeping. She gets up in the middle of the night and walks around this house."

"She's bored."

"Don't start."

"She's got nothing to do all day, is all I'm saying. Get her a dog."

"You ought to find somebody," his father said, and the sound of it changed under him. "You're twenty-six. You ought to be thinking about that much."

"Dad. I'm twenty-six."

"You want to say that again? Your brother. At your age. Emmy was already in preschool."

"Yeah. And how much peace and quiet have those two bought you and Mom since? You sleeping good these days?"

Nothing came back for a second. Trey stayed flat against the wall and let it sit. Over the time clock, next week's schedule was up — his initials in the same box six days running, and a Sunday he had already promised to somebody else.

"You've got an answer for everything," his father said, quieter, which was worse.

"I'm doing you a favor," Trey said. "Ask me again when I'm thirty."

"Trey!"

That came from inside, through the door at his back. Rhonda, with the whole floor behind her.

"Dad, I've got to go, I'm working. I'll come see you and Mom on my off day. Tell her—" He took the phone down, put it in his pocket, straightened his jacket with both hands, and went through the door.

The floor was the floor: fluorescent light, forty feet of product in boxes with pictures of the product on them, three other guys in the same jacket as his. Rhonda was at the mouth of the next aisle with a pen behind her ear and two people parked in front of her, and she pointed at him with her whole hand.

"Fridge row. Look at him. Look at him."

"He's been in there a while."

"Twenty minutes. He's opened every door on the row. Truck in the lot. Mine's got four people in it and one of them's holding my pen." She pointed again. "Go."

"Thanks, Rhonda."

"Don't thank me. Go."

He straightened his cuffs and went. Twenty-sixth of the month, the month was short, and he was behind. He did the math going down the row, the same math he did in his sleep, put his phone on silent, and put the smile on.

The man was big and he moved slow, and he had one hand on the handle of one of the French-door units, the way a man stands next to a horse he's thinking about buying. Trey read him the way he read all of them — size first, then the shoes, then the watch. The watch said this was worth being late for. He came up alongside him and put his hands behind his back.

"Afternoon. You looking at the one with the ice in the door, or the one without?"

"Without."

"Most people say that. Then they come back in two years for the ice." Trey opened the door on the end unit and let it stand. "This is the same box as that one, with a different badge on it and four hundred more on the sticker. You want me to tell you what you're paying the four hundred for?"

"Sure."

"Nothing you can see from here."

The man looked at him for a second, and then he laughed, and that was the sale.

Two hours later Trey walked him out through the sliding doors with the paperwork in a bag and a delivery on the books for Tuesday, and the man shook his hand hard enough to mean it. The doors came together behind him. Trey stood in the vestibule with people going past him and their carts, and did the math, and the math was good — good enough that he didn't hear his phone for the first two seconds.

It was his mother.

He got it to his ear. "Mom?"

"Trey." Then she wasn't in it anymore. The phone was the inside of a house. Voices, more than one, all of them up, and something heavy going over onto a floor.

"Mom. Mom, what—"

"Come home."

The voices came over the top of her. He got "Mom" out twice and nothing came back that was a sentence, and he stood there with the doors going behind him and a cart coming at his legs.

He called back. It rang and rang and rang.

Nobody picked up. "I'm coming," he said into the phone, and then he went and got his jacket.

Rhonda was at the register with a card in her hand. He told her he had to go. She looked at his face for about a second and a half and said she'd take his last guy, and told him to take the back door, and he said yeah, and went.

The bike was chained to the pipe behind the loading dock where he left it every day.

He rode it in the suit, jacket open, tie hanging, and the wind was out of the north the whole way and came up his sleeves every time he stopped at a light. Six miles of strip mall and parking lots, then a stretch with no lights on it and nothing much to look at, and the last mile was uphill. It was nine when he came around the corner and put a foot down.

There was a light over the door and a light on at the front of the place and one more, further in. The door looked shut from the street.

He got the keys out of his pocket and turned the one for it half a turn. The lock gave, and the door swung an inch on its own. It hadn't been shut all the way. The inside of the house came out of the gap.

Voices. More than one, all of them up, running over the top of each other. Something went over and hit the floor in there, and nobody stopped for it.

He stayed where he was, with the key in his hand, and did not step in.