Free The Dirty Secret by Kira A. Gold Page B

stop signs. Her car—not truly hers—was boring to drive.
    “What kind of books?” He picked up the ringing phone. “Brass and Bones.”
    “Not the fancy ones,” she said, and he jerked his thumb to the back, through the double doors with the Employees Only sign.
    Vessa turned on the lights to the warehouse, breathing the scent of antique wood and lemon polish and paint, similar to that smell all museums had, a perfume that could be bottled and simply called Age, or Things Loved. The books were in the back, separated into first editions, complete sets of outdated encyclopedias, and boxes and boxes marked Clearance. Vessa dug through them, balancing anything related to art and architecture in a tall stack.
    She measured her book tower and added a collection of Popular Mechanics magazine, the whole run through the fifties, with advertisements for cars featuring “Hydra-Matic” designs and “Dynaflow” performance enhancement, and advice for women—all drawn with aprons and impossible waists—about the best clothing dryer for her household needs.
    “Five dollars a foot,” Manny said.
    She jumped and spun around. “No way,” she said, balancing a swaying stack. “These are all ones that didn’t sell during your twenty-five-cent sale.” She pointed to the price scribbled on the box. “Two dollars a foot.”
    He mimed a knife through his heart. “Done. And I’ll give you a discount on the boxes to carry them in.”
    She stuck out her tongue and blew a noisy, wet raspberry at him. He backed away, muttering, “ Chica loca !” but he returned with a hand truck and helped her load the books.
    “Ooh, those are new,” she said, enthralled by the collection of stage jewelry in the case under the register. Rhinestones backed with silver leaf had tarnished, turning iridescent like nacre on pearls, old rainbows that couldn’t be replicated new. She picked out two pairs of earrings, the clip-on kind, crusted with yellowed seed pearls and improbable emeralds, and added them to the tally of books.
    She piled the boxes into her car and drove to the new development. The table had been set up while she was gone, all the leaves expanding it to full size. On top was the note she’d left, with YES neatly lettered at the bottom.
    Vessa placed the books on the shelves in the library and mentally unpacked her clothes, trying to decide what to wear on Sunday. She forbade herself to think of it as a date. He wasn’t interested in her. He hadn’t even looked at her as she’d left the other night.
    A few of the books were quite old. Her favorite was a gilt-edged hardbound with stamped etchings called Growing Ceropegia woodii: the Rosary Vine , printed in 1938.
    She went to the hardware store to get paint mixed—two buckets of September Sky in satin, and a gallon of flat ceiling latex called Forest Mood. When they told her they’d page her when her colors were fully homogenized, she told them her name was Jane. She wandered through the hardware store while the paint machine shook. After reading the instructions on the boxes of do-it-yourself paneling, she decided on light oak beadboard. She added a rug to her cart—rustic shaggy wool—and crown molding with the fancy connecting corners.
    In the putty and caulk section, her phone buzzed with the number from the Pizza Piazza.
    “I need you on the schedule this Sunday,” her boss said without a greeting.
    “The lunch shift?” she asked, calculating the time it would take to get home to shower and change, assuming “evening” started at five-thirty. “Eleven to four?”
    “Sunday after-church crowd runs eleven to six. Wear comfortable shoes.” The call ended and Vessa sighed, but she was grateful for the hours after sleeping through her shift last week.
    She wandered the aisles, running her fingers over tile and opening kitchen cabinet doors. In the greenhouse, as she rounded a table of African violets, a hanging plant caught her hair. She laughed when she made it