Free Damaged Goods by Heather Sharfeddin Page B

discovered the terrible mistake he’d made in selling her car. But it wasn’t his screwup that weighed on him, though he harbored a strong desire to somehow make it up to her. No, it was her fear that bothered him. Kept him up most of the night thinking about it, in fact. He could understand her frustration, anger even. But the overriding emotion she’d shown upon discovering that her car was missing, a car that Hershel told him didn’t even run, was terror. And that, Carl could not shake.

    Silvie found Hershel in the cashier’s booth the following morning, poring over receipts. She’d wandered every square inch of thewarehouse the previous day as she’d awaited the return of her car, and had discovered a back hallway leading to the room where they cataloged merchandise. She had pawed through boxes of weird and incongruent things like hair dryers next to poultry feeders. There was a life-size cardboard cutout of John Wayne leaning against the wall next to the women’s bathroom, and its realness unnerved her every time she passed it, giving her the sense that she should say “Excuse me” as she went by. She kept up her energy with small cups of Coca-Cola from the fountain in the concession stand. But hunger never found her.
    Hershel looked up when she appeared at the window, as if she were a customer waiting to receive a bidding number. “Hello,” he said. “How did you sleep?”
    She shook her head. “When do you think he’s going to bring my car?”
    Hershel picked up his phone, scanned through, and held it to his ear. “Kyrellis. Swift.” He listened a moment. “Silvie is wanting her car back. How about you let me come get it?” Another long pause. “Okay, but if it’s not here in an hour I’m coming over. She needs her things.”
    He hung up and looked at Silvie. She tried to smile, but the expression eluded her.
    “He says he’s on his way shortly. Give him an hour.”
    “Did he go through it?”
    “Let me buy you breakfast,” he said. “I know you haven’t eaten. You have to eat something.”
    She shook her head and glanced around at the mostly empty warehouse. “How does this work? Your business.”
    Hershel lumbered up from the chair and came around to stand next to her. “It’s simple,” he said. “People bring in anything they don’t want anymore and I sell it for them. I take thirty percent of the sale price as my commission. That’s it.”
    “How do you remember whose stuff it is? Was everything you sold Tuesday from one person?”
    He laughed. “That was about twelve different consigners. Wetrack it with lot numbers. A lot number is assigned to each seller.” He picked up a cordless drill set that had come in that morning and pointed at the “22” scrawled onto a piece of masking tape stuck to the plastic case. “Twenty-two is Greg Westerman—at least this week it is.”
    “How much money will you make on that?”
    He glanced over it briefly. “It’s worth about fifty bucks. Probably sell for around thirty. I’ll make ten.”
    “How do you make a living on that?”
    “Three hundred items a week, give or take. Some big, some small like this. The trick is to never lay out your own cash. Bring it in and get it out within a few days. Volume.”
    “What if it doesn’t sell?”
    “The seller takes it back. It’s in the contract.”
    She studied him, watched his eyes survey his kingdom. “It’s the perfect business. Really,” he said. “When times are hard, people sell. They also buy used instead of new. Business booms. When times are good, people have extra cash. And business booms.”
    She tipped her head back and let her eyes roam the drab warehouse with its open beams, adorned in dusty cobwebs. He wandered down to the merchandise room at the other end of the building, and she followed. He called out the value of items they passed: seventy-five dollars for a chrome dinette set from the fifties, twenty for the darkroom supplies, eighty for large tractor tires