photo by Patricia Koren
Umbrellas
by Denize Springer
Stella leaned her three-speed cruiser against an unoccupied bench on the town square. At 68, riding her bike down the steep, winding hill to town was probably not something she should still be doing. The road from her cabin to town had become dangerous with the growing number of mountain bikers and bike racing. Now, every turn was a standoff with death—either by distracted drivers, or spandex speed demons. Her once pleasant glide into town had become the frantic roll of a pinball, narrowly missing all the gongs.
She fumbled in her backpack for her bike lock. She always wrestled with whether or not to secure her bike in town, and she always went with her natural optimism. But the truth was, no one would ever want her bike. It mirrored its owner’s physique in two ways—a big basket up front and two saddle bags in the back.
The town Stella had called home for the past 45 years rested at the foot of a diminutive mountain in a Northern California county gilded in sunshine and scenic open space. Several fat, old redwoods graced the town square. Their canopies sheltered every upper middle class comfort—the old depot, now a bookstore; charming restaurants, bars, coffeehouses and night spots; old money antique shops and new money art galleries. The quaintly bricked and benched public square hosted small concerts and food and wine tasting fairs. Saturday afternoons featured parades of the freshly coiffed and well-bred—including the dogs. The square had everything—except a public restroom, which Stella always thought was essential to a place that attracted thousands of admirers each weekend.
It was during one of her daily rides down the hill that Stella decided to open a dollar store. Researching the prospect, she was delighted to find that she didn’t have to buy into a franchise. She could start one from scratch. And the perfect spot, she thought, was right on the square—a small, modest space once occupied by a Baskin-Robbins, the last chain store to be driven from town by pretentiously high rents.
She crossed the street in the freshly painted crosswalk, adjacent to the new bike lane, and paused at the spotless Wells Fargo glass doors to check her hair. The ride along the town’s flat streets hadn’t been any less dangerous than the ride down the hill. A Range Rover coming out of the Whole Foods parking lot nearly hit her. The mother of the “Baby on Board” seemed to be chewing out some poor soul at the other end of her cell phone signal.
Stella fluffed up what was left of the over-processed hair her bike helmet had crushed. An exiting customer flung one door open, narrowly missing Stella’s nose. The woman, in a ball cap and matching butt-huggers, jaywalked to a nearby Tesla coupe without apology. It was on such occasions—and there were too many to count—that Stella felt more akin to the redwoods in the square than to any of her town’s newer inhabitants. These trees were as resourceful as an umbrella, and they widened each year with age.
The door to the bank seemed heavier than it was the last time Stella had visited, shortly before her husband’s sudden death a year prior. She looked around as if she still might know someone at the branch where she and Henry had had their mortgage, home equity account and modest savings accounts. The fact that she was tearing through these savings with house repairs was only one of the many reasons she wanted the store.
A woman who was wearing perfume—unusual, since it was recently censured at a town meeting as an overt intrusion on the senses—directed Stella to the young man behind a desk in the lobby.
“I would own and manage the store . . . .” Stella said, pausing to take in the young man’s blank face. She couldn’t tell where he had gone, but he was nowhere here in the bank, let alone sitting in front of her, sharing her dream. In fact, the “banker” before her, who looked like he could have lived in a frat house just a week prior, yawned.
“Oh, excuse me,” he said with his hand still in front of his mouth. His face turned red when his eyes met Stella’s. Perhaps she could trust him after all.
“Everything would cost a buck,” she continued.
“A dollar? No shit . . . .” his voice trailed off. He looked around. “I mean, no kidding?” He was on the edge of his chair. “What could you sell for a dollar?”
“Great stuff,” Stella said. “Thread and sewing needles, socks, greeting cards, wrapping paper, things you can make Halloween costumes out of. Kids will love it.” The baby banker’s face returned to a blank puzzlement, but it was not accompanied by another question. Instead, he pulled some papers out of his desk drawer and handed them to Stella. “Fill these out and return them as soon as you are done. Mr. Stamfleigh reviews these every Thursday afternoon.”
“Stamfleigh,” Stella rasped, then cleared her throat. “Not Bill?”
“That’s right,” the kid said. “You know him?”
“Yes . . . .”
“Something wrong?”
“No,” Stella offered, wondering what it was about her behavior that made the boy ask that. “I’m just surprised he hasn’t retired.”
Unknown to Stella and everyone else in town, Bill Stamfleigh was struggling with the onset of Alzheimer’s. It was only a week after being diagnosed that he ran across Stella’s loan application. She insisted they meet over coffee because she couldn’t bear the thought of talking about something so important with other customers waiting for Bill’s time.
“You know what you’re getting into, don’t you?” Bill asked.
She nodded and studied the man who had always been friendly whenever she and Henry did business at the bank. They’d say hello at the coffee shop or the movies, but they didn’t travel in the same social circles.
Bill was also recently widowed. But after the three-year ordeal of his wife’s breast cancer, he had no desire to retire, despite his kids’ and friends’ urgings. All he really wanted to do was get back to the life he had always enjoyed: weekdays at the bank and weekends at the golf course. The recent diagnosis was only the second big surprise Bill had ever had in life. The first being Barbara’s illness. He never imagined he’d have to grow old alone.
Stella filled Bill in on what she would do with the old Baskin-Robbins shop. “I really miss folks walking around town with ice cream cones,” she offered for some reason. “Don’t you?”
“Then why don’t you just open an ice cream shop?”
“Too seasonal. Besides, I’ve lived in this town long enough to know that sugar will be the next thing it bans.” The town was the first in the county to officially nix cigarette smoking, Styrofoam, plastic bags, plastic straws, and was currently mulling over the complete elimination of perfumes and colognes.
“Good point,” Bill conceded without any expression. He stared down at her over the reading glasses sliding down his nose.
Stella continued, “I see you’re still on the City Council.”
“Yes, but . . . .”
“I’ve already finished a draft of my business plan. Have a professor at the University reviewing it.”
“I think it might be too big a risk for you. You’ve never run a business.”
“I worked for the city for years.”
“In the Library,” he said flatly, as if she had run nothing more significant than a lemonade stand. Stella stood her ground with the same look that had shamed every middle-schooler who had ever even tried to misbehave in the Library.
Bill cleared his throat. “Uh, what I mean is, you could lose your house.”
“I don’t think so.”
“But you are putting it up as collateral.”
“So?”
“Look, you must know, a dollar store downtown will be fiercely fought . . . .”
“I know . . . .”
“. . . . and even if you do manage to get it by the Town Council, what makes you think your store won’t be boycotted or vandalized, or even turn a profit?”
“I’ll have my business plan on your desk next week . . . .”
Bill wasn’t listening. “The way the rents are downtown you could go out of business in two months.”
Stella took a sip of water. This man was only a year older than her, yet he was talking to her like she was one of his kids asking to borrow his car.
“Haven’t you looked at the cheaper vacancies near the 7-Eleven, or out by the freeway?”
“It wouldn’t be like any other dollar store.” She sighed, then took a sip of her coffee.
Bill was lost in Stella’s eyes. He had never noticed before how intensely blue they were.
Stella let her coffee go cold as she continued to struggle to get her points across. But Bill seemed distracted. Every time someone came through the coffee shop door, he looked at them and then back at Stella as if he couldn’t even remember who she was.
They ended their meeting near the back door behind the bank where Bill always parked his car. He had driven a Jaguar for as long as she knew him. This one was silver. She always thought the black one his wife surprised him with on his 65th better suited his patrician bearing.
“You know, if I approved your loan, I’d have to recuse myself from the Council’s decision.”
Though that hadn’t occurred to her, she didn’t skip a beat. “Don’t you think my 30 years at the Library would count for something?”
“Frankly, no.”
She knew that as well as he did. The town and its inhabitants had changed drastically since Stella and Henry had arrived via San Francisco. They chose it because it was laid back, friendly and astonishingly beautiful. Back then a variety of people lived comfortably together. Low-key folks with working class jobs mixed with the elite. She was tickled every time she went to the now long gone health food store downtown, and a local would have Jerry Garcia cornered by the bulk food. Henry often sat next to Sam Shepard at The Mill, the only workingman’s bar to survive the town’s upscaling. Carlos Santana once lived up on “The Hill”—a local reference to the “molehill-of-a-mountain” that her in-laws from Western Montana never regarded as a real mountain.
There was a time that Stella was able to buy comfortable shoes in town at a reasonable price. Henry could pick up lightbulbs at the hardware store on the square. But over time, the shoe store had been replaced by a boutique that sold footwear and clothing she never saw anyone wear. The hardware store was abandoned to make way for a cooking school owned by a chef who had become a celebrity on TV. Shopkeepers now focused on the newer folks in town, most of them corporate leaders, Hollywood moguls, real estate developers, high tech winners and hedge fund operators. “The molehill”, once a sacred place to the Miwok, was now being loved to death by hikers, runners, equestrians and mountain bikers—grinding powdery ruts into its humble slopes.
Stella tried to hide her disappointment from Bill, but it obviously showed.
“Have you looked into a Small Business Administration loan?”
“The Feds? You know better than that. I’m pushing 70. I’d be dead by the time they got around to even reviewing it.”
“But you’re a woman.”
At least he noticed that!
As soon as she got back to her house, Stella fired up a joint. In a few days she knew she would receive an official letter from the bank with a personal note from Bill clipped to it that said, “Sorry.”
The day after Stella received the letter, she visited the Baskin-Robbins place and took another look at the vacant apartment above it. The owner of the building had retired to Hawaii, and no longer had any interest in the town, other than making money on real estate.
Bill observed Stella from his office window across the square. He had heard through the grapevine that she was considering selling her house to finance the store. The foolish woman was making a big mistake, he thought. Besides, another, more suitable, business was opting for the property.
“Another hair salon?” Stella chided when she bumped into Bill at the coffee shop. “Doesn’t this town already have a hundred?”
“Oh, it’s not that many,” Bill scoffed as the two waited in line. Then he looked into her eyes. “Couldn’t be.” Though he stood ahead of Stella, he insisted that she order first because he had ordered a half-caff, marbled latte that would take longer than her order. She took her coffee—black—and left without another word.
Stella’s business research was as thorough as one would expect from a retired reference librarian. Since the town had driven out the chains and the more funky local businesses—one, a combo jewelry and porn shop that had serviced the community for 40 years—it had steadily added more and more beauty salons. There were now more than 50, with about 400 hairdressers for a town of 14,000 citizens—most of them children, who rarely required $90 haircuts.
The picture window of the tiny apartment had a nice view of the square. Stella hated driving and knew she was pressing her luck on the mountain road. And it was never fun clambering up on the roof of her house to rid it of dried redwood droppings. Henry always did that. The only thing she would really miss was the utter peace of a cabin in a redwood forest. But even this was starting to get to her. The death of her husband had left her in a social vacuum. It would be nice to pop into a local restaurant or even the Library, whenever she felt horribly alone.
Even though her cabin was the sort of home that was commonly knocked down and replaced with a larger one, Stella believed that a triathlon junkie might jump at the chance to own a place right on the hiking and biking trails. She was confident that she could make at least enough from the sale for a 25 percent down payment on the apartment and store. She set the wheels in motion.
Before Stella had the opportunity to present her business plans to the Town Council, the county paper made her plans a front-page story with the headline: Sock it to me. A photo of Stella holding a bag of cotton tube socks accompanied the article, with her quote: “There is no longer any place in town to buy a pair of socks.” This wasn’t entirely true. The clothing boutiques in town were selling socks at $21 a pair.
Nonetheless, by the time the public hearing took place, Stella had been accused of everything from planning to “sell arsenic-filled candy and lead-laden toys from China” to putting the boutiques out of business. Though she assured the growing crowds, she would not, no one seemed to be listening. She tried to detail what she would sell:
“. . . . Practical things like a pair of tube socks if you suddenly need them, some enchanting things too, like Easter and Christmas decorations.”
“Plastic!”
“Lead!”
“No,“ she countered. “Listen.”
She told them she had seen some darling colored eggs made from recycled lumber at a crafts show. She planned to buy trimming remnants from fabric stores as gift-wrapping or children’s hair ornaments. Honest to a fault, Stella admitted that she might have to break up the 3-pack bags of men’s t-shirts she bought at the factory stores, to sell them for a dollar apiece.
“That’s a ridiculous mark-up,” someone shouted.
“Not really,” someone else joked. Most in the crowd knew about, but didn’t bother to elaborate on, the $90 t-shirts in the boutiques.
“But don’t you see,” Stella reasoned, “I would be saving you a trip to the factory store. The nearest is 60 miles away. What you save on gas and time . . . .”
“We can’t have a dollar store in this town.”
“Why?”
“Too much traffic. It would attract . . . . too many . . . . people . . . . from . . . . out of town.”
The person who finished this sentiment probably wasn’t referring to the hordes who routinely rode $5,000 bicycles into town to eat and drink every weekend. Everyone in the room knew this. You could hear a pin drop.
The business professor who had reviewed Stella’s proposal and was also a long-time resident, took advantage of the silence.
“I think this proposal has legs,” he said. “I think that this store could become as unique and beloved as any of our antique shops or restaurants. It deserves a chance.”
Still the skeptics continued.
“What kind of people do you hope to hire?”
“What will you pay them?”
“How will they get here? Where will they park?”
Stella stood and answered all these questions at once. “I plan to hire anyone who can ride a bike, walk or take a bus to work. Starting pay is $17 an hour.”
Stunned silence seemed to suck all the air out of the room. Then the City Manager’s gavel sounded. “Thank you all for coming,” he said. “We’ll accept public comments for another week, and we will make a decision within the next month.”
The vote came down four to three against the store. Stella learned that Bill had cast the deciding vote.
What did he or anyone else in town have against her, she wondered. She wasn’t born with a silver spoon in her mouth, but she had earned a modest pension that would keep her off the streets. Plus, she made enough to keep her proposed business in stock for a decade with the sale of her 950 square foot redwood cabin and its tiny, pie-shaped lot. A criminal lawyer from Pacific Palisades bought the property for over a million. He barely looked at the much beloved home before submitting plans to tear it down and put up a 4,000 square foot structure.
Escrow on her house closed two days after the Council’s decision. Stella had thought seriously about moving to another town where she might feel more at home. But before she had the chance to explore the idea, the owner of the old Baskin-Robbins place accepted her offer.
She moved into the apartment over the empty store a few days before Thanksgiving. The business professor who helped her prepare her business plan helped prepare a petition for appeal of her dollar store proposal. The shop had two bathrooms, one with a door on the street side of the building. Stella could offer them both as official public restrooms. Meanwhile, the hairdresser from Beverly Hills made her an offer for a lease. Betting on her belief that the town desperately needed downtown public comfort facilities, Stella declined.
The front window of Stella’s apartment offered a splendid view of the goings-on-about-town, including one of Bill sitting at his desk at the bank. She used the spotting scope she and her husband had used on their deck to study birds to study the banker. She understood why he couldn’t openly show support at the hearing, but she considered his vote against her proposal a betrayal. And now that she had appealed, he seemed to openly avoid her at the coffee shop and at the movies they each attended alone on weekday nights.
Blissfully mild fall weather finally transitioned into rain, and December ushered in storms with heavy wind. Broken umbrellas stuck out of the garbage cans at the bus stop. Water swirled around the ankles of anyone enduring the wait for a bus. The next Planning Commission meeting came and went without space on the agenda for Stella’s appeal. The Town Clerk told Stella they had to contend with problems presented by the storms—flooding and downed trees, new potholes.
Stella finally managed to corner Bill at the movie theater concession. He told her that the final decision probably wouldn’t be made until after the holidays. “You should have received a letter to that effect by now,” he added. She followed Bill into the theater and took the seat behind him. “If they’re trying to deter me, it won’t work,” she whispered just before the movie began. “I won’t be discouraged.”
“Good,” Bill said without turning around.
He dove into his popcorn. She had some nerve, he thought. Why was this stupid store so important to her? Nobody else in town wanted it. She should just go away. All that business about providing useful things was so naïve. Selling her house to live in that ratty apartment over the store was a colossal mistake. Despite the public restroom aspect of the deal, it was loud and clear that no one on the Council was willing to take a chance on a business that could change the complexion of the town.
Bill quickly lost track of the movie plot and characters, and scuttled out of the movie before the credits rolled. He got soaked in the rain as he walked to his car. On the way out of town he lingered at the stop sign in front of Stella’s empty store. Tacky was how everyone on the Council regarded the prospect of a dollar store.
Once all the other establishments in town had decorated for Christmas, Stella’s dark, empty storefront stuck out in town like she did—always dressed in bright colored fabrics, not the drab polyester sports garments everyone else seemed to wear. She hit a liquidator’s and bought a few colorful umbrellas and kid’s rubber boots to arrange in the store window. She stenciled a sign on the window, and encircled it in Christmas lights: “Everything Here’s Just a Buck!”
People rattled the door to the store downstairs. Everyone in town, including the police and fire inspector, waded in floodwater to make sure she wasn’t selling anything. She assured anyone who asked that she would take her display down and sell the goods at a flea market if her appeal for the store did not succeed.
Late on Christmas Eve, as she was getting ready to go to a friend’s house, she looked out her window to find Bill standing alone in the middle of the town square. Rain poured off the brim of his hat and onto his leather briefcase. He held his car keys in his free hand, pushing the buttons on the keychain that would sound the car horn. She wondered why he had not parked his car where he usually did, at the back door of the bank.
She looked up and down the street. Bill’s Jag was nowhere in sight. He turned in another direction and continued in vain. All the shops had closed early and the restaurants serving Christmas Eve dinner were not yet open.
Stella finished dressing, and took another look out the window. Bill hadn’t ventured an inch. She grabbed two umbrellas from her store window and gently approached the still man in the rain.
“Bill? Bill?”
He turned to look at her, and for the first time in a long time seemed to register no disdain nor dread of her presence. In fact, he didn’t register any expression that would indicate he knew who she was.
“Hello,” he said. “I can’t seem to remember where I left the car this morning.”
“Well, it’s not around here,” Stella said, handing him one of the umbrellas. “Let’s take a walk around the block.”
He nodded, and gladly accepted the umbrella.
“Silver Jag, right?”
“Yes, I think so . . . .” His voice trailed off with a thought he didn’t seem to want to share.
It didn’t take long to find Bill’s car—parked where he had left it every weekday for the past 35 years—at the back door of the bank. Suddenly, Bill didn’t seem as confused as he was just ten minutes earlier. Still, Stella wondered if he should be driving at all. He offered her a ride back to her apartment. She demurred at first, but accepted when a heavy gust of wind blew her umbrella inside out.
“What are you doing tonight?” Stella asked.
“Going to Bruce’s.”
“Isn’t he your oldest?”
“That’s right. How . . . .?”
“No, this way,” Stella said, pointing in the opposite direction from where Bill was going to make a turn.
“Sorry, I . . . .”
They were in front of the store. She lingered in the rain after getting out of the car. She had forgotten to turn on the Christmas lights in the window. The wind blew icy droplets onto the car upholstery but Bill stared straight ahead. She wondered how long she could stand there with the car door open in the rain before he showed any concern at all. She waited for a gust of wind to pass before opening up her umbrella.
“Well . . . . night, Bill,” she said. “Merry Christmas.” She purposely left the umbrella Bill had used behind.
He turned to her with a quizzical expression. “Good night.”
Stella figured his indifference had to be either a drug side effect or the onset of Alzheimer’s. In her tenure at the Library, she had learned to detect it in the older patrons and usually found a neighbor who could make sure that person could find their way home. Though she hoped this was not the case with Bill, it apparently was. About a week after New Year’s, she heard that he was forced by the bank to retire. They threw a retirement lunch at one of the local places on the square. All the merchants in town were invited but Stella was not. She watched the guests arrive as she sipped coffee in a window seat at the depot. She remembered a few faces, but no names. Most were folks who had banked or golfed with Bill, but had moved out of town after retirement.
The rain took a breather on the day the downtown holiday lights were taken down. At the top of the docket for the first City Council meeting of the New Year was the topic now widely known as “the dollar store issue.” Recent letters and editorials in local alternative papers suggested the town considered itself too good and was afraid of attracting “people of color” to work and shop in the store.
“People of color?” one commissioner clucked. “Last time I looked in the mirror I had blue eyes!”
Another brought up the recent article in The New York Times reporting that their county was declared the healthiest in the country, based on statistics regarding regular exercise and number of cases of bad health indicators like diabetes, high cholesterol and heart disease.
“See?” another member of the community proffered. “And that store would carry dangerous candy and bad, chemically produced junk from China, like all of them do.”
“Oh, come on,” another protested. “She did say she wouldn’t sell things like that.”
At first, the group avoided the other topic the study presented—one that seemed to support the dollar store debates in the papers. The county “ranked 54th out of 57 responding counties in income equality, which measured the difference between those earning at the 20th percentile of household income versus the 80th percentile.” This was something that seemed to actually embarrass the townspeople.
The dollar store wouldn’t fix this,” Bill offered. “But it would certainly help with the public perception of our town.”
Everyone resented Bill for verbalizing these misgivings—even Bill. He had inadvertently done something he promised himself he would never do in public—take a side. But for some reason he felt indebted to the woman who wanted to open the store.
Just before the Council was to take the vote, Stella reminded everyone about the public restrooms her store would provide. “I’m sure,” she said, “that we all share the desire to make our downtown welcome for everyone who visits.”
No one with a vote failed to detect the edgy tone that Stella lavished on the word everyone—even the restaurateurs, who apparently felt that anyone who visited the town should have enough money to spend a little in their establishments if they needed a restroom. This time, the vote was four to three in favor of the dollar store. Stella was surprised to learn that—once again—Bill had cast the deciding vote.
The Grand Opening of “Stella’s On the Square” –the Town Council forbade any reference to a “dollar” or a “buck”—was held the weekend before Valentine’s Day. Stella sold red napkins and plates, and white paper table cloths; little heart-shaped red and silver spangled boxes and, of course, valentines. As promised, each item cost a buck. The cards sold out that weekend. The Girl Scouts cookie drive commenced a week after that, and Stella allowed the Scouts to sell cookies in front of the store—even though they were $7 a box.
Stella also allowed her staff, most from out of town—to bring their children on weekends and whenever they were out of school. They played hopscotch with the local kids and decorated the square’s pavement with drawings of chalk that the store provided.
Kids under ten and adults over 70 loved the store. But anyone in between remained skeptical. The staff’s starting wage, well above that of all the other retail businesses in town, was surely a burden for a store that sold such inexpensive items. But most who objected to Stella’s business assumed it would not last a year—especially when a prolonged national recession settled in. The rest of the businesses on the square either barely made it or closed in a hurry only to be replaced by others that would soon fail at selling overpriced things that were not necessarily needed. Nasty rumors about Stella’s dollar store arose whenever a business closed. Whispers that the store’s success was due to under the counter drug dealing spread like ivy up a redwood.
Bill vigorously defended Stella and her store, though he wasn’t sure why. He was surprised that the people spreading the rumors frequented the store quite often, especially when a new shipment of greeting cards came in. At a buck apiece, they always sold out in just a few hours. Cleaning products, stuff Bill always hated spending money on, also sold well.
Bill was privy to the downfall of the last business that had been bullied in such a way—that strange little porno and costume jewelry shop owned by an old hippie. The man was a drug user, but not a dealer. Still, he wound up in jail after a sting found a bag of pot and a trace of heroin on the premises, and that was the end of a business that had occupied the square for more than four decades. Bill tried to remind Stella of all this, but failed because the store was always full of locals.
It wasn’t long before someone planted a bag of pot behind the store register. Bill made a point to meet up with Stella at the coffee shop, but she was nonplussed.
“Cheap stuff,” she scoffed. “Nothing I would buy—or sell.”
“You should be more careful.”
“I know what happened to Jack could happen to me.”
Bill had to think a moment to determine whom she meant. He wasn’t surprised that Stella knew the old hippie by name, now that she admitted they shared at least one unhealthy pastime.
All the fuss died down with the beginning of soccer season, and none of the other dire rumors or prophecies ventured by naysayers came to be. Whenever Bill visited the store, which was often enough—mainly to “just say hello” to the proprietress—there wasn’t a speck of dust on the shelves or merchandise, not even on the feather dusters for sale. Everything sparkled, including every one of the Czech glass buttons and beads that the tweeners bought to make their own jewelry.
Bill’s own obsession began with one of these buttons. And continued with a hair clip, then a porcelain turtle, a bottle of bubbles and a package of Halloween napkins. All insignificant things that Stella wouldn’t miss, had she not witnessed each being pocketed by the same and most unlikely person.
Bill’s M.O. was as reliable as pollen in spring. He’d enter the store, walk past her as if she weren’t there, then examine the objects with his eyes. Sometimes he’d pick one up and put it down again. More often he pocketed any item that caught his eye. He didn’t behave like a thief. He never looked around to see if anyone was watching. The behavior was overtly casual, as if he were removing objects from his own home. But when Bill’s behavior spread to other businesses, people began to talk. His kids decided to steal him from town as quickly and quietly as a glass button to a pocket.
The last day he visited Stella’s, Bill asked her if she’d share an old bottle of wine with him after she closed for the day. She was one of the few who still spoke with him without self-conscious hints about the illness that was claiming his autonomy and identity. It was the day after they had turned the clocks back for winter, but still warm. Though the sun had already disappeared behind the mountain, Bill insisted they sit at one of the benches in the square.
He waited for her to sit before he did. “I’ve lived in this town most of my life,” he said, “but I might as well be a stranger.”
Stella nodded. For the first time in Bill’s presence she did not need to voice what she was feeling.
The old fashioned streetlights that ringed the square started to come on as Bill emptied a large canvas bag. He handed Stella a crystal wine glass and took one for himself. He brought out a couple of linen napkins, a loaf of rosemary sourdough and a block of sliced Havarti. Stella was impressed by the care with which Bill had planned the meeting. She had no way of knowing he had done so because he had read somewhere that focusing on an event and carefully carrying out all its obligations could temporarily thwart the illness that doomed him.
Stella was tickled that the usually careful banker didn’t seem to care that they were doing something socially irresponsible, not to mention illegal in their community. The couple clinked their glasses without looking around for any witnesses to their outdoor consumption of alcohol and any impending public intoxication.
Conversation continued with the changes they’d seen since they each came to town. At one point Stella looked up into the towering redwoods and remarked that what she and Bill had experienced was “nothing in comparison” to what the coned sentries above them had.
Bill filled each of their glasses again, and Stella finally had the courage to ask what she had been wondering since the last Council vote. Why had he changed his mind?
“Frankly, I don’t remember,” he answered, staring off into space for a moment before returning to Stella’s insistent gaze. “You said something. No, it was something . . . .”
“What?”
Bill’s gaze had shifted to the bus dropping off four tired commuters. Stella kept her eyes on Bill, even though she guessed that he had already forgotten what he was about to say. She took another sip of the lovely French red and waited for Bill to speak first. His eyes followed the last commuter crossing the square. When the man finally disappeared out of sight, Bill turned to Stella and asked, “Now, what were we talking about?”
She hesitated. She didn’t want to embarrass him by drawing attention to his lapse.
“It was nothing.”
“No, now I remember,” he said. “It had something to do with your husband.”
“Henry?”
“Was that his name?”
“Yes.”
“I remember the last time I saw him—not far from where we are sitting now in fact. I remember him telling me that when the hardware store closed that there would soon be no place in town to buy a pair of socks.”
They finished the bottle in silence as the North Star joined the couple on the square only to disappear behind a cloud. It started to drizzle but neither seemed to take notice. One of the redwoods had them covered.
She fumbled in her backpack for her bike lock. She always wrestled with whether or not to secure her bike in town, and she always went with her natural optimism. But the truth was, no one would ever want her bike. It mirrored its owner’s physique in two ways—a big basket up front and two saddle bags in the back.
The town Stella had called home for the past 45 years rested at the foot of a diminutive mountain in a Northern California county gilded in sunshine and scenic open space. Several fat, old redwoods graced the town square. Their canopies sheltered every upper middle class comfort—the old depot, now a bookstore; charming restaurants, bars, coffeehouses and night spots; old money antique shops and new money art galleries. The quaintly bricked and benched public square hosted small concerts and food and wine tasting fairs. Saturday afternoons featured parades of the freshly coiffed and well-bred—including the dogs. The square had everything—except a public restroom, which Stella always thought was essential to a place that attracted thousands of admirers each weekend.
It was during one of her daily rides down the hill that Stella decided to open a dollar store. Researching the prospect, she was delighted to find that she didn’t have to buy into a franchise. She could start one from scratch. And the perfect spot, she thought, was right on the square—a small, modest space once occupied by a Baskin-Robbins, the last chain store to be driven from town by pretentiously high rents.
She crossed the street in the freshly painted crosswalk, adjacent to the new bike lane, and paused at the spotless Wells Fargo glass doors to check her hair. The ride along the town’s flat streets hadn’t been any less dangerous than the ride down the hill. A Range Rover coming out of the Whole Foods parking lot nearly hit her. The mother of the “Baby on Board” seemed to be chewing out some poor soul at the other end of her cell phone signal.
Stella fluffed up what was left of the over-processed hair her bike helmet had crushed. An exiting customer flung one door open, narrowly missing Stella’s nose. The woman, in a ball cap and matching butt-huggers, jaywalked to a nearby Tesla coupe without apology. It was on such occasions—and there were too many to count—that Stella felt more akin to the redwoods in the square than to any of her town’s newer inhabitants. These trees were as resourceful as an umbrella, and they widened each year with age.
The door to the bank seemed heavier than it was the last time Stella had visited, shortly before her husband’s sudden death a year prior. She looked around as if she still might know someone at the branch where she and Henry had had their mortgage, home equity account and modest savings accounts. The fact that she was tearing through these savings with house repairs was only one of the many reasons she wanted the store.
A woman who was wearing perfume—unusual, since it was recently censured at a town meeting as an overt intrusion on the senses—directed Stella to the young man behind a desk in the lobby.
“I would own and manage the store . . . .” Stella said, pausing to take in the young man’s blank face. She couldn’t tell where he had gone, but he was nowhere here in the bank, let alone sitting in front of her, sharing her dream. In fact, the “banker” before her, who looked like he could have lived in a frat house just a week prior, yawned.
“Oh, excuse me,” he said with his hand still in front of his mouth. His face turned red when his eyes met Stella’s. Perhaps she could trust him after all.
“Everything would cost a buck,” she continued.
“A dollar? No shit . . . .” his voice trailed off. He looked around. “I mean, no kidding?” He was on the edge of his chair. “What could you sell for a dollar?”
“Great stuff,” Stella said. “Thread and sewing needles, socks, greeting cards, wrapping paper, things you can make Halloween costumes out of. Kids will love it.” The baby banker’s face returned to a blank puzzlement, but it was not accompanied by another question. Instead, he pulled some papers out of his desk drawer and handed them to Stella. “Fill these out and return them as soon as you are done. Mr. Stamfleigh reviews these every Thursday afternoon.”
“Stamfleigh,” Stella rasped, then cleared her throat. “Not Bill?”
“That’s right,” the kid said. “You know him?”
“Yes . . . .”
“Something wrong?”
“No,” Stella offered, wondering what it was about her behavior that made the boy ask that. “I’m just surprised he hasn’t retired.”
Unknown to Stella and everyone else in town, Bill Stamfleigh was struggling with the onset of Alzheimer’s. It was only a week after being diagnosed that he ran across Stella’s loan application. She insisted they meet over coffee because she couldn’t bear the thought of talking about something so important with other customers waiting for Bill’s time.
“You know what you’re getting into, don’t you?” Bill asked.
She nodded and studied the man who had always been friendly whenever she and Henry did business at the bank. They’d say hello at the coffee shop or the movies, but they didn’t travel in the same social circles.
Bill was also recently widowed. But after the three-year ordeal of his wife’s breast cancer, he had no desire to retire, despite his kids’ and friends’ urgings. All he really wanted to do was get back to the life he had always enjoyed: weekdays at the bank and weekends at the golf course. The recent diagnosis was only the second big surprise Bill had ever had in life. The first being Barbara’s illness. He never imagined he’d have to grow old alone.
Stella filled Bill in on what she would do with the old Baskin-Robbins shop. “I really miss folks walking around town with ice cream cones,” she offered for some reason. “Don’t you?”
“Then why don’t you just open an ice cream shop?”
“Too seasonal. Besides, I’ve lived in this town long enough to know that sugar will be the next thing it bans.” The town was the first in the county to officially nix cigarette smoking, Styrofoam, plastic bags, plastic straws, and was currently mulling over the complete elimination of perfumes and colognes.
“Good point,” Bill conceded without any expression. He stared down at her over the reading glasses sliding down his nose.
Stella continued, “I see you’re still on the City Council.”
“Yes, but . . . .”
“I’ve already finished a draft of my business plan. Have a professor at the University reviewing it.”
“I think it might be too big a risk for you. You’ve never run a business.”
“I worked for the city for years.”
“In the Library,” he said flatly, as if she had run nothing more significant than a lemonade stand. Stella stood her ground with the same look that had shamed every middle-schooler who had ever even tried to misbehave in the Library.
Bill cleared his throat. “Uh, what I mean is, you could lose your house.”
“I don’t think so.”
“But you are putting it up as collateral.”
“So?”
“Look, you must know, a dollar store downtown will be fiercely fought . . . .”
“I know . . . .”
“. . . . and even if you do manage to get it by the Town Council, what makes you think your store won’t be boycotted or vandalized, or even turn a profit?”
“I’ll have my business plan on your desk next week . . . .”
Bill wasn’t listening. “The way the rents are downtown you could go out of business in two months.”
Stella took a sip of water. This man was only a year older than her, yet he was talking to her like she was one of his kids asking to borrow his car.
“Haven’t you looked at the cheaper vacancies near the 7-Eleven, or out by the freeway?”
“It wouldn’t be like any other dollar store.” She sighed, then took a sip of her coffee.
Bill was lost in Stella’s eyes. He had never noticed before how intensely blue they were.
Stella let her coffee go cold as she continued to struggle to get her points across. But Bill seemed distracted. Every time someone came through the coffee shop door, he looked at them and then back at Stella as if he couldn’t even remember who she was.
They ended their meeting near the back door behind the bank where Bill always parked his car. He had driven a Jaguar for as long as she knew him. This one was silver. She always thought the black one his wife surprised him with on his 65th better suited his patrician bearing.
“You know, if I approved your loan, I’d have to recuse myself from the Council’s decision.”
Though that hadn’t occurred to her, she didn’t skip a beat. “Don’t you think my 30 years at the Library would count for something?”
“Frankly, no.”
She knew that as well as he did. The town and its inhabitants had changed drastically since Stella and Henry had arrived via San Francisco. They chose it because it was laid back, friendly and astonishingly beautiful. Back then a variety of people lived comfortably together. Low-key folks with working class jobs mixed with the elite. She was tickled every time she went to the now long gone health food store downtown, and a local would have Jerry Garcia cornered by the bulk food. Henry often sat next to Sam Shepard at The Mill, the only workingman’s bar to survive the town’s upscaling. Carlos Santana once lived up on “The Hill”—a local reference to the “molehill-of-a-mountain” that her in-laws from Western Montana never regarded as a real mountain.
There was a time that Stella was able to buy comfortable shoes in town at a reasonable price. Henry could pick up lightbulbs at the hardware store on the square. But over time, the shoe store had been replaced by a boutique that sold footwear and clothing she never saw anyone wear. The hardware store was abandoned to make way for a cooking school owned by a chef who had become a celebrity on TV. Shopkeepers now focused on the newer folks in town, most of them corporate leaders, Hollywood moguls, real estate developers, high tech winners and hedge fund operators. “The molehill”, once a sacred place to the Miwok, was now being loved to death by hikers, runners, equestrians and mountain bikers—grinding powdery ruts into its humble slopes.
Stella tried to hide her disappointment from Bill, but it obviously showed.
“Have you looked into a Small Business Administration loan?”
“The Feds? You know better than that. I’m pushing 70. I’d be dead by the time they got around to even reviewing it.”
“But you’re a woman.”
At least he noticed that!
As soon as she got back to her house, Stella fired up a joint. In a few days she knew she would receive an official letter from the bank with a personal note from Bill clipped to it that said, “Sorry.”
The day after Stella received the letter, she visited the Baskin-Robbins place and took another look at the vacant apartment above it. The owner of the building had retired to Hawaii, and no longer had any interest in the town, other than making money on real estate.
Bill observed Stella from his office window across the square. He had heard through the grapevine that she was considering selling her house to finance the store. The foolish woman was making a big mistake, he thought. Besides, another, more suitable, business was opting for the property.
“Another hair salon?” Stella chided when she bumped into Bill at the coffee shop. “Doesn’t this town already have a hundred?”
“Oh, it’s not that many,” Bill scoffed as the two waited in line. Then he looked into her eyes. “Couldn’t be.” Though he stood ahead of Stella, he insisted that she order first because he had ordered a half-caff, marbled latte that would take longer than her order. She took her coffee—black—and left without another word.
Stella’s business research was as thorough as one would expect from a retired reference librarian. Since the town had driven out the chains and the more funky local businesses—one, a combo jewelry and porn shop that had serviced the community for 40 years—it had steadily added more and more beauty salons. There were now more than 50, with about 400 hairdressers for a town of 14,000 citizens—most of them children, who rarely required $90 haircuts.
The picture window of the tiny apartment had a nice view of the square. Stella hated driving and knew she was pressing her luck on the mountain road. And it was never fun clambering up on the roof of her house to rid it of dried redwood droppings. Henry always did that. The only thing she would really miss was the utter peace of a cabin in a redwood forest. But even this was starting to get to her. The death of her husband had left her in a social vacuum. It would be nice to pop into a local restaurant or even the Library, whenever she felt horribly alone.
Even though her cabin was the sort of home that was commonly knocked down and replaced with a larger one, Stella believed that a triathlon junkie might jump at the chance to own a place right on the hiking and biking trails. She was confident that she could make at least enough from the sale for a 25 percent down payment on the apartment and store. She set the wheels in motion.
Before Stella had the opportunity to present her business plans to the Town Council, the county paper made her plans a front-page story with the headline: Sock it to me. A photo of Stella holding a bag of cotton tube socks accompanied the article, with her quote: “There is no longer any place in town to buy a pair of socks.” This wasn’t entirely true. The clothing boutiques in town were selling socks at $21 a pair.
Nonetheless, by the time the public hearing took place, Stella had been accused of everything from planning to “sell arsenic-filled candy and lead-laden toys from China” to putting the boutiques out of business. Though she assured the growing crowds, she would not, no one seemed to be listening. She tried to detail what she would sell:
“. . . . Practical things like a pair of tube socks if you suddenly need them, some enchanting things too, like Easter and Christmas decorations.”
“Plastic!”
“Lead!”
“No,“ she countered. “Listen.”
She told them she had seen some darling colored eggs made from recycled lumber at a crafts show. She planned to buy trimming remnants from fabric stores as gift-wrapping or children’s hair ornaments. Honest to a fault, Stella admitted that she might have to break up the 3-pack bags of men’s t-shirts she bought at the factory stores, to sell them for a dollar apiece.
“That’s a ridiculous mark-up,” someone shouted.
“Not really,” someone else joked. Most in the crowd knew about, but didn’t bother to elaborate on, the $90 t-shirts in the boutiques.
“But don’t you see,” Stella reasoned, “I would be saving you a trip to the factory store. The nearest is 60 miles away. What you save on gas and time . . . .”
“We can’t have a dollar store in this town.”
“Why?”
“Too much traffic. It would attract . . . . too many . . . . people . . . . from . . . . out of town.”
The person who finished this sentiment probably wasn’t referring to the hordes who routinely rode $5,000 bicycles into town to eat and drink every weekend. Everyone in the room knew this. You could hear a pin drop.
The business professor who had reviewed Stella’s proposal and was also a long-time resident, took advantage of the silence.
“I think this proposal has legs,” he said. “I think that this store could become as unique and beloved as any of our antique shops or restaurants. It deserves a chance.”
Still the skeptics continued.
“What kind of people do you hope to hire?”
“What will you pay them?”
“How will they get here? Where will they park?”
Stella stood and answered all these questions at once. “I plan to hire anyone who can ride a bike, walk or take a bus to work. Starting pay is $17 an hour.”
Stunned silence seemed to suck all the air out of the room. Then the City Manager’s gavel sounded. “Thank you all for coming,” he said. “We’ll accept public comments for another week, and we will make a decision within the next month.”
The vote came down four to three against the store. Stella learned that Bill had cast the deciding vote.
What did he or anyone else in town have against her, she wondered. She wasn’t born with a silver spoon in her mouth, but she had earned a modest pension that would keep her off the streets. Plus, she made enough to keep her proposed business in stock for a decade with the sale of her 950 square foot redwood cabin and its tiny, pie-shaped lot. A criminal lawyer from Pacific Palisades bought the property for over a million. He barely looked at the much beloved home before submitting plans to tear it down and put up a 4,000 square foot structure.
Escrow on her house closed two days after the Council’s decision. Stella had thought seriously about moving to another town where she might feel more at home. But before she had the chance to explore the idea, the owner of the old Baskin-Robbins place accepted her offer.
She moved into the apartment over the empty store a few days before Thanksgiving. The business professor who helped her prepare her business plan helped prepare a petition for appeal of her dollar store proposal. The shop had two bathrooms, one with a door on the street side of the building. Stella could offer them both as official public restrooms. Meanwhile, the hairdresser from Beverly Hills made her an offer for a lease. Betting on her belief that the town desperately needed downtown public comfort facilities, Stella declined.
The front window of Stella’s apartment offered a splendid view of the goings-on-about-town, including one of Bill sitting at his desk at the bank. She used the spotting scope she and her husband had used on their deck to study birds to study the banker. She understood why he couldn’t openly show support at the hearing, but she considered his vote against her proposal a betrayal. And now that she had appealed, he seemed to openly avoid her at the coffee shop and at the movies they each attended alone on weekday nights.
Blissfully mild fall weather finally transitioned into rain, and December ushered in storms with heavy wind. Broken umbrellas stuck out of the garbage cans at the bus stop. Water swirled around the ankles of anyone enduring the wait for a bus. The next Planning Commission meeting came and went without space on the agenda for Stella’s appeal. The Town Clerk told Stella they had to contend with problems presented by the storms—flooding and downed trees, new potholes.
Stella finally managed to corner Bill at the movie theater concession. He told her that the final decision probably wouldn’t be made until after the holidays. “You should have received a letter to that effect by now,” he added. She followed Bill into the theater and took the seat behind him. “If they’re trying to deter me, it won’t work,” she whispered just before the movie began. “I won’t be discouraged.”
“Good,” Bill said without turning around.
He dove into his popcorn. She had some nerve, he thought. Why was this stupid store so important to her? Nobody else in town wanted it. She should just go away. All that business about providing useful things was so naïve. Selling her house to live in that ratty apartment over the store was a colossal mistake. Despite the public restroom aspect of the deal, it was loud and clear that no one on the Council was willing to take a chance on a business that could change the complexion of the town.
Bill quickly lost track of the movie plot and characters, and scuttled out of the movie before the credits rolled. He got soaked in the rain as he walked to his car. On the way out of town he lingered at the stop sign in front of Stella’s empty store. Tacky was how everyone on the Council regarded the prospect of a dollar store.
Once all the other establishments in town had decorated for Christmas, Stella’s dark, empty storefront stuck out in town like she did—always dressed in bright colored fabrics, not the drab polyester sports garments everyone else seemed to wear. She hit a liquidator’s and bought a few colorful umbrellas and kid’s rubber boots to arrange in the store window. She stenciled a sign on the window, and encircled it in Christmas lights: “Everything Here’s Just a Buck!”
People rattled the door to the store downstairs. Everyone in town, including the police and fire inspector, waded in floodwater to make sure she wasn’t selling anything. She assured anyone who asked that she would take her display down and sell the goods at a flea market if her appeal for the store did not succeed.
Late on Christmas Eve, as she was getting ready to go to a friend’s house, she looked out her window to find Bill standing alone in the middle of the town square. Rain poured off the brim of his hat and onto his leather briefcase. He held his car keys in his free hand, pushing the buttons on the keychain that would sound the car horn. She wondered why he had not parked his car where he usually did, at the back door of the bank.
She looked up and down the street. Bill’s Jag was nowhere in sight. He turned in another direction and continued in vain. All the shops had closed early and the restaurants serving Christmas Eve dinner were not yet open.
Stella finished dressing, and took another look out the window. Bill hadn’t ventured an inch. She grabbed two umbrellas from her store window and gently approached the still man in the rain.
“Bill? Bill?”
He turned to look at her, and for the first time in a long time seemed to register no disdain nor dread of her presence. In fact, he didn’t register any expression that would indicate he knew who she was.
“Hello,” he said. “I can’t seem to remember where I left the car this morning.”
“Well, it’s not around here,” Stella said, handing him one of the umbrellas. “Let’s take a walk around the block.”
He nodded, and gladly accepted the umbrella.
“Silver Jag, right?”
“Yes, I think so . . . .” His voice trailed off with a thought he didn’t seem to want to share.
It didn’t take long to find Bill’s car—parked where he had left it every weekday for the past 35 years—at the back door of the bank. Suddenly, Bill didn’t seem as confused as he was just ten minutes earlier. Still, Stella wondered if he should be driving at all. He offered her a ride back to her apartment. She demurred at first, but accepted when a heavy gust of wind blew her umbrella inside out.
“What are you doing tonight?” Stella asked.
“Going to Bruce’s.”
“Isn’t he your oldest?”
“That’s right. How . . . .?”
“No, this way,” Stella said, pointing in the opposite direction from where Bill was going to make a turn.
“Sorry, I . . . .”
They were in front of the store. She lingered in the rain after getting out of the car. She had forgotten to turn on the Christmas lights in the window. The wind blew icy droplets onto the car upholstery but Bill stared straight ahead. She wondered how long she could stand there with the car door open in the rain before he showed any concern at all. She waited for a gust of wind to pass before opening up her umbrella.
“Well . . . . night, Bill,” she said. “Merry Christmas.” She purposely left the umbrella Bill had used behind.
He turned to her with a quizzical expression. “Good night.”
Stella figured his indifference had to be either a drug side effect or the onset of Alzheimer’s. In her tenure at the Library, she had learned to detect it in the older patrons and usually found a neighbor who could make sure that person could find their way home. Though she hoped this was not the case with Bill, it apparently was. About a week after New Year’s, she heard that he was forced by the bank to retire. They threw a retirement lunch at one of the local places on the square. All the merchants in town were invited but Stella was not. She watched the guests arrive as she sipped coffee in a window seat at the depot. She remembered a few faces, but no names. Most were folks who had banked or golfed with Bill, but had moved out of town after retirement.
The rain took a breather on the day the downtown holiday lights were taken down. At the top of the docket for the first City Council meeting of the New Year was the topic now widely known as “the dollar store issue.” Recent letters and editorials in local alternative papers suggested the town considered itself too good and was afraid of attracting “people of color” to work and shop in the store.
“People of color?” one commissioner clucked. “Last time I looked in the mirror I had blue eyes!”
Another brought up the recent article in The New York Times reporting that their county was declared the healthiest in the country, based on statistics regarding regular exercise and number of cases of bad health indicators like diabetes, high cholesterol and heart disease.
“See?” another member of the community proffered. “And that store would carry dangerous candy and bad, chemically produced junk from China, like all of them do.”
“Oh, come on,” another protested. “She did say she wouldn’t sell things like that.”
At first, the group avoided the other topic the study presented—one that seemed to support the dollar store debates in the papers. The county “ranked 54th out of 57 responding counties in income equality, which measured the difference between those earning at the 20th percentile of household income versus the 80th percentile.” This was something that seemed to actually embarrass the townspeople.
The dollar store wouldn’t fix this,” Bill offered. “But it would certainly help with the public perception of our town.”
Everyone resented Bill for verbalizing these misgivings—even Bill. He had inadvertently done something he promised himself he would never do in public—take a side. But for some reason he felt indebted to the woman who wanted to open the store.
Just before the Council was to take the vote, Stella reminded everyone about the public restrooms her store would provide. “I’m sure,” she said, “that we all share the desire to make our downtown welcome for everyone who visits.”
No one with a vote failed to detect the edgy tone that Stella lavished on the word everyone—even the restaurateurs, who apparently felt that anyone who visited the town should have enough money to spend a little in their establishments if they needed a restroom. This time, the vote was four to three in favor of the dollar store. Stella was surprised to learn that—once again—Bill had cast the deciding vote.
The Grand Opening of “Stella’s On the Square” –the Town Council forbade any reference to a “dollar” or a “buck”—was held the weekend before Valentine’s Day. Stella sold red napkins and plates, and white paper table cloths; little heart-shaped red and silver spangled boxes and, of course, valentines. As promised, each item cost a buck. The cards sold out that weekend. The Girl Scouts cookie drive commenced a week after that, and Stella allowed the Scouts to sell cookies in front of the store—even though they were $7 a box.
Stella also allowed her staff, most from out of town—to bring their children on weekends and whenever they were out of school. They played hopscotch with the local kids and decorated the square’s pavement with drawings of chalk that the store provided.
Kids under ten and adults over 70 loved the store. But anyone in between remained skeptical. The staff’s starting wage, well above that of all the other retail businesses in town, was surely a burden for a store that sold such inexpensive items. But most who objected to Stella’s business assumed it would not last a year—especially when a prolonged national recession settled in. The rest of the businesses on the square either barely made it or closed in a hurry only to be replaced by others that would soon fail at selling overpriced things that were not necessarily needed. Nasty rumors about Stella’s dollar store arose whenever a business closed. Whispers that the store’s success was due to under the counter drug dealing spread like ivy up a redwood.
Bill vigorously defended Stella and her store, though he wasn’t sure why. He was surprised that the people spreading the rumors frequented the store quite often, especially when a new shipment of greeting cards came in. At a buck apiece, they always sold out in just a few hours. Cleaning products, stuff Bill always hated spending money on, also sold well.
Bill was privy to the downfall of the last business that had been bullied in such a way—that strange little porno and costume jewelry shop owned by an old hippie. The man was a drug user, but not a dealer. Still, he wound up in jail after a sting found a bag of pot and a trace of heroin on the premises, and that was the end of a business that had occupied the square for more than four decades. Bill tried to remind Stella of all this, but failed because the store was always full of locals.
It wasn’t long before someone planted a bag of pot behind the store register. Bill made a point to meet up with Stella at the coffee shop, but she was nonplussed.
“Cheap stuff,” she scoffed. “Nothing I would buy—or sell.”
“You should be more careful.”
“I know what happened to Jack could happen to me.”
Bill had to think a moment to determine whom she meant. He wasn’t surprised that Stella knew the old hippie by name, now that she admitted they shared at least one unhealthy pastime.
All the fuss died down with the beginning of soccer season, and none of the other dire rumors or prophecies ventured by naysayers came to be. Whenever Bill visited the store, which was often enough—mainly to “just say hello” to the proprietress—there wasn’t a speck of dust on the shelves or merchandise, not even on the feather dusters for sale. Everything sparkled, including every one of the Czech glass buttons and beads that the tweeners bought to make their own jewelry.
Bill’s own obsession began with one of these buttons. And continued with a hair clip, then a porcelain turtle, a bottle of bubbles and a package of Halloween napkins. All insignificant things that Stella wouldn’t miss, had she not witnessed each being pocketed by the same and most unlikely person.
Bill’s M.O. was as reliable as pollen in spring. He’d enter the store, walk past her as if she weren’t there, then examine the objects with his eyes. Sometimes he’d pick one up and put it down again. More often he pocketed any item that caught his eye. He didn’t behave like a thief. He never looked around to see if anyone was watching. The behavior was overtly casual, as if he were removing objects from his own home. But when Bill’s behavior spread to other businesses, people began to talk. His kids decided to steal him from town as quickly and quietly as a glass button to a pocket.
The last day he visited Stella’s, Bill asked her if she’d share an old bottle of wine with him after she closed for the day. She was one of the few who still spoke with him without self-conscious hints about the illness that was claiming his autonomy and identity. It was the day after they had turned the clocks back for winter, but still warm. Though the sun had already disappeared behind the mountain, Bill insisted they sit at one of the benches in the square.
He waited for her to sit before he did. “I’ve lived in this town most of my life,” he said, “but I might as well be a stranger.”
Stella nodded. For the first time in Bill’s presence she did not need to voice what she was feeling.
The old fashioned streetlights that ringed the square started to come on as Bill emptied a large canvas bag. He handed Stella a crystal wine glass and took one for himself. He brought out a couple of linen napkins, a loaf of rosemary sourdough and a block of sliced Havarti. Stella was impressed by the care with which Bill had planned the meeting. She had no way of knowing he had done so because he had read somewhere that focusing on an event and carefully carrying out all its obligations could temporarily thwart the illness that doomed him.
Stella was tickled that the usually careful banker didn’t seem to care that they were doing something socially irresponsible, not to mention illegal in their community. The couple clinked their glasses without looking around for any witnesses to their outdoor consumption of alcohol and any impending public intoxication.
Conversation continued with the changes they’d seen since they each came to town. At one point Stella looked up into the towering redwoods and remarked that what she and Bill had experienced was “nothing in comparison” to what the coned sentries above them had.
Bill filled each of their glasses again, and Stella finally had the courage to ask what she had been wondering since the last Council vote. Why had he changed his mind?
“Frankly, I don’t remember,” he answered, staring off into space for a moment before returning to Stella’s insistent gaze. “You said something. No, it was something . . . .”
“What?”
Bill’s gaze had shifted to the bus dropping off four tired commuters. Stella kept her eyes on Bill, even though she guessed that he had already forgotten what he was about to say. She took another sip of the lovely French red and waited for Bill to speak first. His eyes followed the last commuter crossing the square. When the man finally disappeared out of sight, Bill turned to Stella and asked, “Now, what were we talking about?”
She hesitated. She didn’t want to embarrass him by drawing attention to his lapse.
“It was nothing.”
“No, now I remember,” he said. “It had something to do with your husband.”
“Henry?”
“Was that his name?”
“Yes.”
“I remember the last time I saw him—not far from where we are sitting now in fact. I remember him telling me that when the hardware store closed that there would soon be no place in town to buy a pair of socks.”
They finished the bottle in silence as the North Star joined the couple on the square only to disappear behind a cloud. It started to drizzle but neither seemed to take notice. One of the redwoods had them covered.