* * *
“Well,” Theo said, “I suppose that would depend on your specific definition of ‘not working.’”
I looked at him, then back at the toaster oven sitting on the kitchen island between us. “You’re saying there’s more than one?”
“Definition?” he said, clarifying. I nodded. “Well, sure. On the one hand, it could mean, you know, that it’s broken.”
“Right,” I said.
“But taken in a wider sense,” he continued, “it could translate to the lack of a specific skill, i.e., an inability or outright refusal to perform required tasks.”
“It’s a toaster oven,” I said. “Not the proletariat.”
He laughed. “Wow. Impressive vocab you have there.”
“What, just because I’m from here I can’t use big words?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Um, no. That’s just kind of an SAT word choice, not one you throw around in breakfast conversation.”
Okay, so maybe I was a little bit on edge. “Sorry,” I said. “Rough morning.”
“It’s okay.” He rubbed a hand over his face, glancing at the stairs that led to the upper floors where, I assumed, Ivy was still sleeping. On his wrist was one of the bracelets he’d bought from Gert’s, the slim, green one with the scallop shell. “Look, I know you think this whole toaster thing is ridiculous—”
“Because it is.”
“But the bottom line is that Ivy likes things done in a certain way. If her breakfast, or anything else, isn’t right, then it’s my job to correct the problem.”
“How can toast not be right?”
“As I’ve explained,” he said, giving me a tired look, “there is no specific control for doneness on this thing. Your only choices are light, medium, and dark.”
“You want more variation,” I said. Then, before he could reply, I added, “I think that’s the word that got me into college.”
He smiled. “What I want is an adjustable dial. Light is too light, medium is too medium, and dark is too dark. Right now, we have black and white only, and we need gray.”
“Gray toast?”
“Fine,” he said, shaking his head. “Go ahead, mock. But I think you actually do know what I mean.”
Hearing this, I had a flash of Luke earlier, saying the same thing, but about what our relationship was lacking. Apparently, it was obvious to everyone else what I did or did not know. Too bad I still felt so clueless.
“So what I’m hearing,” I said, pushing this out of my head, “is that this machine is not broken, but still needs to be replaced.”
“Pretty much.” He sighed. Then, more confidently: “Yes.”
As I looked back at the toaster oven, I could feel him studying me, the same way he’d been doing since I’d first turned up at his door fifteen minutes earlier. After I dropped Morris off at a nearby gas station—“Talk later,” he’d told me, as always—I’d done my best to regain my composure, putting on lipstick and taking deep breaths. Unfortunately, I was cursed with the blotch-prone kind of skin that always made it obvious if I’d been crying. Theo hadn’t asked me anything about this directly, though. Never had I been so happy to talk about breakfast foods.
“Look,” I said, “normally, our policy is this: if an appliance is in working order but not up to the standards of the client, it’s up to them to provide their own alternative.”
Theo bit his lip, looking stressed. “Okay.”
“However,” I continued, slightly distracted by how this single word spread a sudden hopefulness over his features, “the owners of this particular property have been apprised of the situation and are willing to remedy it.”
“So we get a new toaster oven? With an adjustable doneness setting?”
I glanced down at my phone, re-reading the text my mother had sent me only moments earlier. Since VIP, owners OK’d. Get what they want. Since I’d last checked it, another one had appeared beneath it. You need me, call. Love you.
I felt tears prick my eyes again—God, what was wrong with me?—and shoved my phone back into my pocket. “Looks like it,” I said to Theo.
“Oh, man. That is great.” He was actually beaming. At least for a second. Then he said, “When, do you think?”
“When …”
“… can we get the replacement?”
I opened my mouth to answer, but before I could, he went on.
“Today? This morning?”
“Um,” I said slowly, “I guess it’s really just a matter of going out and finding one that meets her specifications.”
“But we could do that now, right?”
I just looked at him. “You are pushy, you know that?”
“Well, that depends on your definition of pushy,” he replied, smiling. “Personally, I like to call myself driven. It’s different.”
I made a face, showing I wasn’t so sure about this. “Well, Mr. Driven. Big Club opened at nine.”
“Perfect. Just give me five seconds.”
And with that, he was gone, jogging across the room and disappearing up the stairs. I wondered what time Ivy roused herself, if it was even possible to have the perfect toaster oven waiting for her when she did. Apparently, I was going to find out.
A few minutes later, Theo was easing the front door of Sand Dollars shut so slowly and gently, you would have thought there was a bomb attached to the knob. “Really?” I said. “She’s that light a sleeper?”
“Apparently, I slam doors,” he explained.
I watched him as he turned the lock, also with the utmost care and concentration. “Do you like your job, Theo?”
“Yeah,” he replied. “Why?”
I shrugged, starting down the front steps. “I don’t know. It just seems … really demeaning.”
“Yes, but,” he said, “all work has demeaning moments. Otherwise it would be called play.”
“That sounds like a quote.”
“I may have complained about certain tasks at various times.” He cleared his throat. “There was a time when both her cats had simultaneous diarrhea. Not exactly what I had in mind when I applied.”
“What was that, though?”
“Diarrhea?”
I made a face, pulling open my driver’s side door. “Why did you want this job in the first place?”
“The experience,” he replied. Not a moment of hesitation, not even a breath. “I want to be a filmmaker, and I get to spend all day with an award-winning one.”
“Cleaning up her cat shit,” I added.
“One very bad week, yes,” he said. “But I’ve also watched her shoot, and edit raw footage. I’ve been there when she’s taken meetings, begged for funding, somehow drawn out reluctant subjects to reveal things they never planned to. And now she’s even letting me shoot b-roll, which is awesome.”
“If you say so,” I said, cranking the engine.
“Do I plan to include litter box fumigator and purveyor of toaster ovens on my résumé?” he said. “No. But you take the bad to get to the great. That’s just how it works. Right?”
“Well,” I said, “if that’s true, I guess I’m going to have a freaking awesome day tomorrow.”
This was out before I even realized it, and I instantly wondered what on earth compelled me to share it. Too late now, as Theo was looking over at me. “Not that it’s any of my business, but you did seem kind of upset, earlier. You okay?”
“Fine,” I said. “Nothing a trip to Big Club can’t fix.”
I’d meant this as a joke, but as we headed over the bridge in the tail-end of morning traffic, I actually did feel a sense of relief. Like I was leaving the morning, Luke, and everything else behind. In Colby, the roads were narrow, everything small and close together. But where the Big Club was, in McCorkle, things were more spread out, and it felt nice to just get lost a little within them.
“Wow,” Theo said, as I pulled into a space. “Look at the size of that shopping cart. It’s epic!”
“Everything is huge here,” I told h
im. “It’s a bulk store.”
“Still, that’s insane,” he said, still gawking at the cart, parked sideways in the return next to us. “It’s bigger than my apartment.”
I got out, then went to retrieve it, easing it out backwards. It had a loose wheel, of course. I’d yet to ever have one that didn’t. That, too, was part of the Big Club experience. “Isn’t everything in New York huge, though? Buildings, attitudes, shopping carts …”
“Common misconception,” he replied, falling in beside me as I rattled towards the entrance. “The truth is, with so many people packed into such a small island, things have to be compact. It’s, like, the ultimate dichotomy. Such largesse and tininess, all at once.”
“Largesse? Who’s studying for their SATs now?”
He made a face at me, and I laughed.
“Anyway, here everything’s small. Except Big Club.”
“Apparently,” he replied, as we passed a woman pushing a cart piled with large boxes of laundry detergent. “Wow, did you see the sizes of those Tides? Who does that much laundry?”
“Everyone, eventually.” The doors slid open, revealing a guy in a Big Club blue vest. He glanced at my membership card, then waved us through. “That’s the whole idea. You buy big, but it costs less in the long run. It helps to have storage space, though.”
“So we’re buying multiple toaster ovens?”
I shook my head, pushing us past the candy section towards appliances. “They sell better names here than at Park Mart. More chance we’ll find one her highness approves of.”
“Adjustable dial,” he said, in a flat voice. “All I am asking for is an adjustable dial.”
We found one on the third model we saw, a shiny chrome number that also sported slick black trim, an expanded-size broiler pan, and, inexplicably, a digital clock. “So you can time your toast, I guess?” I said.
“You can never have enough clocks in the kitchen,” Theo told me, twisting the dial back and forth to test it. “It’s where the entire day begins.”
“Wow,” I said. “You are, like, a motto machine. You should write bumper stickers or something.”
“It’s because of my parents,” he explained. “They were old.”
“What?”
“Older,” he corrected himself, “than, you know, just about everyone else’s mom and dad. My father was forty-eight when I was born. He wasn’t the best on the basketball court, but he had a saying for everything.”
“I don’t think my father would have been much for basketball either,” I said. “Even if he had been around.”
“You didn’t grow up with him?”
I shook my head. “Didn’t even meet him until I was ten. My stepdad adopted me at three, did all the heavy lifting.”
“Wow,” he said. “I never would have guessed, just from meeting him in the parking lot that night. You two seemed close.”
“Looks can be deceiving.”
“That,” he said, pointing at me, “is one of my father’s favorites.”
I smiled, then nodded at the oven. “So, you think this will work? She’ll approve?”
“Yep. We’re good.” He picked it up and slid it into the cart. Problem solved. If only they were all so easy. “You need a vat of Tide before we go?”
“Just stocked up last week,” I said, as a guy in a baseball hat rounded the corner beside us, pushing a cart packed with paper towels and various cleaning supplies. He had his head ducked down, studying a list he was holding, but I still recognized Clyde instantly. “Yeah, so,” I said, starting towards the register, “let’s just get this back, and we’ll see what—”
“Emaline?”
To say I was surprised that Clyde had spoken to me was an understatement: he wasn’t exactly known for his outgoing nature. I glanced at Theo, who was reading the fine print on the oven’s box, with no clue whatsoever to who was standing right in front of him. “Hi,” I said, as casually as I could, “how are you?”
“I’d be better if that storm the other night hadn’t busted a hole in the ceiling of the Washroom,” he said. “Place is soaked. Your dad still doing some contracting?”
“Um, yeah,” I replied, as Theo slid his hands in his pockets and stepped back to stand by politely. “He’s framing a job over on Summerhill right now, I think.”
“Sound or ocean end?”
“Sound.”
“Maybe I can convince him to stop by, take a look. Can I get his number?”
“Sure,” I said. He flipped his list over to the blank other side, grabbing a pen from behind his ear, then held both out to me. I wrote the number quickly, wondering if it was actually possible that we’d be able to part ways with no one the wiser. Then, though, just as I handed it back, Clyde gave Theo a polite nod. Next thing I knew, Theo was sticking out his hand.
“Theo Burns,” he said.
“Clyde Conaway.”
The shock that went through Theo as he heard this was like a gunshot: I literally felt it hit him, then reverberate all around us. “You’re …” he said, then stopped. I could suddenly hear him breathing. “You’re Clyde Conaway?”
“Well, we better go,” I said quickly. “It was good to—”
“We’re doing a film about you,” Theo blurted out, a bit of spit flying along with it. Oh, dear. “A documentary. Ivy Mendelson is the director, she did Cooper’s Way? We’ve been trying to reach you for months.” He started digging in his pockets, for God knows what, still talking. “You have no idea how hard it’s been to track you down. And now, here you are, with the toaster ovens. I mean, it’s unbelievable, I can’t even …”
He was still talking, still breathing, still searching for something on his person. Just a hot, sputtering mess, and I wanted to die, right there in Big Club. I looked at Clyde, trying to convey my deepest apology, but he was just studying Theo, his face impassive. Then, in a voice as casual as Theo’s was on the verge of hysteria, he said, “Oh, right. The documentary. How’s that going?”
“Oh, it’s amazing! Just fantastic. I mean, we’ve hit some local opposition in terms of willingness for interviews and providing information. But apparently that’s typical when a subject is, um, as private as, well … you are. Really, though, that’s exactly why we came down here, to get a sense of the community, you know, immerse ourselves in your world, your people, and—”
I was beginning to think he was never going to stop talking, even though—judging by the raspiness of his voice and dropping volume—he desperately needed to take a breath. “Theo’s very, um, passionate about the project,” I said, hoping to give him a chance to do just that. “He’s working really hard.”
“And Emaline’s been amazing!” Theo added, once bolstered by a quick shot of oxygen. “She took me some places I never would have found otherwise.”
Clyde glanced at me, and I tried not to cringe. “Really.”
“Oh, yeah,” Theo went on. “The fish house, for starters, and also this local market, where we found this milk crate that was, like, huge in terms of your history.”
“A milk crate,” Clyde repeated. I kept waiting for him to get visibly annoyed, but instead he seemed almost amused. “Huh. How so?”
“Well, it was from Craint Farms,” Theo explained. “And, of course, it’s well known the word craint was prevalent in some of the collages in the Metal/Paper series of 1997. All the writing on the subject has assumed this was a reference to the French word for fear, denoting your feelings about how agriculture felt in the face of industry.”
Clyde was just looking at him. It occurred to me that this had to be beyond bizarre, having your own work interpreted and analyzed by a total stranger. In Big Club.
“But then when I bought the crate,” Theo was saying now, “the owner of the store said the Craints used to farm around here. So it’s possible it was based on a real name, not a translation. Which is just—”
“Wait,” Clyde said, holding a hand to stop him. “You actually bought a Craint Farms milk crate?”
“From Gert’s,” I explained.
“It’s a huge find for the film,” Theo added, “not to mention to the collection of your papers and interviews. Ivy said it really singularly confirms everything that brought us here. The sense that this town did shape you and your work, more than anyone realized.”
Clyde looked at me again. “Old Gert must have thought you guys were nuts.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But he got fifty bucks out of it, so he wasn’t exactly complaining.”
“He does love a dollar,” he agreed.
“You have to let us interview you,” Theo told him, his voice suddenly grave, serious.
“Theo,” I said, “I don’t think—”
“What you could add to this film, with your input and cooperation,” he continued, “would take it to a whole other level. I know you haven’t exactly had good experiences with journalists in the past. I mean, we all remember that piece in the magazine of the Times in 1999.”
“We do?” I said.
“But if you would just give us a chance,” he went on, ignoring me, “we could in turn give you, and your legacy of work, the respect it deserves. Just meet with Ivy, give her a chance to explain her vision for the film. Please. I am begging you.”
I could literally see him sweating now, he was so excited. Good Lord, I thought. No wonder he got beat up in high school. If a locker had been around right then, I would have pushed him into it, if only for his own good.
For a moment, we all just stood there, no one saying anything. In the silence, I found myself thinking of the other toaster oven, back at Sand Dollars. Perfectly fine, in good working order. If only it had that adjustable dial. It takes so little to change everything. If you really thought about it, it would scare you to death.
“All right,” Clyde said finally, so casually you would have thought he was agreeing to a cup of coffee. “Set it up with your boss, name your place and time.”
“Oh my God!” Theo said. Now he was damp, breathless, and shrieking. I put my hand over my face. “Thank you! You won’t regret this, I promise. Just give me your number, and—”
“No.” Clyde nodded at me. “Set it up with Emaline, have her contact me.”