Page 6 of Worshipped by the BRATVA Grump

The front window has been framed out during the day. It's deep, deeper than the standard, because the original sill runs back further than anybody realized once the paneling came off, and Bohdan's carpenter has boxed it with a hinged lid on it for storage.

Daisy puts her bag on the floor. She walks over to it and strokes the bare wood in wonder. When sits down on it in the dim light with the streetlight coming through the dirty glass behind her, she runs her fingers over the carving I had put there. A small cat and the shop name.

Then she says, without turning around, “Mechislav.”

“Yes.”

“Come here, please.”

I make my way down the stairs. She's still sitting in the window with her coat on, looking down at where her fingers are tracing the small carved words.

“Say the ladder isn't happening,” she says.

“The rail's on order, but I can cancel it.”

She shakes her head, still not looking at me. “Say the children's section under the stairs isn't happening.”

“The frame went in on Friday. It's low. Nothing above three feet, like you said.”

“Right.” Her voice has gone strange. “Because those things weren't in the drawings I signed. I have read that fit-out schedule eleven times. It says wall removal and the party wall door and shelving… it says built in counter and flooring made good. It doesn't say one word about a custom window seat with a hinged lid, and I know exactly how much this costs, because I have priced it myself and allocated for it in the budget.”

“Bohdan had the timber left over.” I shrug as casually as possible and she finally lifts her eyes to me.

The light from the street is behind her so I can't read her face properly, only the shine of her eyes, and she's quiet long enough that I hear the café's extractor humming through the party wall.

“You didn’t write any of it down,” she says. “But it’s all here.”

“I remembered,” I say, sliding my hands into my pockets.

She stands up. It puts her very close, and she has to tip her head back a long way to keep looking at me. There's plaster dust on her cheekbone. She's still got the gloves on, and she pulls one off, slowly, and then the other, and drops them on the seat behind her, and neither of us says anything for about four seconds.

Her hand comes up and stops just short of my chest.

I know what's happening. Her breathing has changed, her chin has come up, and she's looking at my mouth. Every part of my body is telling me to put my hands on her waist and pull her into me.

She stood in my kitchen and told me clearly, in full possession of the facts, that she couldn't be involved with a man like me.

“There's a survey on Monday for the door,” I say. “You'll need to be here to sign it.”

Daisy stands in the window with her hands at her sides.

“Right,” she says. “Monday.”

“I'll lock up. Go home, it's late.”

Daisy

>The paper goes to bed at five on Thursdays, and by twenty past I’m standing in the hardware place on Anders Road buying sugar soap, two pairs of rubber gloves and a scrubbing brush, while Gordon behind the counter tells me about his sciatica. He’s been telling me about his sciatica since I was seventeen and came in here for poster putty, and there’s a comfort in that continuity I’m not going to pretend I don’t need this week.

Bohdan quoted eleven hundred dollars to wash and prime that ceiling, and eleven hundred dollars is a lot of paperbacks. It’s also, more importantly, a job that any person can do. It doesn’t need a trade. It needs somebody with a bucket, an evening and no particular plans, and it turns out I am all three of those things.

The shop at night has become my favorite place in the world, which is a slightly humiliating thing to know about yourself at twenty-seven. I let myself in with my own key now, and the smell has changed completely since work began: it’s sawdust and new oak and the faint chemical sweetness of the varnish they’re using on the treads.

The shelving carcasses are in along the left-hand wall, floor to ceiling, unfinished and pale and standing there like something waiting to be told what it’s for. The counter is still in pieces. The stairs go up to the mezzanine with a temporary rail. Under them, the low frame of the children’s section sits in the dark but I can already see the colorful lights I intend to put under there.

I turn the radio on and set up the tower.

It’s Bohdan’s, a waist-high platform, and I’ve watched Yusuf move it around this floor about forty times so I know how it works. The wheels have brakes and I do put them on. The ceiling is fifteen feet up and it is filthy in a way that has taken forty years of commitment to never cleaning it. Sugar soap, hot water, and every square foot of pressed tin gives up its pattern in a grubby gray wave that runs down my arm and into my sleeve. Grapes. It’s grapes and vine leaves. Nobody has been able to see that since the eighties, I’ll bet. Now I’m standing on a platform at half past eight at night with my mouth open, looking at grapes.