Robin Hobb - The Inheritance and Other Stories

Or maybe all he meant was that I should look out for Mom, and the rest of it was just an accident. I don’t know.

Mom and I still live here. Next month I’ll be eighteen. I’ll have to register with the aid office as an adult, and with the job office for training. Mom’s Career Mother checks will stop and she’ll have to get job training or lose all her aid. I’ll have to move out, because aid receivers aren’t allowed to let other adults share their homes. Mom will probably get a smaller place.

That’s too bad. Because just last night, as I was falling asleep on the couch, I heard a mouse, nibbling inside there.

It’s been a good home, really. I had good folks.

This story was written in 1988 as a fortieth birthday present for my husband, Fred.

Since the early 1970s I’d had an agreement with my husband. He didn’t read my fiction. He didn’t read it in draft form or before I sent it out. He didn’t even read it after it had been published. It was a wall we’d put in place after we realized that we simply knew each other too well. I could shrug off criticism from any other reader, but not from him. He was simply too good at putting his finger unerringly on exactly my greatest doubt.

Writing fiction, my friend, is a game of sleight of hand that a writer plays with her- or himself. The writer takes key events, dazzling pains, gasping joys, and unutterable boredom and weaves them into a story that is always, inevitably, about the writer’s own life. The trick is to write it in such a way that the writer does not know he or she is merely holding up a very large and distorted mirror of the writer’s life. It is my opinion that the only way writers can serve up their own steaming entrails on a platter and not know they are offering their own vital essence to the world is by disguising it.

And I was never able to disguise it well enough from Fred. He would read a story, a story that wasn’t about me or us or any time or place we had ever lived, and then he’d say, “Oh, yeah, I remember that day. That was awful, wasn’t it?”

And suddenly I’d see the roots of my own tale. And be unable to even finish polishing the story, let alone put it out there for sale. There were two choices for me. I’d either have to give up being a writer or ask Fred not ever to read anything I wrote. I chose the second alternative, and to this day, he has kept his word. The sole exception is this story, “Silver Lady and the Fortyish Man.” It was written for him, as a gift, and he read it. And had the great good sense to not point out exactly where and how it intersected with my reality.

I do think that every freelance writer reaches a point at which he or she says, “If I quit trying to write fiction and just spent those hours working for someone else for minimum wage, I’d come out dollars ahead.” I know I certainly have, and more than once. In the speckled years of my writing career, I’ve served pizza, pulled beers, delivered the US mail, sold consumer electronics, managed an electronics store, and yes, worked as a salesperson in the ladies’ clothing department of a Sears store. And at times like that, when a writer is not writing, sometimes someone else believing in you is what it takes to put the world back on track.

And thereby hangs a tale . . .

It was about 8:15 P.M. and I was standing near the register in a Sears in a substandard suburban mall the first time the fortyish man came in. There were forty-five more minutes to endure before the store would close and I could go home. The Muzak was playing, and a Ronald McDonald display was waving at me cheerily from the children’s department. I was thinking about how animals in traps chew their legs off. There was a time when I couldn’t understand that type of survival mechanism. Now I could. I was wishing for longer, sharper teeth when the fortyish man came in.

For the last hour or so, salespeople had outnumbered customers in the store. A dead night. I was the only salesperson in Ladies’ Fashions and Lingerie, and I had spent the last two hours straightening dresses on hangers, zipping coats, putting T-shirts in order by size and color, clipping bras on hangers, and making sure all the jeans faced the same way on the racks. Now I was tidying up all the bags and papers under the register counter. Boredom, not dedication. Only boredom can drive someone to be that meticulous, especially for four dollars an hour. One part boredom to two parts despair.

So a customer, any kind of a customer, was a welcome distraction. Even a very ordinary fortyish man. He came straight up to my counter, threading his way through the racks without even a glance at the dresses or sweaters or jeans. He walked straight up to me and said, “I need a silk scarf.”

Believe me, the last thing this man needed was a silk scarf. He was tall, at least six feet, and had reached that stage in his life where he buckled his belt under his belly. His dark hair was thinning, and the way he combed it did nothing to hide the fact. He wore fortyish-man clothing, and I won’t describe it, because if I did you might think there was something about the way he dressed that made me notice him. There wasn’t. He was ordinary in the most common sense of the word, and if it had been a busy night in the store, I’d never even have seen him. So ordinary he’d be invisible. The only remarkable thing about him was that he was a fortyish man in a Sears store on a night when we had stayed open longer than our customers had stayed awake. And that he’d said he needed a silk scarf. Men like him never buy silk scarves, not for any reason.

But he’d said he needed a silk scarf. And that was a double miracle of sorts, the customer knowing what he wanted, and I actually having it. So I put on my sales smile and asked, “Did you have any particular color in mind, sir?”

“Anything,” he said, an edge of impatience in his voice. “As long as it’s silk.”

The scarf rack was right by the register, arranged with compulsive tidiness by me earlier in the shift. Long scarves on the bottom rack, short scarves on the top rack, silk to the left, acrylics to the right, solid colors together in a rainbow spectrum on that row, patterns rioting on that hook, all edges gracefully fluted. Scarves were impulse sales, second sales, “wouldn’t you like a lovely blue scarf to go with that sweater, miss?” sales. No one marched into a Sears store at 8:15 at night and demanded a silk scarf. People who needed silk scarves at 8:15 at night went to boutiques for them, little shops that smelled like perfumes or spices and had no Hamburglars lurking in the aisles. But this fortyish man wouldn’t know that.

So I leaned across the counter and snagged a handful, let my fingers find the silk ones and pull them gently from their hooks. Silk like woven moonlight in my hands, airy scarves in elusive colors. I spread them out like a rainbow on the counter. “One of these, perhaps?” I smiled persuasively.

“Any of them, it doesn’t matter, I just need a piece of silk.” He scarcely glanced at them.

And then I said one of those things I sometimes do, the words falling from my lips with sureness, coming from God knows where, meant to put the customer at ease but always getting me into trouble. “To wrap your tarot cards, undoubtedly.”

Bingo, I’d hit it. He lifted his eyes and stared at me, as if suddenly seeing me as a person and not just a saleswoman in a Sears at night. He didn’t say anything, just looked at me. It was like having crosshairs tattooed on my forehead. In exposing him, I had exposed myself. Something like that. I cleared my throat and decided to back off and get a little more formal.

“Cash or charge?” I asked, twitching a blue one from the slithering heap on the counter, and he handed me a ten and dug for the odd change. I stuffed the scarf in a bag and clipped his receipt on it and that was it. He left, and I spent the rest of my shift making sure that all the coat hangers on the racks were exactly one finger space apart.