Chapter 78: making up minds and making it last us

Saturday is the shelf.

That's as far as he goes. That's as much as he determines ahead of time. The night before, he gets home on the ass end of one and he fumbles off his clothes and collapses into bed and sleeps more heavily than he has all week. He's not shaken. Neither is exhaustion the right term for what sends him down and keeps him there. If someone made him look for the words he would scramble and come up with some but they wouldn't even come close to the mark, for all his skilled aim in other respects.

Something happened out there. And he came home. Those seem to be the only important details. Whatever else it meant, it's over and he's here. If he was on a ledge, he came off it again.

He wakes up around six-thirty and heads back out to the farm. It's mostly playing catch-up, nothing huge or too strenuous, and the fact that he's more tired than usual makes little in the way of difference. Beth is there helping, but Daryl's in the fields, away from the house, and doesn't see much of her. Which is fine. He passes, sees her at a distance coming from the barn, waves. She waves back, and that makes him feel pretty goddamn good and carries him through until he's done, shortly after noon. By then she's gone out with friends, and his time is entirely his own.

So. Shelf.

Where the fuck does one go for that?

Driving back toward town, he contemplates Walmart for about half a second before shoving the idea away. Same with Target; not all big box stores are created in a single equally miserable image but all of them fall short of easily bearable.

And anyway, it doesn't feel right. Everything he's done to and in this place - his place - has been guided by instinct he doesn't understand and doesn't want to. Once again, the risk of watching his feet too closely.

Paying attention, he's learning, isn't always something you try to do. Sometimes it involves the exact opposite.

Let go.

So he just drives, half an idle eye on the tall, puffy clouds drifting by overhead and the wheeling, darker murmurations of starlings. And when he hits the turnoff for the center of town he keeps moving - not out and away, as if he was heading to points beyond, but swinging wide and southwest along the outskirts, where he's less familiar with everything. He's lived here for coming on four months now but there are still significant parts of this place that he doesn't know. Not well.

The edges of town nearer the farm are sparse and the higher end of poor, narrow manufactured houses with patchy walls and roofs and trailers in even worse shape, crooked rusting mailboxes, scrubby yards with chain link fences and broken toys scattered in cracked driveways.

Familiar.

This is the opposite end of town, and while it's still sparse it's clearly doing better. The houses aren't lavish but they're in good shape and the lawns are wide and mostly well-kept. Lots of minivans and small SUVs, and what scattered toys he sees don't look as if they've been through about ten generations before their current owners. A couple of kids biking down the street; the bikes look new. Families were living out on the other side; there are families here too, and he gathers they're younger ones. Starter families in starter homes. He's never made any conscious study of real estate, never taken time to pick up on this stuff, but there are patterns, patterns in everything, signs to read everywhere, and at some point you stop needing to try to notice things. It requires no more conscious effort than breathing. You just do.

He feels - and is sure he looks - intensely out of place here. Which he also barely notices anymore, unless it spikes, and this is well within comfortable limits.

Driving down a long, curving arc of a street - houses on one side and a stretch of open land on the other - he still isn't sure what he's looking for. So he isn't. When he finds it he'll know.

And about ten minutes later, down a street further in where the buildings rest a little closer together and the houses are interspersed with a bike shop and a tiny, low concrete place that purports to do both manicures and palm readings, he finds it.

At first he doesn't know what he's found. He just knows that he's found something. He pulls over across the narrow street and looks at it.

It's small - not as small as the manicure/fortune-telling place but still small. It's a brick building on a corner adjacent to another house - also small, porch roof doing a bit of leaning and light blue siding getting dingy. It may or may not be connected to the building; hard to tell. Low roof, single big front window, and the window is packed with stuff.

It's difficult to tell what exactly this place sells, though it does look as if it sells something. Patchy lettering on the window seems to back that up.

ANTIQUES
VINTAGE
CLOTHES BOOKS FURNISHINGS

The window is full of all three. Whether they're antiques or not, Daryl has no idea and has no idea how anyone would have any idea, but sure, they could be. A dress covered in purple and blue sequins hanging off a dressmaker's dummy, a stack of paperbacks the spines of which he can't read, a dark wooden dining chair, a box overflowing with what appears to be extremely gaudy costume jewelry. An ugly painting of a cat in a green boat with an owl.

According to whatever bizarre dream-logic governs his life right now - if he goes nuts for a minute and grants some kind of authorial intelligence behind everything - it's so fucking weird, there's no way he wasn't supposed to find it.

He gets out of the truck and walks across the street and opens the plate glass door. A bell jingles and the door shuts silently behind him when he releases it, and he stands there in relative dimness and waits for his eyes to adjust.

His first impression is that the space he's entered is somehow larger than it should be, going by its external appearance. His second impression is that if the window was packed with stuff, the space itself is jammed full of it to the point where movement through it is difficult at best. It smells like the back of an ancient closet, all dust and old mildew and gently decaying paper and mothballs that have been lying in place for so long they've just about fossilized. It's full of rows of shelves, all pressing against the ceiling and almost obscuring the already inadequate overhead lighting. The shelves themselves are stocked according to no ordered plan Daryl can see. More books - in stacks again rather than arranged in lines with spines facing out - paperbacks but also hardbacks, some of which, to his eyes, look very antique indeed. Jumbles of random junk: cheap little figurines of dancers and angels and teddy bears, souvenir vacation glasses, snow globes, brass candle holders. More clothes far to the right, hung on a long rack which is bowing dangerously in the middle - sequins and silk which may or may not be real, velour, lots and lots of beads, colors which have no business showing up together. Another chair is hanging inexplicably from the ceiling. Fixed to the wall, he can just see the tip of what's probably a small kayak.

He blinks a little.

His childhood house - both of them - was full of junk. Ugly junk, useless, most of it broken, a lot of it boasting bullet holes like it went through a war. Some of it bought by his father - a disturbing remote control shaped like a headless limbless woman's torso with buttons for nipples, a bra bucket-thing used for an enormous ashtray, a huge plastic beer stein emblazoned with STAY DRUNK NO HANGOVER, a Confederate flag with crossed rifles and cigarette burns scattered across it. He alternately hated and ignored it all, because it was his father, outward manifestations of Will Dixon's sensibilities, but there were other things. Little things brought in by his mother. Little figurines not unlike the ones on those shelves, a plastic vase made to look like stained glass in which she unsuccessfully tried to grow a succession of plants, a chipped decorative plate - with a wolf on it, he suddenly remembers. A howling wolf backlit by an enormous moon. All just as cheap, but he later understood what it was: she was trying to fight back. In her way. Almost everything she acquired was broken already or got broken later one way or another, but she kept fighting. She was fighting right up until the end. Exerting any kind of control she could find, any way she could manage.

She got hit. She had her share of bruises. But whatever impression the neighbors might have gleaned, the truth is that for the most part the beatings Will Dixon visited on her weren't physical. Those were reserved for his sons.

She wanted beauty. Little beauties, existing only for themselves. They were never allowed to survive. So those were the things Daryl always loved.

Didn't really know it, but he did.

Now he looks at all this junk and he takes a breath.

"Anyone here?"

Silence, except for the almost inaudible creaking of things struggling to support the weight of other things. Cautiously, he moves forward and down one of the cramped aisles past a wildly varied selection of doorknobs and a pile of faded silk flowers. The back of the place isn't visible, at least not clearly; he's beginning to wonder if there is one, if he's wandered into yet another tangent universe entirely full of the contents of people's basements and attics, when there's a crash in the distance and a string of loud cursing, and the sound of things scattering themselves across the stained linoleum.

Well, it's something to follow. Noise is bouncing confusingly around but he's pretty sure it came from somewhere to his left, and he exits the aisle, turns in that direction - and there's a man standing on a low step-stool, arms up and spread, desperately attempting to keep a tower of unlabeled VHS tapes from collapsing onto him. On the floor all around him are about five hundred buttons, all different and all large and a lot of them glittery. A tin tipped on its side against the wall indicates where they came from.

"Oh, God." The man sounds vaguely, calmly panicked. "You... I'm sorry, can you help me? I don't want to die in here."

Daryl takes a few seconds to survey the situation, hurries forward and reaches up to match the man's hold. It's awkward, and a few tapes fall and narrowly miss their heads, but together they manage to push most of the stack back into place. It's unsteady, wobbling, and the man eyes it dubiously as he backs away.

"Jesus, thank you." He faces Daryl, dusting his hands off on his shirt. He's youngish, wavy brown hair, covered enough in dust that trying to remove it from his hands is mostly pointless. "That was stupid. You know that thing where you know something's stupid as you're doing it and you do it anyway?" He nods at the shelf. "That was that thing. Tapes have sharp corners." He exhales heavily. Daryl watches him, bemused. "Anyway. Hi. Sorry, I didn't hear you come in. I was in the back."

Daryl glances behind him and to the left. "This ain't the back?"

The man laughs a little hollowly. "Oh, no. God, no. No, this goes back a ways."

"All like this?"

"Yeah. We didn't..." He trails off for a few seconds and wipes at his forehead, succeeding only in smearing more dust around. "Believe it or not I didn't notice that before I bought this place. We. Me and my... my partner." He turns and starts back toward the front.

Daryl, still bemused and not sure what else to do, follows. "You just got it?"

The man nods over his shoulder. "Last week. Came with everything you see. Been trying to get it in some kind of order since then, but it's... There's a lot. Somehow didn't seem like a lot before. Maybe because it was so cheap." He sighs and mutters under his breath. "Let's buy an antique store, he said. It'll be fun, he said."

It's been getting steadily brighter as they approach the window, and just before they reach it a counter with a cash register comes into view. It, like almost everything else, is half buried under other things. The cash register looks it might be deeply confused by the concept of credit cards. It looks like it should be in a home for cash registers. It doesn't look happy about being there.

The man stops, lays a hand on the counter and adopts a kind of businesslike affect. It doesn't entirely work for him. Daryl's bemusement begins to slide over into amusement.

He's not sure and it's really too early to tell, but he doesn't think he dislikes this person.

"So. I guess we're open. Can I help you with something?"

"Yeah." Okay. Sure. Why the fuck not? This is already odd and was from the beginning, and he sees no harm in making it odder. "I'm... Guess I'm lookin' for a shelf. Or somethin'," he adds, because maybe he shouldn't get too specific.

The man takes a couple of seconds to process that. "Okay. I mean... Yeah. Probably something like that's in here." He glances around. "Anything might be. Are you okay with hunting?"

Daryl shrugs. "Ain't got nowhere to be."

"Okay." The man nods, as if something's been decided, and sticks out a hand. "I'm Aaron, by the way."

Daryl looks down at it, takes it, shakes. "Daryl."

"Daryl." The man gives him a faint smile. Faint, but genuine. Very. It looks nothing like Beth's - there's nothing about Aaron that is at all like Beth in any sense of appearance - but somehow it reminds him of Beth all the same. "All right. Let's see if we can find you a shelf."

There could be anything in there. There really seems to be just about everything in there. Except a shelf, and in the third aisle they make their way down - it took Daryl two aisles to realize that he doesn't know and can't seem to tell how many there actually are - Aaron sidesteps a thick bouquet of peacock feathers in an umbrella stand and half turns.

"What kind of shelf?"

Daryl shrugs again, hands in his pockets. Carol hadn't specified that, and his brain hasn't done any specifying of its own. "I dunno. Any kind."

"What do you need it for?"

This isn't a line of questioning he anticipated, and he's not sure what to do with it. "I don't... Don't need it for anythin'."

Aaron arches a brow, looks both thoughtful and uncertain. "Why do you want one, then?"

Somehow Daryl's not yet aggravated, but he can see how he might get there - and as much at himself as at Aaron. He didn't come prepared. He still doesn't know how to do things. "To put shit on."

Aaron makes a turn, looks up and to the right and scans a case full of ornate gold-painted clocks. "What kind of shit do you have?"

He can answer this much, at least. Though saying it... It feels like revealing something personal. Not easy to say to a stranger, even one he's now certain he doesn't dislike. "Got a book. Got a crystal wolf."

"Like a figurine?"

"Yeah."

"That's all?"

"So far."

"All right." Aaron sounds slightly pleased. "That's helpful. Nothing big, then. A wall shelf, maybe." He chews meditatively at his lip and starts forward again. They're suddenly flanked on both sides by wigs on faceless heads. It's creepy. "Doesn't help find one, but yeah."

This could have been an easier process. Much. There are plenty of stores around that probably could have sold Daryl what he needs, and probably within about ten minutes at the most. He could extricate himself, leave, go do that, go home. He's still not exhausted, but he's tired, and he knows that if he lay down he'd be asleep in a couple of minutes.

But he doesn't want to. Creepy wig heads aside, there's nothing about this place that's putting him in any real hurry to get out of it.

He lifts aside a dangling collection of beads, so numerous that they almost form half a curtain. They seem to be coming into a part of the shop that features more in the way of furnishings and furnishing-like stuff, and Aaron is scanning the shelves with fresh and thoughtful care. "You gonna keep it pretty much like this?"

"You know, we're actually not sure yet." Aaron nudges a child-sized rocking chair further back under the shelf where it seems to live. "Eric likes it this way. I'm not sure how we're ever supposed to-" He gestures in the general direction of everything. "-find anything if we do." He glances back, smiling a bit crookedly. "You're the first person who's come in here, actually. And looking for something specific."

Daryl rolls a shoulder. Not that specific. To him it still feels extremely vague.

But then he looks up and to his left and he's found it.

He halts, touches Aaron's shoulder. "Whoa, hold up."

They've reached the part of the room with the kayak - it is indeed a kayak, all flaking and pitted and possibly not very effective as a kayak anymore - hanging high on the wall. Just below it is a bewildering assortment of decorative fixtures: more sconces, wood carvings, masks - and shelves. Three, not huge; none of them longer than two feet, all featuring three actual shelves fitted into a frame. Two of them are unfinished pale wood, and look like the kind of thing someone might buy to customize. But the third one isn't.

The third one is as simple as the others. There's nothing special about it. Except there is, and Daryl needs to see it for less than the time it takes to blink to know it.

Someone already finished it. It's dark brown, almost black, and glossy even under the thin layer of dust that covers everything. Looking at it, he can already feel the cool smoothness sliding under the pad of his finger.

So he reaches up - fascinated - and he does exactly that. Runs a fingertip along the bottom shelf and watches the darker stripe it leaves in its wake as he wipes the dust away.

It's a dark space. Not bad. Not a box of darkness - or if it is, it's beautiful because it might be filled. And it's beautiful in and of itself.

"You like it?"

Daryl starts slightly, drops his hand and shoots Aaron a glance that's almost more of a twitch. He feels... Not exposed, exactly. Not like he's been seen doing something he would have rather kept private. But something did just happen, and Aaron saw it, and Daryl can tell in the way those three words are said. They aren't a question. And when he registers the look on Aaron's face, that's all the confirmation he needs. Little smile. Warm. It reaches all the way to Aaron's eyes. Puzzlement, too; Aaron doesn't entirely get it. But he's okay with not getting it.

This is a guy who knows what a good thing looks like. All at once Daryl doesn't need to know him to know it.

He clears his throat. "Yeah. It's... I do."

"All right." Aaron looks at him in silence for a moment or two, the smile and the bemusement still present, but somehow it's now difficult to completely read his expression. Except that he seems to be thinking. Then he nods up at the shelf. "Take it."

Daryl looks at the shelf, looks back at Aaron. Take it. Like... Lift the thing down off the wall? "How much?"

Aaron waves a dismissive hand. "Don't worry about it."

"You can't-" But he has money. He can pay. He wants to. "I got cash on me."

"I'm sure you do. I said don't worry about it." Aaron's smile grows by a few increments. "You saved my life. We'll call it even."

Daryl arches a brow. "Ain't exactly even."

"You'd be doing me a favor, then. You get it out of here, it's one less thing I have to worry about. Seriously." And he is serious. Very. Under that smile there's a deep reservoir of clear honesty, and again Daryl finds himself thinking of Beth. "Take it."

Somewhere in the unpleasant recesses of those long years of ugly conditioning, Merle mutters something about not takin' no one's handout and just for the briefest of second-fragments Daryl's gut twists. But that's a lie. And that version of Merle is a lie, or at the very least it isn't the full story where Merle is concerned. Daryl knows that now. He knows a lot of things.

He's not stupid. He knows this isn't the kind of thing you say no to.

You don't say no to a gift.

He rolls a shoulder. One of the things Beth has taught him, made piercingly clear, is that there are good people and they aren't even few and far between. There might be a lot of them. "Alright." He pauses, returns that little smile with one of his own. "Thanks."

Aaron dips his head. "I just can't believe we actually found one. Honestly."

But Daryl is already moving on to something else, shifting his attention back to the shelf and its rich color and its space. Okay, he's taking a free shelf. But there's another part to this, something that follows the acquisition of that space, and this doesn't seem like a poor chance to address that question.

"Gotta put somethin' on it," he murmurs. "Just got the two things."

Aaron is sharp. He can tell that too. Someone who might pick up on a hint. Sure enough, the answer comes and it's exactly what he thought it would be.

"Well. If you want things..." Aaron spreads his hands expansively and his smile turns a touch dry. "I think I might be able to help you out with that."

He's half expecting Aaron to keep trailing him, but Aaron tips his head toward what he's mysteriously termed the back and says he should return there, keep sorting through some boxes, and leaves Daryl alone to browse. Which is nice, even preferable; he hadn't at all resented Aaron's help or his company, but this feels like something it might be better to do on his own.

He nods, turns, and begins to make his way back down the aisle toward the front, gaze drifting idly over the shelves without really focusing on much of anything.

Shapes glide past. More figurines, little glass sculptures of fairies that actually don't look cheap at all, a pile of mismatched plates, a pile of equally mismatched teacups. A case of chunky rings. A chess set made of unfamiliar green stone, polished until it almost glows and veined in white - similar to marble. A rack of tiny and extremely intricate wind chimes ornamented in what looks like bone cradled in spirals of copper.

All pretty. All of them look like they could mean something to someone. Did, maybe, assuming someone had them before now, and as his attention passes them he realizes that each one of these things has a story attached to it. Probably nothing terribly interesting, but maybe. Sure, maybe. And it's all someone. All people.

This isn't only one story. There's a lot more going on.

This takes him out of it for a bit. He keeps wandering, keeps looking, but his mind is also wandering, floating, leaving clarity behind for close to pure abstraction. It's nice, it feels good in ways he can't define, and without noticing it he ends up back in the aisle with the shelf containing all the old books - many old. Not all. But books, and even though the shelf itself isn't all that large, he can't shake the feeling that he's seeing more of them packed into one space than he ever has in his life.

His attention snaps back in and he looks at them - at the spines, not just at the titles. Some of them don't have titles at all. But each one of them has a texture, frayed cloth and torn paper, mass-market paperbacks run through with white lines from opening and reopening. He can practically feel it without touching them, and then something makes him do just that, running his fingertips along them the way he touched the shelf. Slow. Careful. Taking in the input.

In the ruins, in the sun, he reached out and laid his hand on warm stone. Felt the roughness, the pebbled texture. Could almost feel the sharp pinpricks of reflected light from the flecks of mica.

He touched it and it felt real. Something - a feeling, an experience - that he could possess.

He could have any one of these books. He could have them all. He could have anything in here, and the experience of the things. No one is stopping him. No one is telling him it's a bad idea, or it's stupid, or it's a waste of his time.

A waste of his time would be turning away from this. Walking out.

He reaches out and - at random - plucks one of the beat-up hardbacks off the shelf level with his chest. Turns it over and looks at it. There's nothing on the cover but the title - deep red letters printed into gray fabric.

ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND

He knows it exists. He knows it was a Disney movie. He knows there's a girl, a white rabbit, and a cat. That's about the extent of it.

He flips it open to a random page and scans down the lines.

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
'"I don't much care where-" said Alice.
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.
"-so long as I get somewhere," Alice added as an explanation.
"Oh, you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."

He snaps it closed and tucks it under his arm.

He's about to move on, already drifting again - something about this place seems to be doing that to him, the dimness or the smell or simply the bewildering chaos of it all - when another spine reaches out and grabs his sleeve and gives it a sharp tug. Before he realizes he's doing it, he's pulling it off the shelf. Doesn't even bother to look through it.

He knows he doesn't have to.

There's a little more wandering, a little more looking, but - and as usual he has no fucking idea where the certainty is coming from or what it means - he senses that he's finished here. At least for now. It might be his imagination, because the whole fucking thing might be his imagination, but he doesn't feel like he's done with this place. Not quite yet.

For now he has what he needs.

He makes his confused and confusing way through the maze of shelves toward the back and meets Aaron on his way from it. Aaron gives the books a cursory glance, sets a price of five dollars for the two, and insists on putting them into a plastic grocery bag while Daryl goes back to get the shelf off the wall.

Daryl's feelings regarding Aaron are definitely warming beyond the point of doesn't dislike.

He's still not entirely used to liking people. It feels weird.

"Thanks for coming in." Aaron comes with him to get the door, even though Daryl doesn't need it - again, he's not inclined to argue, and it seems to be making Aaron quietly happy. "Not just because of the tapes. Kind of..." He steps out onto the sidewalk and back, lets the door fall closed with a quiet jingle and blinks in the afternoon sunlight. "It feels real now. Having this place. Know what I mean?"

Daryl nods. He does.

He knows it exactly.

He stops off at the tiny hardware store on Main for some nails and a hammer. It's dusk by the time he gets home.

Everything feels strange. Everything already felt strange, did long before he ever walked into that store, but the quality of the strangeness has shifted yet again, and the low light through which he moves seems to be semi-solid, almost like a very thin mist. It moves, swirls, as if his passage is disturbing it in some subtle ways.

He's turning to walk around the house to the stairs when a pale shape moves in the shadows of the porch. He stops, the shelf under one arm and bags hanging from his wrist, and looks; it's Carol on the swing.

She lifts her hand in a wave. He doesn't have any free hands to wave back with, but he nods at her, trusts she'll be able to see it.

And then he stays put. He's aware that he's considering something, and he's considering it on a level quite separate from the part of his brain that usually takes care of making decisions.

He waits for it to get done with whatever it's doing. When it relays instructions back up to him, he walks back to the porch steps, looks up at her. He can make out her expression now, and she's smiling the tiniest bit, but she also appears slightly puzzled.

Well, he's about to puzzle her more.

"You like rabbits?"

She doesn't answer immediately. Just looks more puzzled. This is expected, so he adds, "Y'know. To cook."

"Oh." Her brow furrows. "I... I never tried."

"They're real good fried." He pauses again, gives her a smile. Faint, but he means it. Means it completely. He has a number of reasons for this, some of which he now knows and some of which he only suspects, but primary among them is simply that he can do pretty much whatever he wants, and he wants to spend some more time with her.

And he owes her.

"I'll get you some rabbits. Tomorrow."

"All right." Bemused, every bit as much as he's been at any point today, but she's smiling again too. "That'd be nice." She lifts her chin at the shelf under his arm. "You got one."

"Yeah. I did."

"Have anything else to put on it yet?"

"Got a couple things." His smile widens. Not very much, but it does. He's feeling good. He's feeling really, really good. "Like you said. Goin' from there."

He doesn't put the shelf by the bed. He's made his camp, established it as a space with a certain function, but he can't stay there forever. It's time to start spreading out.

He puts it across the room, directly opposite the bed. He does it carefully and with a good deal of attention to height, to how level it is. He looks at it from several angles. It's important to get this right.

It's another step. It's moving.

When he's sure, he takes out the books, picks up House of Light, picks up the wolf. He's careful with this too, but less so. This can be done more by feel. If some ways of paying attention involve almost a kind of lack of it, this is one of those. If he looks directly at it, thinks about it too much, he'll fuck it up.

They all go on the same shelf. He places them where it seems like they should go, then pauses with the last of the three books in his hand, fallen open.

What we know: we are more
than blood - we are more
than our hunger and yet
we belong
to the moon and when the ponds
open, when the burning
begins the most
thoughtful among us dreams
of hurrying down
into the black petals
into the fire,
into the night where time lies shattered
into the body of another.

He puts the book on the shelf with the others. He goes back to his base camp and switches off the lamp. For a while he stands by the window and looks out at the last of the light as it fades from the sky.

He's not sure why he does this. He just does.

He's not sure what he's feeling. He just is.

Note: Poem is "Blossom" by Mary Oliver.