Pat owed his daddy from back when and gave him work when he needed it. “Sure,” Carney said, waiting for the kicker. Usually when someone mentioned his father it was a prelude to a disreputable story. I saw two policemen haul him away outside Finian’s or He was beating this sucker with the lid of a garbage can. Then he had to figure what to make his face look like.
But she didn’t share any shabby anecdote. “It closed down a few years ago,” Ruby said.
They did a deal for the couch and the matching armchair.
“How about that radio?” she asked. It was next to a small bookcase. Hazel Brown had kept a bunch of artificial flowers in a red vase on top of it.
“I’ll have to pass on the radio,” he said. He paid the super some bucks to help him carry the sofa down to the truck, he’d send Rusty tomorrow for the armchair. Sixty-four steps.
* * *
*
Carney’s Furniture had been a furniture store before he took over the lease, and a furniture store before that. In sticking around for five years, Carney had outlasted Larry Early, a repellent personality ill-suited for retail, and Gabe Newman, who lit out in the dead of the night, leaving behind a clutch of fuming creditors, his family, two girlfriends, and a basset hound. A superstitious sort might have deemed the location cursed in regards to home goods. The property wasn’t much to look at, but it might make a man his fortune. Carney took the previous tenants’ busted schemes and failed dreams as a kind of fertilizer that helped his own ambitions prosper, the same way a fallen oak in its decomposition nourishes the acorn.
The rent was reasonable for 125th Street, the store well-situated.
Rusty had the two big fans going on account of the June heat. He had a tiresome habit of comparing the weather in New York City to that of his native Georgia, in his stories a land of monstrous rainfall and punishing heat. “This is nothing.” Rusty maintained a small-town sense of time in all things, devoid of urgency. Although not a natural salesman, during his two years in the store he had cultivated a brand of bumpkin charisma that appealed to a subset of Carney’s customers. Rusty’s newly conked hair, red and lush—courtesy of Charlie’s on Lenox—gave him a new confidence that contributed to an uptick in commissions.
Conk or no conk, nothing was happening in the store that Monday. “Not a single soul,” Rusty said as they carried Hazel Brown’s sofa to the gently used section, his voice a lament, which Carney found endearing. Rusty reacted to routine sales patterns like a farmer scanning the skies for thunderheads.
“It’s hot,” Carney said. “People have more things on their mind.” They gave the Heywood-Wakefield prime placement. The gently used section occupied twenty percent of the showroom floor—Carney calculated to the inch—up from ten percent last year. It had been a slow creep for the used merchandise, once Carney noticed its pull on the bargain hunters, the payday strollers, the just-walking-by types who wandered in. The new goods were top-notch, he was an authorized dealer for Argent and Collins-Hathaway, but the secondhand stuff had durable appeal. It was hard to pass up a deal when faced with choosing a warehouse delivery or walking out that day with a wingback lounge chair. Carney’s careful eye meant they were getting nice furniture, and he took the same care with the secondhand lamps, electronics, and rugs.
Carney liked to walk his showroom before opening. That half hour of morning light pouring through the big windows, over the bank across the street. He shifted a couch so it wasn’t up against the wall, straightened a sale sign, made neat a display of manufacturer brochures. His black shoes tapped on wood, were silenced by the plush give of an area rug, resumed their sound. He had a theory about mirrors and their ability to reflect attention to different quadrants of the store; he tested it on his inspection. Then he opened the shop to Harlem. It was all his, his unlikely kingdom, scrabbled together by his wits and industry. His name out front on the sign so everyone knew, even if the burned-out bulbs made it look so lonesome at night.
After checking the basement to make sure Rusty had put the TVs where he’d asked, he retreated to his office. Carney liked to keep up a professional appearance, wear a jacket, but it was too hot. He wore a white short-sleeve shirt, sharkskin tie tucked between the middle buttons. He stuck it in there when he packed the radios so it wouldn’t be in the way.
He ran the day’s numbers at his desk: down what he’d paid for the radios years before, down the money for the TVs and the Brown lady’s furniture. Cash on hand was not heartening, if the heat kept up and the customers stayed away.