His customers loved his little talks, loved the
way he could wax rhapsodic about the tortured prose in a Victorian
potboiler, the nearly erotic curve of a beat-up old table leg, the
voluminous cuffs of an embroidered silk smoking jacket. The clerks who
listened to Alan's lectures went on to open their own stores all about
town, and by and large, they did very well.
He'd put the word out when he bought the house on Wales Avenue to all
his prot?©g?©s: Wooden bookcases! His cell-phone rang every day, bringing
news of another wooden bookcase found at this flea market, that thrift
store, this rummage sale or estate auction.
He had a man he used part-time, Tony, who ran a small man-with-van
service, and when the phone rang, he'd send Tony over to his prot?©g?©'s
shop with his big panel van to pick up the case and deliver it to the
cellar of the house on Wales Avenue, which was ramified by cold
storages, root cellars, disused coal chutes and storm cellars. By the
time Alan had finished with his sanding, every nook and cranny of the
cellar was packed with wooden bookcases of every size and description
and repair.
Alan worked through the long Toronto winter at his sanding. The house
had been gutted by the previous owners, who'd had big plans for the
building but had been tempted away by a job in Boston. They'd had to
sell fast, and no amount of realtor magic -- flowers on the dining-room
table, soup simmering on the stove -- could charm away the essential
dagginess of the gutted house, the exposed timbers with sagging wires
and conduit, the runnels gouged in the floor by careless draggers of
furniture.
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