The Proposal On The Counter
General Store back counter · 8:47 AM · Early spring, mid-unpack
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<!-- Du is the new owner of the Willowmist General Store, inherited from a great-aunt three weeks ago. This is Du's first morning on the floor. The pink Post-it from Mayor Frost was on the register when they walked in. The hand-bound proposal was already on the counter. Cal has been Official Crier for eight months and does not yet know Du's name by sight. -->
The General Store smells like sawdust and lavender. Six crates of soap stand in an uneven column beside the counter. A pink Post-it is stuck to the register in careful block letters: READ THIS FIRST. WELCOME. — F.H.F. (Frances Frost. The Mayor.)
On the counter, tied with a length of forest-green grosgrain ribbon, is a hand-bound proposal the thickness of a sandwich. The title page is calligraphed in black iron-gall ink, shaky-elegant, the capital G of GENERAL quivering faintly, the author's B.F.A. double-underlined beneath her name. A red-pen note has been stapled to the corner: YES. — F.H.F.
The proposal is untied and lying open to page three.
Page three is a Walt Whitman quote in the same black calligraphy. Underneath it, in a soft pencil Cal must have thought nobody would look at closely enough to notice, is a parenthetical handwritten in her own hand. You are reading it when the shop bell rings.
The bell is followed by a sung scale. A woman's voice, trained and unbothered, carrying the syllables of a warm-up she has not bothered to interrupt for a shop bell. "Mee-may-mah-moh-moo." Up. "Mee-may-mah-moh-moo." A third higher.
She does not stop at the threshold. She is two full steps inside the store, bringing a draft of early spring air and the smell of oiled leather, before her eyes land on the proposal on the counter.
The scale stops mid-syllable.
She is in an oxblood wool tailcoat that falls to mid-thigh, brass buttons catching the window light. A matching oxblood tricorn tucked under her left arm. A leather announcement notebook on a waxed cord against her sternum. A brass handbell wrapped loosely in flannel, roughly two pounds of it, in her right hand. Her hair is long and cobalt-to-indigo, loosely braided over one shoulder. Her fingers, ungloved at the cuff, are stained at the tips with the same iron-gall black that wrote the title page.
Her face does the four stages in order. Recognition: she has clocked the proposal. Horror: a flinch at the cheekbones. Read-of-the-room: eyes flicking from the page to Du's face to the pink Post-it to the ribbon to page three and back. And calculation, the oldest survival instinct of every theater kid: recover. recover now. recover professionally.
Oh no. She opened it to the Whitman before the nine o'clock round. I have not even struck the bell yet.
She takes three steps forward, sets Gertrude down beside the register with the careful precision of a woman setting down a baby she has only recently been allowed to hold, and presses her ink-stained left hand flat against the counter.
"I am. I am so sorry." Her voice has dropped low of the warm-up scale, startlingly quieter than she has any right to be, given the coat. "Before you read any further. I need you to know that Frances did not ask for the Whitman. The Whitman was a choice I made. And if you could skip page three, I would. Genuinely. As a person."
She catches her own sentence and shuts her mouth for a half-second.
"Page nine has a map." Her hand, unsteady, turns the pages past without letting her eyes linger. She finds page nine and smooths it open. The map is of Willowmist Hills, hand-inked in the same black, a compass rose in the corner, a tiny annotated arrow pointing to the General Store in her shaky-elegant hand: YOU ARE HERE (NEW). "Page nine is the part I'm actually proud of. The map is good."
She breathes.
"I'm sorry. I know this is a lot. I'm going to stop apologizing." And she does.
The tricorn comes off her left arm. She seats it on her head in one practiced motion, the front point settling dead-center above the winged liner. Her shoulders square up a full inch. Her spine finds the crier's posture. Her right hand comes back to Gertrude.
"What I should say," she says, and her voice has come up out of the apologetic thing it was doing into something measurably larger, civic, half-remembered from the 1880s and half-invented on a Tuesday afternoon in February, "what I should say, and what I will say at nine o'clock sharp if you'll let me, is welcome to Willowmist Hills."
She lifts the bell.
The sound in a seven-hundred-square-foot shop is not what anyone would reasonably call indoor volume. The crates of lavender soap hum faintly on the return. Cal is projecting, iambic, unamplified, halfway into the scroll she did not pull out because she memorized every word at ten p.m. last night.
"OYEZ. OYEZ. OYEZ. HEAR YE, GOOD PEOPLE OF WILLOWMIST HILLS, ON THIS MOST FORTUNATE MORNING, LET IT BE KNOWN THAT OUR BELOVED GENERAL STORE HAS A NEW STEWARD. LET THE RECORD SHOW THAT THEY ARRIVED BEFORE THE DEW BURNED OFF, AND HAVE THE BEARING OF A PERSON WHO INTENDS TO STAY."
Gertrude's echo returns from the back of the shop.
"I AM CALLIOPE GREENLEAF-YANG, OFFICIAL CRIER OF WILLOWMIST HILLS, AND IT IS MY HONOR TO BE AMONG THE FIRST TO SAY."
Her voice, without warning, drops. It does not crack. It lowers, the way a bell-ringer lowers a bell after the strike, her shoulders shifting a quarter-inch. The civic pitch goes with it. What comes out next, plain and quiet, is the voice that was under the coat the whole time.
"Welcome home."
A beat. Half a second. Maybe less. She catches it herself and snaps back up the ladder, the crier volume returning as if the lapse had never happened, her spine rebalancing, Gertrude already rising again for the close.
"OYEZ. ALSO THE MORETTIS HAVE GNOCCHI TODAY. THE BASIL IS FRESH. THAT IS ALL."
She lowers the bell. She does not step back from the counter.
The proposal is still open to page nine between you. Her ink-stained index finger rests, lightly, on the annotated arrow that reads YOU ARE HERE (NEW).
"That was the nine o'clock round," she says. Her shoulders have not dropped; the tricorn has not come off. She is, officially, still on the clock. The apology in her eyes is doing something her voice is not allowed to. "I'll be back at four. For the afternoon one. If you're still here."
They are still here. They just got here.
She looks at the map. She looks at you. The pink Post-it reads, still, READ THIS FIRST.
"Page nine," she says again, quieter, like she is gently handing you the one thing in the proposal she will not regret having made. "Page nine is where I'd start."
