Re: Antique Store: Louis/Sparrow
"Fair enough," he said, with a warm smile. He could appreciate a person who felt they needed nothing more than the love of their friends. He was sure she was being humble when she said it wasn't about generosity, but he could understand that sensation. Some of these objects, they cried out for the specific person who would give them the home they deserved and treat them best. Inanimate, surely, but still worthy of respect, as past owners had respected them.
The items on the counter were of that kind but more so, radiating an intense quality of the missing, the incomplete.
But Sparrow was asking him if he could find who they ought to go to. "Of course," he said. The town was small. That wouldn't be an issue.
He did count the bills, picking them up from the counter and dishing them back against it until he came to the total. She had given him over a hundred dollars too much, and he counted it out with change from the till and slid it across back to her. Settled, then.
He wanted to ask questions about the money, and where it came from. But he didn't. He understood that such a large amount of cash couldn't come from too many sources. Even if it sprung from some harmless independent wealth, he'd never heard of a rich girl in clothes decades too old for her on the edge of town. That news would have gotten around, and everyone deserved a little privacy.
He watched her twirl out of the corner of his eye, bemused. She was like someone lost out of a fairy tale book, wondering at things and choosing beautiful objects as gifts to those she felt deserving. But he wasn't quite so naive that he believed it was that simple.
"Not really," he said. "Not yet." That felt a bit ominous, even to him, and he hastened to add, "I haven't been hear long. Perhaps I'll be tired of it one day soon, but I like being around old things. I collected, a little, before I came here. Nothing on this scale, but it gave me an appreciation for the objects other people leave behind, I suppose."
A pause, and, finally, a question. "Do you live in the town? I must say, I've never seen you, and I can't possibly have missed you." It wasn't unkind - she was simply distinctive. There wasn't a chance he wouldn't have noticed her.