Sometimes, Tibor always said, God is trying to tell you something. Gregor figured this must be one of those times. He put his notebook back in his pocket and climbed the short flight of steps to Country Crafts’ front porch. Once he was up on it, he realized that there was one of those ubiquitous driveways running along the side of the building. That meant there had to be a parking lot out back. He stopped on the porch and looked at what was in the windows, which wasn’t much: a doll made out of “pulled” yarn in an old-fashioned dress; a little set of bright blue clay pots; a swath of hard red velvet that seemed to have drifts of dust across its surface. He pushed through the front door and heard a bell tinkle above his head. It sounded like a brass cowbell.
The big front room of the house was empty except for a woman standing behind a counter, chewing on a Mars bar and looking through a copy of Us magazine. She was, Gregor thought, the single fattest human being he had ever seen outside a hospital. If she went on eating Mars bars, she was going to end up in a hospital. He wondered if she made her dresses herself. He couldn’t imagine a store that would sell a size like that. He wondered if she did her hair herself, too. It wasn’t just blond. It was a bright egg-yolk yellow.
The woman looked up from her magazine and said, “Hello, there. Can I help you?”
“I don’t know.” Gregor walked up to the counter. “I’m supposed to be spending the week with a friend. I thought it might be a good idea to take some kind of house gift.”
“And you just thought of that this minute?”
“What?”
The woman put her copy of Us down on the counter. “I said I can’t believe you thought of that just this minute,” she said patiently. “I mean, I’ll help you out if I can, but let’s face it, you’d probably have had a larger selection of house gifts wherever it was you came from.”
“Philadelphia,” Gregor said politely.
She looked him up and down. “Yeah. I figured it had to be at least Philadelphia. You staying here in Hollman?”
“Yes.”
“Anybody who lives in Hollman will have seen everything I’ve got a hundred times and hated all of it. Unless they’re into crafts, of course, and then they come in to buy the material they need. Yarn. Material. Pipe cleaners. Do you smoke a pipe?”
“No. Are you Mrs. Bligh?”
“What?” The woman looked startled. “Oh,” she said finally. “The sign. Yes, I’m Mrs. Bligh. Emma Bligh. Emma Kenyon Bligh, as they put it in the newspaper when they write me up for being on some committee at the high school. Kenyon was my maiden name. Who are you?”
“Somebody who needs a knickknack to present to a friend of mine before I’m unconscionably late arriving.”
The cowbell rang again, and they both looked up at the front door at the woman coming in. To Gregor, she seemed less alarming than Emma Kenyon Bligh—not fat, and with ordinary brownish hair instead of yellow—but there was also something out of key about her, as if, if you scratched the surface, you would get something you didn’t expect to see. The surface was ordinary enough, though. She had on a short-sleeved shirtwaist dress of the kind once favored by the women called in Gregor’s youth “old-maid schoolteachers,” and if it hadn’t been for the thin gold wedding band on the fourth finger of her left hand, that was what Gregor would have thought she was.
“Peggy,” Emma said. “What are you doing downtown so late?”
Peggy looked at her feet. She seemed not only unwilling, but incapable of looking anyone in the eye. “I had to work late. We had chess club. I—” She looked confused.
“Shit,” Emma said, under her breath.
Peggy looked up at the ceiling. There was a fan there, turning slowly, not doing much good. “I had to talk to you,” she said.
“Shit,” Emma said again.
Peggy seemed not to have noticed.
Gregor grabbed the first thing at hand—a little wooden plaque with a ceramic inset with the words “The Kitchen Is the Heart of the Home” printed across the top of it and a poem underneath, probably a bad one. Emma had come out from behind the counter and was moving through the shelves full of inanities toward the front door, where Peggy was still standing almost still, as if she had just come in. Gregor hadn’t realized how many shelves and knickknacks there were. He hadn’t been paying attention. Now the place seemed to be stuffed full of them.
“I’ll just leave you twenty dollars for this,” he said, taking out his wallet.
Emma had reached Peggy and grabbed her by the arm. They were, Gregor realized, the same age. Emma only looked younger at first glance because the heavy folds of fat left her without the kind of wrinkles Peggy had. He had, he was sure, a Peggy in his notebook, but he didn’t want to check it here.