Chapter 6: The Cellar
That morning Clare returned the helmet to the safety deposit box, and the rest of the week after the Memorial Day weekend excitements was devoted to making The Cellar ready. Clare ordered display cabinets from Sears. One of the many bonuses of being able to order from all the old Sears catalogues was that her orders were delivered quickly, within a couple of days. All things considered, Clare was surprised everything didn’t just appear in front of her the instant she filled in the order forms.
After Aunt Del died, her checks were confiscated and her bank account frozen, but Clare found that she was able to resume ordering from the Sears catalogues with her own checks. This was as inexplicable as the fact of the live catalogues. She knew it had something to do with Jackson, but he wasn’t talking.
By Thursday, the basement was painted, the floors polished, and the display cases delivered and in place.
Clare told Jackson what was going on with The Cellar, and explained that it wouldn’t interfere with the Sears shop.
“I have some things left from my flea market days to start off with, and the deputy gave me an old glass bottle he wants to sell.”
Jackson raised an eyebrow at the mention of the deputy, or was it the bottle? Just one eyebrow.
“I expect everyone around here will appreciate this.”
“Maybe.”
“Probably not as much as the Sears houses, though.”
The greatest Rag and Bone success was the Sears house kits, and if Clare could have ordered plots of land from Sears catalogues, she could have sold millions of acres.
“And I’ve got an interesting antique helmet I want to show you. It’s in the bank vault right now though. Maybe you might have an idea about what it is or where it came from?”
Jackson didn’t answer, and drove away.
She got to work arranging her old flea market stock in the cabinets. She hadn’t had a particular specialty when she worked the Hartville flea market. Some dealers just sold jewelry, or military items, or books and magazines, or household linens, or Depression glass, or tools; or they might pick an era. Clare bought things she liked, that she thought someone would buy, and that didn’t cost a lot because she never had much cash flow. Also, she didn’t buy anything very large and heavy, because of her daily unpacking and packing. Thus stocking the display cases wasn’t a hard job. But the huge area still looked pretty bare. Whereas before she’d had a few tables under a canopy, now she had many square feet to work in, and not much stuff. Time to tap into the locals.
She foresaw that many people would want to treat The Cellar as a sort of permanent yard sale and bring in things she didn’t want to carry, so she’d have to screen everything. Or as a pawn shop, where they could borrow cash. It would be too hard to draw up a list of what she would and wouldn’t put in the store because she’d forget things, and there would always be exceptions. She’d have to go on an item by item basis, which was how she’d worked before anyway. Eventually everyone would get an idea of the kinds of things that would fit in The Cellar.
The little bottle Clench had brought her went into the top shelf of the center glass-topped case, sitting on a doily. She marked it $5, which was more than she would pay for it, but plenty of her customers would pay that, and Clench deserved it for sparking the idea for The Cellar.
She set about writing a flyer for the window advertising The Cellar and encouraging everyone to bring in their old things for consideration. She still wasn’t sure whether or not to buy things outright or hold them on consignment, and sat down to work some numbers.
It would be a good idea to put an ad in the local paper too. She walked down the street to the Greenline Week newspaper building and placed a small display ad, and bought the weekly paper at the same time. The lead story was about the Memorial Day parade, picnic, and so on, and the front page carried a photo of Clare in the flaming helmet, with the caption, Clare Bower sets the parade on fire. The story was larded with similar zingers: Memorial Day a blazing success, It was a hot time in the old town, and so on. The punning allusions were to the high temperatures on Monday as well as to the candles in the helmet. Clare wondered if schools of journalism now offered required courses in lame puns as graduation requirements.
At least they got her name right, though she really didn’t care about that, only about the name of her store. They got that right too, and fortunately didn’t allude to fire when mentioning The Rag and Bone Shop.
The enterprising owners of the little newspaper also owned the town’s copy shop, so Clare had a few simple flyers made up to tell people about The Cellar:
Too good for a yard sale? Bring it to
THE CELLAR
under THE RAG AND BONE SHOP
Now buying and selling your old stuff.
Clare realized that somewhere, someone would read “Too good for a yard sale?” as a personal insult, as in, “Do you think you are too good for a yard sale”, but whether the answer was yes or no, that person might come into the store anyway. There was no end to the ways in which people could choose to feel offended. She thought it might be a good idea to aggressively insult touchy people, like the guy in Crocodile Dundee confronted with knife-wielding thugs: “You call that a knife? This is a knife!” (“You think that was an insult? I’ll give you an insult!”) Maybe she could cultivate a persona of insult. Become a town “character”. Pre-emptive insults. Which naturally led her to an image of herself with a shoulder holster and a knife in her boot. She’d have to get some cool boots. Fancy cowboy boots. And take that concealed carry class. Then no insults would be necessary.
After taping up flyers on the front windows, Clare took a look around The Cellar to see what else she could do until people started bringing in their things. She sang to herself to the tune of the old hymn “Bringing in the Sheaves”, “Bringing in the things, bringing in the things, We shall come rejoicing bringing in the things.”
There was a lot of bare wall space. Eventually maybe she’d have pictures to hang, for sale, but meanwhile …. She remembered the boxes of old Life magazines from the flea market stock. She’d found them in an abandoned house, otherwise empty, and gave them to friends of hers who opened a small restaurant in Riley. She suggested they name the place The Life of Riley and frame the magazine covers to hang on the wall, and then she designed menus for them that looked like old Life magazines. Unfortunately the restaurant closed when their partners, a married couple, split and stopped working all of a sudden. Clare was able to retrieve the now-framed Life covers as well as their innards, and decided to hang the covers on The Cellar walls. She could always sell them if she got tired of looking at them, or thought of something better. She got her hammer and assorted picture hangers.