Uncle Earl and I drank free at the Black Hen because Uncle Earl owned the whole building, and I think he took at least half his rent in caffeine. Simon loved the Wonder Museum and came over sometimes with interesting skulls, also in lieu of rent.
“How’ve you been, Simon?” I asked, flopping down in one of the chairs while he filled up a carafe for me to take back.
“I’m good,” he said. “I hear you’re not so good.”
“Divorce.”
“Ugh. Do I need to kill him?”
Simon was approximately half the size of my ex, but it was an arresting mental image. “No, but you’re sweet to offer. I’ll manage.” (I’ll manage, I said, as if I weren’t still bursting into tears at inconvenient moments once or twice a day.)
“Aww. You’re better off. Men suck.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“Sorry, it’s the eye talking.” He put my coffee on the counter.
“…the eye,” I said.
“Oh, you haven’t been around for a while! Yeah. Turns out my left eye’s got some rare form of color blindness that only women get. So they think I’m probably a chimera and ate my twin in the womb and it’s actually her left eye.”
I sipped the coffee. It was extremely good coffee. “Huh.”
“The optometrist got very excited.”
“I bet.”
“Sometimes I see weird shit with it.”
Knowing Simon, weird shit could encompass anything from ghosts to auras to invisible aliens performing in a barbershop quartet. I thought about asking if he’d seen anything in the Wonder Museum, but given that it was wall-to-wall weird shit, how would he even tell?
After a minute, because I am incapable of leaving things alone, I said, “Is it just the left eye?”
“Well, it’s hard to tell. I’d have to get everything tested individually, wouldn’t I? I mean, my pancreas could be female. How would I even know?”
I had never before contemplated the gender of my pancreas. I gazed into my coffee.
“How’s the museum?” he asked.
“Seems to be doing okay. I’d like to try and catalog some of the things, maybe update the website while I’m staying here.”
“Hoo, good luck.” Simon shook his head. “Better you than me.”
A man who had devoured his twin in the womb and was now carrying her eye around in his head was pitying me. That seemed as if it should be a good metaphor for my life, although I’d be damned if I could make sense of it. I took the carafe of coffee, clutched my own cup, and headed back to the museum.
* * *
A couple of early tourists showed up to tour the museum, promptly at nine. I unlocked the door and waved them in. “Welcome to the Wonder Museum!”
“I love this place,” one of them confessed, a shaggy-haired woman with a bull ring in her nose and a T-shirt that said I ♥ CHICKENS. “It’s the best. I bring all my friends here when we’re in town.”
“Glad you think so!” I said cheerfully.
The little knot of tourists vanished up the stairs, their voices drifting after them. “Wait until you see the taxidermy….”
I swept my eyes over the displays, packed to bursting with… stuff. Contemplating the cataloging job ahead of me was like standing at the bottom of Everest and looking up. “Do you have any kind of inventory system?”
“Oh, yes,” said Uncle Earl. “For the T-shirts and the bumper stickers and the mugs.”
“But the museum exhibits?”
He frowned. “Well, I know what they all are… mostly…”
There is probably a phrase that strikes more fear and terror into the heart of someone attempting to take an inventory, but I do not know it. But looking at Uncle Earl’s hopeful, slightly worried face, I could not say it aloud.
“Spreadsheets,” I said. “We will do this with spreadsheets. And stickers.”
I pulled up a fresh one and wrote #00001 in the first box, then wrote Prince—mounted Roosevelt elk head. I went into the back, took a photo with my cell phone, then plugged it into the spreadsheet. Uncle Earl had a bunch of tiny price-tag stickers, for putting on the coffee mugs. I wrote #1 on one and affixed it to the back of Prince’s plaque.
“One down,” I muttered, looking around me. “Another couple million to go.”
I got to work.
CHAPTER 3
A week later, we were settling into a routine. I got up just before the museum opened. I ate whatever Uncle Earl brought in—muffins or doughnuts or whatever. I went next door, got coffee for both of us, and then Uncle Earl sat at the till and I did all the jobs that required mobility—fetching mail, putting out the signboard, restocking the stickers and the coffee mugs. Somewhere around lunch, he’d send me out for sandwiches at the diner, and I’d spend the rest of the afternoon cataloging.
When we closed up at six, he’d say, “Good job today, Carrot. Don’t know what I did without you.” Then he would go home and I would go next door to the coffee shop and leech on the Wi-Fi. If I could think of something fun to say, I’d update the museum’s social media. I had grandiose visions of overhauling the web page and doing more with it than the occasional blog post about the history of Feejee Mermaids, but I hadn’t quite gotten there yet. And you had to be careful when you posted pictures of skulls and taxidermy because there were always people who wanted to tell you that this made you a murderer and the moral equivalent of Ed Gein. My internet armor had been built up in the fanfic battlegrounds and was thus impenetrable, but Uncle Earl was a gentle soul, and I was afraid that someone might hurt his feelings.
Most of my time was spent designing people’s logos and wedding invitations and sending them off to clients, while Simon slung coffee and told me rambling stories about his childhood in Florida. This sounds boring. It was not. I would be head down in a project, letting the words flow over me, and Simon would casually throw out that his parents had been religious-party clowns on weekends, or that he had nearly been eaten by an alligator on two separate occasions. I would jerk upright, startled, and say “Wait, what?” and then Simon would explain how his sister had fought the alligator off with a lawn dart, and I would stare at him and wonder how he had survived to adulthood. (I asked him about this once. He said he’d never expected to live this long and now he was just happy to be here. Possibly that explains why he seemed so absolutely content to be a barista and live over the coffee shop. I think he genuinely expected to keel over on the espresso machine one day and be buried with a steamer in his hand.)
At some point, the coffee shop would close. Simon never kicked me out, but when he’d turned the sign to CLOSED, I’d finish up what I was doing and head back next door. If I sat in a particular spot against the wall downstairs—directly under the kudu head, next to the portrait of Pope John Paul done entirely in sunflower seeds, I could still get Wi-Fi, so I’d check various forums, eat the other half of my sandwich from lunch, then congratulate myself on not stalking my ex-husband on social media to see if he was appropriately miserable.
(Mark was not appropriately miserable. He was posting platitudes about life being full of possibility and moving bravely into the unknown. Dammit, I can’t believe I spent so much of my life on a man who would unironically post the line “Today is a gift, that’s why we call it the present.” And in Papyrus, too.)