I’d say that Uncle Earl was an unlikely fairy godmother, but he’d certainly swooped in and given me the gift of a spare room, so maybe it wasn’t that unlikely after all.
A lot of the taxidermy gets nicknames eventually, not just Prince. “Move Bob to cover the hole.” “See if Tusky will fit there.” “Dust Corky’s horns, will you?” Bob’s the wildebeest, Tusky is a boar. Corky is the male kudu, from Corkscrew, which is what the horns look like.
The otter doesn’t have a nickname. It’s just the otter. It’s the crown jewel.
I dropped off the leather mask, much to Beau’s disgust, and proceeded to the otter. It gazed past me with wet black eyes. The creature’s mouth was mounted open, showing the heavy canines. It’s not a smile or a snarl. It’s just a businesslike showing of teeth.
I nodded respectfully to the otter and looked around for a place to put the carving. There was a shelf up against the wall with a couple of tacky porcelain windmills. I took them down, put the carving on the shelf, and wandered around looking for a place to stick the windmills. I finally found a gap under the Thimbles of the World and called it good.
My hands felt vaguely greasy. I’d say it was some kind of malicious taint from the otter carving, but realistically, given how suddenly eager Beau was to sniff my fingers, it was probably left over from the fish leather.
I would have lingered over the otter but I heard someone on the main floor ask if we had a particular shirt in XL, and I went to go rummage in the back so Uncle Earl didn’t have to.
* * *
I was starting my third week at the museum when Uncle Earl didn’t come in one morning.
He called me, so I didn’t have time to worry.
“Hi, Uncle Earl.”
“Carrot? This is your uncle.”
I closed my eyes. His voice was a bit weaker than usual; it wasn’t the time to teach him how caller ID worked. “Are you okay?”
“Well, I’m afraid it’s my knee, hon. Can’t walk real well right now. Can I ask you to open the museum for me today?”
I assured him that I would, that he should stay home and stay off his knee, and insisted that he call the doctor.
“You’re a real blessing, Carrot. God must have sent you to take care of me.”
I avoided saying that God could have just sent an email instead of my divorce, and I made my uncle promise to take it easy.
Running the Wonder Museum single-handedly was not much more difficult than helping Uncle Earl with it, except that I had to be up front to talk to the tourists instead of wandering around cataloging things. I used the downtime to work on my most recent gig, which was a logo design for a customer who wanted the logo to have everything, including—I am not making this up—a feather because his mother’s maiden name had been Featherstone and he’d started the company because she believed in him.
Still, it was money.
Uncle Earl was back the next day, but two days later, he was out again. Monday I hauled off and drove him to the doctor myself.
He limped out of the back looking gloomy. “They want to do surgery,” he said. “Soon as they can. But not on my back. On both knees. They said I’m walking funny because of my bad knees and it’s throwing my back out.”
“Yikes. Okay.”
“I’d be out for weeks, Carrot. I can’t ask you to watch the museum while I lay in bed.”
“You can and you will. Call Mom. She’ll take care of you while you’re recovering, and I’ll watch the museum.”
A week later, Mom came down to drive Uncle Earl to Charlotte. I hugged him and told him to focus on getting well, that I’d take care of everything. He went over how to pay the power bill for the fourth time, then Mom gave me a fond, exasperated glance and shooed him into the car.
“I know you’ll do great, Carrot,” he said, rolling down the window. “You call me if you have any problems. God bless you for doing this.”
I still didn’t believe in Uncle Earl’s God, but he believed, and that’s all that mattered. I gripped his hand, then Mom started the engine and they drove away.
I waved after them, then drove back downtown, unlocked the front door, and turned the sign to OPEN. The eyes of the mounted animals shone in the light and His Sunflower Holiness beamed down at me benevolently.
It was the one-month anniversary of my arrival at the Wonder Museum.
CHAPTER 4
Everything went well, at least for a few days. There were the usual sorts of problems—Uncle Earl had told me how to pay the power bill but not the water bill, which took me nearly an hour to sort out, and then the point-of-sale system needed an update, and doing that took the computers down for two hours, and I had to make out receipts by hand for T-shirts and coffee mugs. An update came out for the website that broke every link, and I had to go through and update them by hand. And Beau groomed the grizzly bear’s left hind paw until he threw up, because old taxidermy is preserved with nasty chemicals. I assume this was revenge for not letting him eat the fish leather.
The first major crisis occurred on the Thursday after Uncle Earl left, when I was doing my sweep to make sure nobody was left in the museum after closing and discovered a hole in the drywall in the otter room.
The hole was jagged and irregular, about a foot and a half long. Probably one of the tourists had put their elbow into the wall. None of them had come around and apologized for it, though.
I swore under my breath. Not even in charge for a week, and some idiot was wrecking up the joint….
“Well, better the wall than the otter,” I muttered. The hole was in the back wall of the museum. The shelf that had been up on the wall had fallen down. I couldn’t remember what had been on it—ceramic windmills? I didn’t see any broken ceramics on the floor, but maybe the guilty tourist had shoved them under something else and fled.
It occurred to me, as I stared at the hole, that I wasn’t sure how to patch it. I could spackle nail holes and dents and whatnot, but this was something else again. Major home repairs had been my ex-husband’s job. Anything bigger than a Dremel scared me.
I went next door to the coffee shop to mooch on the Wi-Fi and look up how to patch drywall.
Okay, that’s not entirely true. I went to check up on various social media, maybe have a rousing argument with someone about a particular fanfic ship, and then look up how to patch drywall.
My ex was posting inspirational quotes again. I swear I wasn’t looking for them, they just came across my timeline anyway. I know, I should just have unfollowed him, but it felt petty. We were having a Friendly Divorce™. Probably some people really have those, but in our case it felt as if we were locked in a competition over who could be publically most gracious to the other. Ha ha, no, I’m not bitter, why would you think that, no, my teeth always lock like this when I smile, I don’t know what you’re talking about….
“How’s it going?” asked Simon.
“Ugh. One of the customers knocked a hole in the wall, and now I have to figure out how to fix it. And my ex is posting pictures of…” I paused. “One of his coworkers with her hands all over him. Huh.” That son of a bitch. It had been a month! A month!
“Need any help?”