Hit Me

Thirty-Three

The stamp business was Julia’s idea.

He’d come home from a day on a construction crew, his muscles sore from ten hours of installing Sheetrock, his head throbbing from ten hours of salsa music pouring out of one crew member’s boom box. He’d been paid in cash at the day’s end, and he put three twenties and a five on the kitchen table and stood there for a moment staring at his earnings.

“Let me draw you a bath,” Julia said. “You must be exhausted.”

The bath helped. He returned to the kitchen, where the four bills were still on the table, along with a welcome cup of coffee. “I must be out of shape,” he told Julia. “Used to be Donny and I’d work dawn to dusk and I’d feel fine at the end of it. Tired after a long day, but not like I’d just had a beating.”

“You’re not used to it.”

“No,” he said, and thought for a moment. “And it’s different. We had a business, we were working to accomplish something. Now all I’m working for is six fifty an hour.”

“Which you don’t really need in the first place.”

“Donny got the guy to take me on. I didn’t really know how to turn it down. Donny’s doing me a favor, I can’t throw it back in his face.”

“There ought to be a way,” she said. “You don’t want to keep on doing this. Or do you?”

“I suppose my body would get used to it before too long. But what’s the point? We don’t need the money.”

“No.”

“And even if my body gets used to it, I’m not sure my head will. They’re mostly Hispanic, which is fine, except that the opportunity for conversation is limited. But the music they like, and the volume they play it at—”

“I can imagine.”

“What am I going to tell Donny? ‘Thanks all the same, but I’ve got a ton of money in an offshore account.’”

“No.”

“‘And now and then I get a phone call and…’ Well, obviously I can’t tell him that part, either.”

They talked about it, and the following afternoon Julia followed Jenny into the den while he was working with his stamps. She stood there silent while he was cutting a mount. When he looked up she said, “I was thinking.”

“Oh?”

“You need a business.”

“I do?”

“Something,” she said. “So that there’s something that you do, so it’ll make sense to Donny that you don’t need to swing a hammer.”

“That’d be nice,” he allowed. “And it’s not just Donny. There must be a lot of people who wonder just what it is I do.”

“Not so much in this town. New Orleans is full of people who don’t seem to do much of anything. But it wouldn’t hurt if you had some visible source of income.”

“I’ve had that thought myself,” he said. “But there’s nothing I know all that much about.”

“You know a lot about stamps, don’t you?”

“So I could go into the business?” He thought about it, frowned. “The dealers I know,” he said, “work all the time. And they’re constantly making little sales and filling orders and doing all this detail work. I don’t think I’d be good at it. I enjoy buying stamps, but if you’re going to make a business out of it, the part you have to enjoy is selling them.”

“If the buying part’s what you like, couldn’t you make a business out of that?”

He extended a hand, indicating first the album on the desk in front of him, then the double row of albums in the bookcase. “I’m already doing that part,” he said, “and it keeps me busy, but it’s hard to call it a business.”

“Did you ever meet my friend Celia Cutrone? She was a year behind me at Ursuline. Skinny little creature then, but she filled out. Yes, you did meet her, she was at Donny and Claudia’s cookout.”

“If you say so.”

“She brought her big old dog, and the two of you were talking about dogs.”

He remembered now, an owlish woman with a wonderfully well-behaved Great Pyrenees, and he’d found himself remembering Nelson, the Australian cattle dog he’d had for a while, until the dog walker walked off with him.

“We didn’t talk about stamps,” he said. “Did we?”

“Probably not. She’s not a stamp collector.”

“Oh.”

“She’s in the antiques business, but she doesn’t have a shop or list things on eBay. She’s what they call a picker.”

He’d heard the term. A picker went around and scooped up items at garage sales and junk shops and wholesaled them to retailers.

“I could do that,” he said. “I guess the way to get started is run standing ads in all the neighborhood papers. The ones they give away.”

“Shoppers, they call them. And you wouldn’t want to forget Craigslist.”

“Craigslist is free, isn’t it? Running ads in it, I mean. And ads in the shoppers can’t cost the earth.”

“And then there’d be word of mouth,” she said. “‘You know those old stamps Henry had all those years? Well, the nicest young man came over and paid me decent money for them.’”

“‘The one who married the Roussard girl, and he’s surprisingly polite for a Yankee.’”

“Word of mouth,” she said, “New Orleans–style. You can run all the ads you want, but once you get them talking about you, you’re in business.”

He thought about it. Low start-up costs, nothing like opening a store. Even so…

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Whether you’d enjoy it?”

“Oh, I’d like it well enough. What I don’t know is if there’s any way to do it and come out ahead. I wouldn’t want to cheat anybody, and I wouldn’t get big prices from the dealers I sold to, and I could see myself putting in a lot of hours and barely breaking even.”

“Hours doing what?”

“Well, driving around and looking at people’s stamps,” he said. “And then looking at them some more afterward, and figuring out just what I bought and what it’s worth and who’s the best buyer for it.”

“And you might spend hours doing these things and make chump change for your troubles.”

“Chump change,” he said.

“Isn’t that the expression?”

“It sounded funny,” he said, “coming out of your mouth. But yes, that’s the expression, and it’s probably what I could expect to earn.”

“So?”

He looked up at her, and got it.

“I don’t have to make money,” he said. “Do I?”

“No. We’ve got plenty of money. And every once in a while you get a call from Dot, and we get more money.”

“All I need,” he said, “is something that looks like a business. I need a sideline, but it doesn’t have to be a profitable one. It could even lose money and that would be all right. In fact, we could declare a net profit whether we actually earned one or not. Pay a few dollars in taxes and keep everybody happy.”

“You’ve got that quick Yankee mind,” she said. “I do admire that in a man.”