Some Things Should Not Be Sold
Bradley J. Collins
The woman shambled, feet headed in two different directions, a junkie shuffle. Booker jumped backward, heart pounding as her pale knuckles rapped against the front door. Fog curled around her, as though she’d appeared from nowhere. No cars or trucks in sight, only the empty parking lot, weeds growing through the cracks.
The store’s neon sign cast everything in the lot – his car, cigarette butts, and broken beer bottles – in a pink hue. The woman’s face looked like a hibiscus flower in bloom. The rest of her skin, and she showed plenty, wearing the shortest skirt he’d ever seen, was the color of fresh cream. She reminded him of prostitutes at the truck stop on the interstate. Too thin, pupils too dilated. Lost.
Did she know it was November? She seemed numbed to the biting cold and the late hour. Booker recalled watching his late wife, Gloria, pour pills down her throat, and then she’d retreat into her bedroom for days, oblivious to their time together disappearing. She’d missed anniversaries, birthdays, a hundred other moments that made his heart ache. Sometimes after work, he’d lie face down on the carpet, trying to see Gloria through the crack under her door. He recalled flashes of color from her television – Growing Pains and Family Ties, reflected off the walls.
Booker stared at the woman’s tank top, fixated on her nipples poking through the fabric. He clenched his jaw, hating the flush of heat rushing through him, but his gaze lingered.
The woman knocked again. “Can I come in?”
Booker imagined her freezing, becoming an ice sculpture. For the millionth time since she’d died, Booker wished Gloria were here. His hand twitched to the door, then dropped. She’d have grabbed a blanket and welcomed the woman inside.
Booker reached for the Benelli M4 shotgun behind the counter. A hundred other guns rested in display cases, bound by trigger locks. They came with serial numbers. The M4 was untraceable. If he shot someone, Booker saw no logic in leading the police to him.
“Go away.” He flashed the shotgun.
The woman pressed against the glass. “I need cash.”
Booker couldn’t pull away. He looked down, half expecting to see his feet nailed to the floor. “We’re closed.”
The woman disappeared into the fog.
Booker swept the showroom floor. He expected to hear another knock, to see those pale knuckles again. For the next half hour, the only sound was from his space heater rattling. The heat didn’t reach him; he kept it on for the warm glow, the way it reminded him of one Christmas when Gloria was sober. She’d come out of rehab in a floral print dress, her straw-blonde hair cut short, and invited Booker to the halfway house where she lived after they’d separated.
Gloria bought a tiny tree, small enough to fit on the counter. They’d sat in front of a space heater, and Booker had opened his one present with exquisite care, pulling off the tape and folding the paper, afraid that making too much noise or moving too fast might drive her away. She’d bought him Songs in the Key of Life, on vinyl.
“Our first dance was to Isn’t She Lovely…remember?” Gloria asked.
Booker gripped the album until it snapped. He’d stood up, shaking, skin hot. “I’m glad you're clean. But….”
He’d wanted to scream at her, to shake Gloria until she understood the cost of her addiction.
Booker had held back a torrent of hateful things that clawed at the back of his throat, thinking their relationship was broken. Hurting her solved nothing.
He couldn’t recall hugging her or even saying goodbye. His last memory of Gloria was watching her scoop the shattered vinyl, the scrape of her nails across the tile.
Had she overdosed the next morning? Or was it a week later? Booker didn’t like thinking about how she died. He’d mentally erased the exact date of her funeral.
Booker retreated to the store’s office, where he found a six-pack of beer in a mini-fridge. He shuffled out to the back patio and sat in an Adirondack chair. Drinking a beer, he stared at a barbed-wire-topped fence around the perimeter. He smoked a cigarette, exhaling a pale cloud, watching headlights cut through the gloom on Matheson Avenue.
Booker couldn’t explain why the rush of white noise from traffic soothed him. He wasn’t the sort of man to question these rare moments of peace.
The woman appeared again, leaning against the fence.
“Hi,” she said with a wave.
Booker stood, shaking his head in disbelief. “What do you want?”
She vibrated. Teeth clattering, arms wrapped around her chest. Probably minutes away from hypothermia. “I need cash.”
The woman’s voice swayed Booker. She spoke in a raspy tone, like Stevie Nicks on Landslide. That song echoed from Gloria’s apartment as the coroner took her out in a body bag. They’d reconnected for one night, not talking, barely looking at each other, colliding in a desperate spasm to rekindle a burned-out love. Booker had left to buy cigarettes, and then got an alert that someone was breaking into the pawn shop. His phone buzzed, then rang, as the security company and the police tried contacting him at the same time. He raced across town, didn’t get back to Gloria for two hours. By the time he returned, her body was cold. He’d sat with her, combing Gloria’s hair and cleaning vomit off her dress. Should he have cried then? His reaction was to hum Isn’t She Lovely, curled against her body.
Booker went to the fence, used his keys to undo the lock, removed a thick chain, and ushered her inside the shop. He brought the woman into his office, then retrieved his space heater and pointed the coils at her.
“What’s your name?”
She stared at her toes. “Cherry.”
“Your real name.”
She looked up, blue eyes burning into him. “Allison…Allie.”
“I’m Booker.”
Allie folded herself into a ball on his recliner, arms wrapped around her knees. “I…don’t have anything to pawn.”
“Why are you here?”
“Mimi told me you’re one of the good Johns.”
One of the good Johns. Did such a thing exist? Booker didn’t believe buying sex from prostitutes felt good, at least not in the way Allie meant. Since Gloria died, he’d been driving to the truck stop off the interstate. He’d sit in his late father’s Winnebago, with the Rocky IV soundtrack stuck in the tape deck, and wait to see whether women would approach him.
Some nights, Booker sat in the driver’s seat for hours doing crossword puzzles by flashlight. Mimi had climbed into his passenger seat unprompted. Wrapped in a skin-tight black dress, she was dark-haired and curvy.
Their meetups became therapy sessions. He opened up about Gloria. Mimi listened, and sometimes she held Booker.
One night, Mimi had dressed in a pencil skirt, a cardigan, and wireframe glasses, looking enough like his late wife for Booker to fantasize that Gloria had lived.
“I found your wife’s photograph on the bookstore’s website,” Mimi had said. “I thought you might want to tell her how you feel.”
Gloria was a clerk at different bookstores for twenty years. She’d work for a couple of months, then get back into pills. Booker never visited her stores once. Never brought her lunch or met her co-workers. He had no idea what she did all day, whether she was happy in her job.
“I don’t know why you fell in love with someone like me,” Booker had said, as though Mimi truly was his wife. He recalled meeting Gloria in a Barnes & Noble, asking if she knew where to find the Harlan Coben paperbacks. They ended up talking about mystery novels over coffee. They’d spent ten years together after that chance meeting.
The sex was sweaty, over in a minute, but for a brief moment after, when Booker wasn’t looking closely at Mimi’s face, he almost believed Gloria was with him. The quiet, desperate emptiness that had plagued Booker his entire life spun out of his body, and he fell asleep not quite so alone.
A hot rush of shame burned Booker’s face. He paced across the carpet.
“It’s cool. I’m not a cop.” Allie dug into her bra, producing a string of condoms. “Fifty for a blow job. A hundred for sex.”
Her words spilled out in a rush; she’d jumped straight to propositioning him. Allie assumed Booker was lonely and wouldn’t turn her down. Maybe she was right.
“Shit…shit…shit!” Booker pounded his fist into the drywall. A plume of dust erupted, and he bounced backward, landing hard on his tailbone.
Allie’s eyes cranked open. “What the hell?”
Booker sat on the floor, shaking out the lightning bolt of pain in his fist, muscles coiled, seething, not at Allie, but himself. He’d turned fifty a month ago, gray at the temples, soft in the midsection. This woman was young enough to be his daughter. But it was worse than some paternalistic connection. Having sex with Allie meant using an unstable person. “I can’t do this.”
Allie leaned back in the recliner, biting her bottom lip. “You don’t find me sexy?”
It took all Booker’s willpower to turn away. How was Allie so oblivious to his unease? “You’re beautiful,” Booker said.
“Then take me.” She shimmed out of the skirt, approached, and grabbed the back of his head. “I taste like cherries.”
Booker was in an awkward position on the floor. Unable to move with his back pressed against his father’s rolltop desk. Allie loomed over him. “Don’t do this.”
Allie lowered herself, not quite touching him, maybe an inch away, her breath hot with the scent of vodka. “I want to.”
“Some things should not be sold,” he said softly.
“What?”
“One time, this older woman came in. She tried pawning her wedding ring. Easily worth ten grand, but she was willing to take three in cash. My dad asked why she was so desperate.”
Allie pulled back. “What did she say?”
“Her husband had dementia, and she was trying to get him into a memory-care unit. The place required a deposit. My dad said – Some things should not be sold. He gave her three thousand out of the safe. Told her to keep the ring.”
“Wow….” Allie said, her voice soft for a second. “That’s beautiful. But your story won’t help me tonight.”
“Why do you need cash in such a hurry?”
She looked away. “Don’t make me say it.”
Were those track marks on Allie’s arms? He wasn’t sure. “I’ll give you a hundred.”
“For nothing?”
Booker nodded.
“I don’t like owing people, and not knowing when they’ll collect.” She leaned closer. “No emotions. Just pleasure and cash.”
Booker needed a distraction. “My father did not let emotions get in the way of business. And if I were ever weak, offering too much money for a guitar or a gun, he beat me.” He tensed up, recalling the sting of the belt, the way it whistled through the air. “Except for when he met that old woman.”
Allie’s face soured. “Are we still talking about this?”
“Indulge me.”
“Why did he give a stranger so much money?”
“I think he felt sorry for the old woman.... Honestly, I don’t know, because I was so shocked I couldn’t speak.”
“Don’t you dare feel sorry for me. I like sex.” Allie’s fingers drifted to his zipper. “And you are killing the mood.”
Booker grabbed her hands, felt the cold in her fingers. “You don’t have to sell yourself. Not to me.”
“Do you want to get off or not?”
“What I want, and what I should do, are two different things.” Booker’s mind raced, trying to find a way to distract Allie and himself. Again, he thought of Gloria and their first meeting at the bookstore. Their conversation had started with books and transitioned into those awkward questions people ask on first dates. Where are you from? Do you have brothers or sisters? Booker thought of one question he’d asked Gloria that might hit hard enough to shock Allie. “When you were a little girl, what did you dream about becoming?”
Allie exhaled, eyes drifting to an Ansel Adams print Booker had put up. “I wanted to sell real estate. We lived on my dad’s military base. But we rarely saw him. Mom and I would go to the mall and buy fancy clothes. Armani. Gucci. But we kept the tags on. We’d get dressed up and visit open houses, pretending we were interested buyers.”
“Was it fun?”
She smiled brightly. “Sometimes we put on posh British accents and acted like we were related to the royal family. I remember laughing so hard my stomach hurt. It was the most fun I had as a kid.”
“Where is your family now?”
“Mom…passed away. Dad lives in Oak Park.”
“I bet he misses you.”
Tears streamed down her face. “I don’t know if he does.”
“Let’s find out.”
“What do you mean?” Allie asked.
“I never told my wife how much I loved her when it mattered. Now she’s gone. Don’t go through life regretting the things you held in. Let me drive you home. If you’re father doesn’t want you, we’ll figure out something.”
“Figure out what?”
He laughed. “I don’t know; I’m making up my life as I go.”
Allie bolted up and dressed. “I only needed fifty bucks, man. Not a lecture or whatever this is.”
Before Booker could move, she flitted out the back and was gone.
~ ~ ~
Booker spent two days glued to footage from his security cameras. He hardly slept or left the pawn shop. He’d put the – CLOSED – sign on the door, and didn’t answer the phone.
Allie showed up on a Sunday, minutes after midnight. She wore a blonde wig, heels, and a tartan skirt, with socks up to her knees. She banged her pale knuckles on the glass, and Booker answered.
It took him a second to see the purple bruise under her eye, the cuts on her arm. Booker pulled her inside and grabbed his shotgun. “Who did this to you?”
“It doesn’t matter.” Allie leaned into him. She sobbed, a full-body quake.
Booker held Allie until her breathing steadied. “Can we call your dad?”
“Don’t tell him what I’ve become.”
“All I see is a young woman who needs a ride home.”
They didn’t call Allie’s father that night. It took Booker another two days to gain her trust. They spent the time mostly in his Winnebago, playing Euchre or reading, and she’d started on suboxone, taking the pills to lessen the harsh comedown from quitting opiates. Allie introduced him to her favorite bands, Pavement and Sonic Youth, and after Booker got accustomed to the fuzz, the squelching guitars, he started humming the songs while working in the shop. With Allie, he didn’t talk; he just listened as she spoke about going from a college student with straight As to turning tricks for cash.
One night, they sat in camping chairs outside the Winnebago, looking up at the stars.
“After my mom died…I wanted to be numb. I took a Vicodin at her funeral. All-time bad idea, because the high made me think I could survive anything.”
“When my wife passed away, I spent two weeks in bed, only getting up for whiskey,” Booker said. “Sometimes, I listen to Stevie Wonder, and I’ll pull one of Gloria’s dresses out. The scent of her lilac oil is still in the fabric.”
Allie put on Karma Police, and the mournful chords filtered from a Bluetooth speaker. “What were you like as a couple?”
“We read together, not always the same books,” Booker said. “She liked Cormac McCarthy, Pynchon, stuff way over my head. But we’d be in the same room, her curled up on the couch, me in a recliner. Find someone you can share the quiet with, and you’ll be alright.”
“I doubt anyone would love me enough to share the quiet.”
“I wish I could help you more. I couldn’t help my wife either. Nothing I said or did got through to her.”
Allie squeezed his hand. “I won’t forget everything you’ve done.” She pulled out her phone, thumb hovering over a contact labeled – Dad. “I don’t know if I’m ready to see my father again. I said horrible things to him at my mother’s funeral. He’s been texting for months. Asking me to visit. He apologized for missing most of my childhood. But what if he finds out the things I’ve done and he doesn’t love me?”
“Your past doesn’t make you a bad person, it doesn’t make you unlovable.”
“Are you telling me or yourself?”
“A bit of both.”
~ ~ ~
Hours later, Booker pulled onto a leafy street in Oak Park. Allie unbuckled her seatbelt and froze. Booker had scavenged some of Gloria’s old clothes, a Cubs hoodie, and jeans, which hung loose on Allie’s slender frame.
“What if Dad doesn’t want me?”
Booker grabbed her hand. “I’ll wait for you. You can stay in this Winnebago until you get back on your feet.”
“Why are you doing this? You barely know me.”
Just then, he didn’t see a scared, young stranger. Booker saw Gloria. “I know you deserve a second chance.”
“So do you.”
Allie walked up to a two-story home and knocked on the door. A lean man with a military buzzcut answered. The second he saw Allie, the man hugged her, and seemed in no hurry to let go.
Booker leaned back, unable to move for a long while, unsure whether he felt relief or joy. It had been so long since he’d experienced such lightness in his body, not since the day he met Gloria.
~ ~ ~
Two years later, Booker loaded his father’s antique rolltop desk into a U-Haul van and drove it to a wealthy buyer in Lake Forest. As he sped home, Booker saw a billboard that read – Allie Marsten the Million-Dollar Realtor – in giant letters. Allie looked different, healthier. Fuller cheeks. Hair straightened. Those blue eyes cut through the darkness.
She’d been sending him handwritten letters about once a month. Booker liked reading them while he listened to Pavement records. At the end of every note, she’d kissed the page, leaving the tracings of her neon pink lipstick.
Allie had gone through rehab and earned her realtor’s license. She’d sent him outlines, and Booker hunched over the shop counter, jotting down notecards about real estate law, contracts, and financing, and shipped them to her father’s home.
Then Allie took another turn into pills a few weeks back and returned to the pawn shop, unable to explain why she’d slipped.
Booker had sat with her in the office, coming knots out of her hair. “We’ll get you clean. Whatever it takes.”
Since that night, Allie called once a week. Most times, they didn’t talk much; just being connected seemed to calm whatever drove Allie to drugs.
“I’m in a rehab called New Horizon,” Allie said during their last conversation. “I won’t let you down again.”
“This isn’t about me. You deserve to be happy and loved. Keep saying that as many times as it takes.”
She’d be released in a few weeks, and Booker would pick Allie up. He chose to believe Allie was strong enough to break the cycle.
Booker returned to the truck stop only once, to drop off boxes of Gloria’s dresses to Mimi and the other women. He’d expected to break down, screaming at himself for letting Gloria slip away. As he’d driven home, windows down, fall air rushing across his skin, he thought of the dark road Allie had traveled because grief metastasized inside her, and decided letting his wife go was long overdue.
He wasn’t sure what a second chance looked like. Dating apps? Hoping he ran into another woman at a bookstore? Maybe helping Allie was enough of a fresh start. Booker figured the answer would become clear when he was ready to see it.
Most nights, he sat outside alone, listening to the white noise of cars racing down the street.
~ ~ ~
July 2026
Bradley J. Collins
The woman shambled, feet headed in two different directions, a junkie shuffle. Booker jumped backward, heart pounding as her pale knuckles rapped against the front door. Fog curled around her, as though she’d appeared from nowhere. No cars or trucks in sight, only the empty parking lot, weeds growing through the cracks.
The store’s neon sign cast everything in the lot – his car, cigarette butts, and broken beer bottles – in a pink hue. The woman’s face looked like a hibiscus flower in bloom. The rest of her skin, and she showed plenty, wearing the shortest skirt he’d ever seen, was the color of fresh cream. She reminded him of prostitutes at the truck stop on the interstate. Too thin, pupils too dilated. Lost.
Did she know it was November? She seemed numbed to the biting cold and the late hour. Booker recalled watching his late wife, Gloria, pour pills down her throat, and then she’d retreat into her bedroom for days, oblivious to their time together disappearing. She’d missed anniversaries, birthdays, a hundred other moments that made his heart ache. Sometimes after work, he’d lie face down on the carpet, trying to see Gloria through the crack under her door. He recalled flashes of color from her television – Growing Pains and Family Ties, reflected off the walls.
Booker stared at the woman’s tank top, fixated on her nipples poking through the fabric. He clenched his jaw, hating the flush of heat rushing through him, but his gaze lingered.
The woman knocked again. “Can I come in?”
Booker imagined her freezing, becoming an ice sculpture. For the millionth time since she’d died, Booker wished Gloria were here. His hand twitched to the door, then dropped. She’d have grabbed a blanket and welcomed the woman inside.
Booker reached for the Benelli M4 shotgun behind the counter. A hundred other guns rested in display cases, bound by trigger locks. They came with serial numbers. The M4 was untraceable. If he shot someone, Booker saw no logic in leading the police to him.
“Go away.” He flashed the shotgun.
The woman pressed against the glass. “I need cash.”
Booker couldn’t pull away. He looked down, half expecting to see his feet nailed to the floor. “We’re closed.”
The woman disappeared into the fog.
Booker swept the showroom floor. He expected to hear another knock, to see those pale knuckles again. For the next half hour, the only sound was from his space heater rattling. The heat didn’t reach him; he kept it on for the warm glow, the way it reminded him of one Christmas when Gloria was sober. She’d come out of rehab in a floral print dress, her straw-blonde hair cut short, and invited Booker to the halfway house where she lived after they’d separated.
Gloria bought a tiny tree, small enough to fit on the counter. They’d sat in front of a space heater, and Booker had opened his one present with exquisite care, pulling off the tape and folding the paper, afraid that making too much noise or moving too fast might drive her away. She’d bought him Songs in the Key of Life, on vinyl.
“Our first dance was to Isn’t She Lovely…remember?” Gloria asked.
Booker gripped the album until it snapped. He’d stood up, shaking, skin hot. “I’m glad you're clean. But….”
He’d wanted to scream at her, to shake Gloria until she understood the cost of her addiction.
Booker had held back a torrent of hateful things that clawed at the back of his throat, thinking their relationship was broken. Hurting her solved nothing.
He couldn’t recall hugging her or even saying goodbye. His last memory of Gloria was watching her scoop the shattered vinyl, the scrape of her nails across the tile.
Had she overdosed the next morning? Or was it a week later? Booker didn’t like thinking about how she died. He’d mentally erased the exact date of her funeral.
Booker retreated to the store’s office, where he found a six-pack of beer in a mini-fridge. He shuffled out to the back patio and sat in an Adirondack chair. Drinking a beer, he stared at a barbed-wire-topped fence around the perimeter. He smoked a cigarette, exhaling a pale cloud, watching headlights cut through the gloom on Matheson Avenue.
Booker couldn’t explain why the rush of white noise from traffic soothed him. He wasn’t the sort of man to question these rare moments of peace.
The woman appeared again, leaning against the fence.
“Hi,” she said with a wave.
Booker stood, shaking his head in disbelief. “What do you want?”
She vibrated. Teeth clattering, arms wrapped around her chest. Probably minutes away from hypothermia. “I need cash.”
The woman’s voice swayed Booker. She spoke in a raspy tone, like Stevie Nicks on Landslide. That song echoed from Gloria’s apartment as the coroner took her out in a body bag. They’d reconnected for one night, not talking, barely looking at each other, colliding in a desperate spasm to rekindle a burned-out love. Booker had left to buy cigarettes, and then got an alert that someone was breaking into the pawn shop. His phone buzzed, then rang, as the security company and the police tried contacting him at the same time. He raced across town, didn’t get back to Gloria for two hours. By the time he returned, her body was cold. He’d sat with her, combing Gloria’s hair and cleaning vomit off her dress. Should he have cried then? His reaction was to hum Isn’t She Lovely, curled against her body.
Booker went to the fence, used his keys to undo the lock, removed a thick chain, and ushered her inside the shop. He brought the woman into his office, then retrieved his space heater and pointed the coils at her.
“What’s your name?”
She stared at her toes. “Cherry.”
“Your real name.”
She looked up, blue eyes burning into him. “Allison…Allie.”
“I’m Booker.”
Allie folded herself into a ball on his recliner, arms wrapped around her knees. “I…don’t have anything to pawn.”
“Why are you here?”
“Mimi told me you’re one of the good Johns.”
One of the good Johns. Did such a thing exist? Booker didn’t believe buying sex from prostitutes felt good, at least not in the way Allie meant. Since Gloria died, he’d been driving to the truck stop off the interstate. He’d sit in his late father’s Winnebago, with the Rocky IV soundtrack stuck in the tape deck, and wait to see whether women would approach him.
Some nights, Booker sat in the driver’s seat for hours doing crossword puzzles by flashlight. Mimi had climbed into his passenger seat unprompted. Wrapped in a skin-tight black dress, she was dark-haired and curvy.
Their meetups became therapy sessions. He opened up about Gloria. Mimi listened, and sometimes she held Booker.
One night, Mimi had dressed in a pencil skirt, a cardigan, and wireframe glasses, looking enough like his late wife for Booker to fantasize that Gloria had lived.
“I found your wife’s photograph on the bookstore’s website,” Mimi had said. “I thought you might want to tell her how you feel.”
Gloria was a clerk at different bookstores for twenty years. She’d work for a couple of months, then get back into pills. Booker never visited her stores once. Never brought her lunch or met her co-workers. He had no idea what she did all day, whether she was happy in her job.
“I don’t know why you fell in love with someone like me,” Booker had said, as though Mimi truly was his wife. He recalled meeting Gloria in a Barnes & Noble, asking if she knew where to find the Harlan Coben paperbacks. They ended up talking about mystery novels over coffee. They’d spent ten years together after that chance meeting.
The sex was sweaty, over in a minute, but for a brief moment after, when Booker wasn’t looking closely at Mimi’s face, he almost believed Gloria was with him. The quiet, desperate emptiness that had plagued Booker his entire life spun out of his body, and he fell asleep not quite so alone.
A hot rush of shame burned Booker’s face. He paced across the carpet.
“It’s cool. I’m not a cop.” Allie dug into her bra, producing a string of condoms. “Fifty for a blow job. A hundred for sex.”
Her words spilled out in a rush; she’d jumped straight to propositioning him. Allie assumed Booker was lonely and wouldn’t turn her down. Maybe she was right.
“Shit…shit…shit!” Booker pounded his fist into the drywall. A plume of dust erupted, and he bounced backward, landing hard on his tailbone.
Allie’s eyes cranked open. “What the hell?”
Booker sat on the floor, shaking out the lightning bolt of pain in his fist, muscles coiled, seething, not at Allie, but himself. He’d turned fifty a month ago, gray at the temples, soft in the midsection. This woman was young enough to be his daughter. But it was worse than some paternalistic connection. Having sex with Allie meant using an unstable person. “I can’t do this.”
Allie leaned back in the recliner, biting her bottom lip. “You don’t find me sexy?”
It took all Booker’s willpower to turn away. How was Allie so oblivious to his unease? “You’re beautiful,” Booker said.
“Then take me.” She shimmed out of the skirt, approached, and grabbed the back of his head. “I taste like cherries.”
Booker was in an awkward position on the floor. Unable to move with his back pressed against his father’s rolltop desk. Allie loomed over him. “Don’t do this.”
Allie lowered herself, not quite touching him, maybe an inch away, her breath hot with the scent of vodka. “I want to.”
“Some things should not be sold,” he said softly.
“What?”
“One time, this older woman came in. She tried pawning her wedding ring. Easily worth ten grand, but she was willing to take three in cash. My dad asked why she was so desperate.”
Allie pulled back. “What did she say?”
“Her husband had dementia, and she was trying to get him into a memory-care unit. The place required a deposit. My dad said – Some things should not be sold. He gave her three thousand out of the safe. Told her to keep the ring.”
“Wow….” Allie said, her voice soft for a second. “That’s beautiful. But your story won’t help me tonight.”
“Why do you need cash in such a hurry?”
She looked away. “Don’t make me say it.”
Were those track marks on Allie’s arms? He wasn’t sure. “I’ll give you a hundred.”
“For nothing?”
Booker nodded.
“I don’t like owing people, and not knowing when they’ll collect.” She leaned closer. “No emotions. Just pleasure and cash.”
Booker needed a distraction. “My father did not let emotions get in the way of business. And if I were ever weak, offering too much money for a guitar or a gun, he beat me.” He tensed up, recalling the sting of the belt, the way it whistled through the air. “Except for when he met that old woman.”
Allie’s face soured. “Are we still talking about this?”
“Indulge me.”
“Why did he give a stranger so much money?”
“I think he felt sorry for the old woman.... Honestly, I don’t know, because I was so shocked I couldn’t speak.”
“Don’t you dare feel sorry for me. I like sex.” Allie’s fingers drifted to his zipper. “And you are killing the mood.”
Booker grabbed her hands, felt the cold in her fingers. “You don’t have to sell yourself. Not to me.”
“Do you want to get off or not?”
“What I want, and what I should do, are two different things.” Booker’s mind raced, trying to find a way to distract Allie and himself. Again, he thought of Gloria and their first meeting at the bookstore. Their conversation had started with books and transitioned into those awkward questions people ask on first dates. Where are you from? Do you have brothers or sisters? Booker thought of one question he’d asked Gloria that might hit hard enough to shock Allie. “When you were a little girl, what did you dream about becoming?”
Allie exhaled, eyes drifting to an Ansel Adams print Booker had put up. “I wanted to sell real estate. We lived on my dad’s military base. But we rarely saw him. Mom and I would go to the mall and buy fancy clothes. Armani. Gucci. But we kept the tags on. We’d get dressed up and visit open houses, pretending we were interested buyers.”
“Was it fun?”
She smiled brightly. “Sometimes we put on posh British accents and acted like we were related to the royal family. I remember laughing so hard my stomach hurt. It was the most fun I had as a kid.”
“Where is your family now?”
“Mom…passed away. Dad lives in Oak Park.”
“I bet he misses you.”
Tears streamed down her face. “I don’t know if he does.”
“Let’s find out.”
“What do you mean?” Allie asked.
“I never told my wife how much I loved her when it mattered. Now she’s gone. Don’t go through life regretting the things you held in. Let me drive you home. If you’re father doesn’t want you, we’ll figure out something.”
“Figure out what?”
He laughed. “I don’t know; I’m making up my life as I go.”
Allie bolted up and dressed. “I only needed fifty bucks, man. Not a lecture or whatever this is.”
Before Booker could move, she flitted out the back and was gone.
~ ~ ~
Booker spent two days glued to footage from his security cameras. He hardly slept or left the pawn shop. He’d put the – CLOSED – sign on the door, and didn’t answer the phone.
Allie showed up on a Sunday, minutes after midnight. She wore a blonde wig, heels, and a tartan skirt, with socks up to her knees. She banged her pale knuckles on the glass, and Booker answered.
It took him a second to see the purple bruise under her eye, the cuts on her arm. Booker pulled her inside and grabbed his shotgun. “Who did this to you?”
“It doesn’t matter.” Allie leaned into him. She sobbed, a full-body quake.
Booker held Allie until her breathing steadied. “Can we call your dad?”
“Don’t tell him what I’ve become.”
“All I see is a young woman who needs a ride home.”
They didn’t call Allie’s father that night. It took Booker another two days to gain her trust. They spent the time mostly in his Winnebago, playing Euchre or reading, and she’d started on suboxone, taking the pills to lessen the harsh comedown from quitting opiates. Allie introduced him to her favorite bands, Pavement and Sonic Youth, and after Booker got accustomed to the fuzz, the squelching guitars, he started humming the songs while working in the shop. With Allie, he didn’t talk; he just listened as she spoke about going from a college student with straight As to turning tricks for cash.
One night, they sat in camping chairs outside the Winnebago, looking up at the stars.
“After my mom died…I wanted to be numb. I took a Vicodin at her funeral. All-time bad idea, because the high made me think I could survive anything.”
“When my wife passed away, I spent two weeks in bed, only getting up for whiskey,” Booker said. “Sometimes, I listen to Stevie Wonder, and I’ll pull one of Gloria’s dresses out. The scent of her lilac oil is still in the fabric.”
Allie put on Karma Police, and the mournful chords filtered from a Bluetooth speaker. “What were you like as a couple?”
“We read together, not always the same books,” Booker said. “She liked Cormac McCarthy, Pynchon, stuff way over my head. But we’d be in the same room, her curled up on the couch, me in a recliner. Find someone you can share the quiet with, and you’ll be alright.”
“I doubt anyone would love me enough to share the quiet.”
“I wish I could help you more. I couldn’t help my wife either. Nothing I said or did got through to her.”
Allie squeezed his hand. “I won’t forget everything you’ve done.” She pulled out her phone, thumb hovering over a contact labeled – Dad. “I don’t know if I’m ready to see my father again. I said horrible things to him at my mother’s funeral. He’s been texting for months. Asking me to visit. He apologized for missing most of my childhood. But what if he finds out the things I’ve done and he doesn’t love me?”
“Your past doesn’t make you a bad person, it doesn’t make you unlovable.”
“Are you telling me or yourself?”
“A bit of both.”
~ ~ ~
Hours later, Booker pulled onto a leafy street in Oak Park. Allie unbuckled her seatbelt and froze. Booker had scavenged some of Gloria’s old clothes, a Cubs hoodie, and jeans, which hung loose on Allie’s slender frame.
“What if Dad doesn’t want me?”
Booker grabbed her hand. “I’ll wait for you. You can stay in this Winnebago until you get back on your feet.”
“Why are you doing this? You barely know me.”
Just then, he didn’t see a scared, young stranger. Booker saw Gloria. “I know you deserve a second chance.”
“So do you.”
Allie walked up to a two-story home and knocked on the door. A lean man with a military buzzcut answered. The second he saw Allie, the man hugged her, and seemed in no hurry to let go.
Booker leaned back, unable to move for a long while, unsure whether he felt relief or joy. It had been so long since he’d experienced such lightness in his body, not since the day he met Gloria.
~ ~ ~
Two years later, Booker loaded his father’s antique rolltop desk into a U-Haul van and drove it to a wealthy buyer in Lake Forest. As he sped home, Booker saw a billboard that read – Allie Marsten the Million-Dollar Realtor – in giant letters. Allie looked different, healthier. Fuller cheeks. Hair straightened. Those blue eyes cut through the darkness.
She’d been sending him handwritten letters about once a month. Booker liked reading them while he listened to Pavement records. At the end of every note, she’d kissed the page, leaving the tracings of her neon pink lipstick.
Allie had gone through rehab and earned her realtor’s license. She’d sent him outlines, and Booker hunched over the shop counter, jotting down notecards about real estate law, contracts, and financing, and shipped them to her father’s home.
Then Allie took another turn into pills a few weeks back and returned to the pawn shop, unable to explain why she’d slipped.
Booker had sat with her in the office, coming knots out of her hair. “We’ll get you clean. Whatever it takes.”
Since that night, Allie called once a week. Most times, they didn’t talk much; just being connected seemed to calm whatever drove Allie to drugs.
“I’m in a rehab called New Horizon,” Allie said during their last conversation. “I won’t let you down again.”
“This isn’t about me. You deserve to be happy and loved. Keep saying that as many times as it takes.”
She’d be released in a few weeks, and Booker would pick Allie up. He chose to believe Allie was strong enough to break the cycle.
Booker returned to the truck stop only once, to drop off boxes of Gloria’s dresses to Mimi and the other women. He’d expected to break down, screaming at himself for letting Gloria slip away. As he’d driven home, windows down, fall air rushing across his skin, he thought of the dark road Allie had traveled because grief metastasized inside her, and decided letting his wife go was long overdue.
He wasn’t sure what a second chance looked like. Dating apps? Hoping he ran into another woman at a bookstore? Maybe helping Allie was enough of a fresh start. Booker figured the answer would become clear when he was ready to see it.
Most nights, he sat outside alone, listening to the white noise of cars racing down the street.
~ ~ ~
July 2026
