Gloves Off, Hearts On

My week had been the same six days in a row, which was driving pills and inhalers and the occasional oxygen tank around town in a white van that smelled like hand sanitizer, and by Friday night I was about ready to lose my mind. Toni, twenty-eight, pharmacy delivery driver, professional circle-maker, that was me. The most exciting thing that happened all six days was an old guy on Kowhai Street who tried to tip me with a handwritten IOU for two meat pies, and I stood there in his driveway trying to explain that I could not accept baked goods as legal currency.

The pharmacy closed at midnight, which sounds late until you have actually finished a shift at midnight, and then it sounds like the middle of the night, because it is. I locked up, signed off the last delivery log, and sat in the van in the parking lot for a minute eating half a stale muesli bar out of the glovebox because dinner had not happened. My stomach was still growling, so I did the math on what was open at that hour in a town this small, and the answer was basically one place, the twenty-four hour hardware store two doors down. Hardware stores do not have good snacks. This is a fact. But they have something, usually, jerky or chips or those triangle sandwiches that taste like the fridge they have been sitting in, and I was hungry enough not to care.

So I locked the van and walked over, and the automatic door did that weird half-open stutter it does, which I later found out was a known problem, but at the time I just shouldered through and went in. Fluorescent lights, paint fumes, a kid at the register doing something on his phone with his whole face lit up blue. I found the snack rack, which was sad but present, and I grabbed a bag of chips and a fizzy drink and started wandering, because there is something about a hardware store at half past midnight that makes you want to look at things you will never buy. Socket sets. Extension cords. A clearance rack full of junk nobody has wanted since last Christmas.

That was where I found the snow globe fight.

There was a woman there, mid thirties I guessed at the time, tall, dark hair tied back, hi-vis jacket over a work shirt with a contractor logo on the pocket, holding a snow globe up to the light and turning it like she was inspecting a diamond. A stock clerk, a young guy with a box cutter clipped to his belt, was standing next to her with the exact face of a man who has explained something four times already. The globe had a crack running across the top of the dome, and inside was a little plastic snowman, and I could tell from two aisles away this conversation was not going anywhere good.

"It is damaged," she was saying, "which is the entire point of a clearance rack, I accept the damage, I am not asking you to hide the damage, I am asking you to sell it to me at the damage price."

"The sticker says four ninety," the kid said, "and the system won't let me do a markdown without a manager code, and the manager is not here till six."

"It is one dollar and the sticker is wrong and the crack is right there."

"System says four ninety."

I do not know what came over me. Boredom, probably, six days of it. I leaned around the end cap holding my chips and said, "Just shake it and tell him the crack leaks, then it is a hazard and he has to discount it for safety reasons, everyone wins."

Both of them looked at me. The clerk looked relieved in a guilty way, like I had said the thing he was thinking but was not allowed to think. The woman looked at me the way you look at a dog that has learned to open the gate, which is half annoyance and half respect.

"That is fraud," she said.

"It is negotiation," I said. "Also it is four dollars, who cares."

"I care about four dollars. Four dollars is a coffee. I am not paying a coffee for a snow globe with a crack in it, I am paying one dollar for a snow globe with a crack in it, those are different things."

"Why do you even want it?" I asked, and honestly it was a fair question, because she was dressed like she fixed wiring for a living and the snowman inside the globe had a painted-on smile that would haunt a person.

She turned it over in her hand and for a second she looked almost embarrassed, which did not suit her face at all. "The base is wood," she said. "Good chunk of rimu. I have a shelf bracket situation at home and this base is the right size, I can gut the globe part and keep the base. Four ninety for a shelf bracket is insulting, one dollar is a fair price for firewood with a snowman in it."

The clerk said, "I literally cannot change the price," in the tone of a man whose whole life is other people's systems, and she sighed and put the globe in her hand basket like she was going to pay the four ninety under protest and write a letter about it later, and I moved on down the aisle feeling like I had done my good deed for the night, or at least my entertainment.

Then it went wrong, in the way things do, and it went wrong over gloves.

The clearance bin at the end of the paint aisle had a jumble of stuff in it, and buried near the bottom was one pack of those blue disposable nitrile gloves, the heavy ones, the good ones, the kind I buy for the van because cleaning up sick and spills is half my job and cheap gloves split the second you look at them. I had been meaning to buy a pack for two weeks. So I reached into the bin and dug down and got it, and when I pulled it out there was a hand already attached to the other end of it.

"Ah," she said.

"Ah," I said back, because I am quick like that.

"I was reaching for these," she said, not letting go.

"So was I," I said. "You were over there being robbed by the pricing system, I do not know how you had time."

She let go, which surprised me, and then she reached in and pulled out the pack herself, holding it up between two fingers, and I realized she had let go only so she could win it properly. There was a little ink smudge on her knuckle and a scrape of something silver on her forearm, solder or filler or whatever electricians get on them, and her name tag on the hi-vis said NAN in handwriting that had clearly been gone over with marker more than once.

"Nan," I said, reading it.

"Correct," she said. "And you are the snow globe heckler."

"Toni."

"Are you a heckler professionally or is it a hobby?"

"Hobby. I drive deliveries for the pharmacy next door, so mostly I just drive and think about heckling."

"Pharmacy," she said, and looked at the gloves, and looked at me. "Okay, that changes things. You probably need these more than I do, actually, you would have my vote on pure occupational grounds, if we were voting."

"Except we are not voting," I said.

"Except we are not voting," she agreed. "So how do you want to settle it? Rock, paper, scissors. Arm wrestle. You could just be a decent person and hand them over."

"What are they even for, it is one in the morning, what are you wiring at one in the morning?"

"The ice rink chiller, it died at nine and I drew the short straw, and the job needs gloves because the last thing I want is to get coolant on my hands, and the supplier runs a pack of these at four twenty, which is a crime, so I was going to buy the clearance one, and then you came along with your chips and your opinions."

The gloves were marked four twenty on the shelf tag, which I only knew because I had looked at that exact tag two weeks earlier standing in this exact aisle, and it is weird the things your brain keeps. Anyway. She was holding the gloves and I was deciding how badly I wanted them, and the honest answer was not badly enough to fight a stranger in a hardware store, but enough to enjoy the fight a little.

"Tell you what," I said. "Split them. There are like a hundred in a pack, you take fifty, I take fifty, we both walk away rich."

"That is the worst deal I have ever been offered," she said. "Half a pack of gloves that now has a provenance of bin dust and stranger hands."

"Bin dust is sterile, I would know, I work adjacent to medical things."

"That is not how sterile works."

"It is close to how sterile works."

She was smiling by then, I noticed, the kind of smile that starts at one corner and has to be talked into the rest of the way, and I was smiling too, which I had not really done since the meat pie incident on Tuesday. The clerk had wandered off to stock something, bored of us, and it was just the two of us and the paint fumes and the hum of the drink fridge two aisles over.

"Fine," she said. "Split them. But I get the top half of the pack, the ones nobody has breathed on."

"Deal," I said, and we stood there in the paint aisle at one in the morning splitting a packet of nitrile gloves like it was a business merger, and that was when the lights over the entrance did the flicker thing, and somewhere near the front door there was a clunk and a whirr that neither of us thought anything of at the time.

The clunk and the whirr turned out to be the automatic door having one of its moments, because when Nan walked over to leave, with her half of the gloves and her snow globe and her toolbox, the door just did not open. She stood in front of it and waved her hand at the sensor like she was hailing a taxi, and nothing happened, and she waved again, slower, the way you do when you think the machine just needs to see you being patient. "Nope," she said. "That is a no from the door!"

"Is it on a timer or something?" I asked, drifting over with my chips.

"I think it is on a breakdown," she said. "Look." She pointed at the little box on the wall beside the door, where a light that had been green was now blinking orange in a way that did not feel friendly. There was a sticker under it, half peeled off, that said something about maintenance and a phone number, and she leaned in and read it and then said a word I will not repeat here. "Locked down for safety, ten minute delay, do not attempt to force. Great. Fantastic. I love a system that punishes me for existing."

"So we are trapped," I said.

"We are detained," she said. "Trapped implies we did something. This is just administrative."

We looked at each other, and then we both laughed, properly, the kind where you have to put something down, and I set my chips on a stack of bags of potting mix and had to sit on them because I was laughing too hard to stand. She dropped her toolbox on the