Stocking Night

The shop smells like old paper and dust. Floyd Carver stands among the shelves and waits. He is twenty-three, two years out of college, and he narrates his own life in his head the way other people bite their nails.

He is waiting for Angie Swanson, he thinks. She is twenty-three. She works here now. She was in his senior seminar two years ago and he never did anything about it.

Stop narrating, he tells himself. That is also narrating.

He laughs at that, alone, and a woman browsing the poetry section looks up at him. He pretends to study a shelf of local histories.

The catalog is in his bag. A 1955 hosiery catalog, mail order, forty pages, near mint. He found it in an estate lot in a town three hours north. The widow wanted the furniture gone more than the paper. He paid twenty dollars for the whole box. This one catalog alone might be worth two hundred, if the right buyer comes along.

His phone buzzes. A text from Angie.

Parking. Be there in five. You better not have sold it to somebody else lol.

He types back. Still here. Still yours.

Then he deletes "still yours" because it sounds like too much. Then he puts it back because deleting it felt worse. He sends it. He puts the phone in his pocket and stops narrating for maybe four seconds.

* * *

The bell over the door goes off at five past. He hears her before he sees her, heels on the wood floor, and then she comes around the shelf of old postcards and there she is.

Angie Swanson. Hair shorter than in college. Glasses now. A cardigan with the sleeves pushed up.

"Floyd Carver," she says.

"Angie Swanson."

They stand there a second. Then she hugs him, quick, and it is over before he can do anything with his arms except pat her back once.

"God, okay," she says. "Hi. Sorry. It's been two years and my greeting is a drive-by hug. Come on, back office. Front of house is Dianne's territory and she's on a tear about the Dewey system again."

She leads him past the register, down a short hall, into a room the size of a walk-in closet. Boxes everywhere. Labels in her handwriting. One desk lamp, a green shade, and a couch against the wall that has clearly been there since the fifties.

"This is it," she says. "The empire. Watch your step, that box is 1948 seed catalogs and it's worth more than my car."

"Your car is a 2004 Corolla."

"See? Exactly."

He sets his bag on the desk. She pulls a second chair over with her foot and sits, and he sits, and for a second neither of them says anything and he can hear the radiator clicking.

"So," she says. "You sell it. I buy it. The archive gets a gem. Everybody wins. Show me."

He takes the catalog out of the bag. It is in a Mylar sleeve. He holds it flat on the desk between them and does not let go of it, which is a salesman thing, he knows. Anchor the object. He flips the sleeve back at one corner.

Angie leans in.

"Oh," she says. Quiet. Like it slipped out.

The cover is a drawing, but the inside is photo after photo. Women in girdles and seams and Cuban heels, hands on hips, one holding a phone receiver to her ear like the photographer just called mid-shot.

"This condition," Floyd says, and his sales voice comes on without permission. "No foxing. No creases at the spine. Somebody's grandmother ordered from this and then put it in a drawer for seventy years and never touched it again."

"You're doing the voice."

"What voice?"

"The salesman voice. I remember it. You did a presentation in seminar once and half the room leaned forward." She looks at the page, not at him. "It's a good voice."

"Thank you," he says, and then, because he cannot help himself: "Two hundred, firm, and it's a steal. Comparable copies have gone for three hundred plus at auction in the last year."

"Two hundred."

"Two hundred and I throw in the original order envelope. It's in the back. Pencil, customer name, everything."

"Two twenty-five," she says. "Deal. God. Don't let me negotiate with you when I'm this happy, it's embarrassing."

He writes the invoice. She signs it. He counts the cash she hands him from a coffee tin marked MISC, which is a very archivist thing, he thinks, and does not say.

The deal is done. The money is counted. He says so out loud, even, "Okay, that's settled, it's yours," and slides the catalog across the desk.

"Settled and staying settled," she says. "Whatever else happens in this room is not part of the sale. Not a discount, not a favor, not a thing."

She does not pick it up. She turns pages instead, slowly, one hand flat like she is afraid of her own fingers.

"Can I ask you something weird," she says.

"I sell weird things for a living. Ask."

She turns to a page near the middle. A full-page photo, a model seated, legs crossed, seam straight as a plumb line down the back of her calf.

"These. The stockings in the photos. What do they actually feel like?"

Floyd blinks. "You want me to describe nylon?"

"I want you to describe the difference." She pushes her glasses up. "I collect them. Full disclosure, this is not a professional question. I have a drawer at home with maybe thirty pairs. Vintage seamed, mostly. I wear them. I have never worn them with anybody watching, ever, and I think about that a lot, and now there's a man in my office who touched this thing when it was new or at least touched a lot of things from that era, so."

"So you're asking the salesman."

"I'm asking you. Floyd." Now she looks at him. "Sorry if that's out of nowhere. Say so and I'll drop it and we'll talk about seed catalogs."

He thinks about the hug. He thinks about the deleted text. He thinks about two years of narrating in his head and never once saying a word of it out loud.

"It's not out of nowhere," he says. "Okay. The difference. Modern nylon is uniform. Dead, sort of. These were sheer but with weight. A little more grip. The seam is a heavier thread, it sits up off the skin, you'd feel it against a chair or a boot all day. And they had to be coaxed on. No spandex. You roll them up your hand and work them up slow or you put your thumb through them."

"Through them," she repeats. "Yeah. I've done that. Twice. I cried the second time, they were French."

"That's very you," he says.

"What's that mean?"

"You cried about a stocking and it's the most reasonable thing I've heard all week."

She laughs. The lamp light catches the edge of the catalog page. Her hand is still flat on the photo, on the printed leg.

"Here's the weird part," she says. "And you can say no and we invoice each other like adults forever. I've never had anyone watch. But I've thought about it. Somebody sitting right there while I put a pair on. Telling me if the seam is straight. That kind of thing. It does something to me, that idea. Has for years."

Floyd's heart is loud in his own ears. He keeps his voice level, mostly.

"Like right here?"

"God, no. The couch smells like 1974 and Dianne has a key." She turns another page. "Home. Someday. Not today even. I'm just. Saying it. Out loud. To a person."

"Thank you for saying it to me," he says.

"You're welcome. Your turn or we're lopsided."

"Okay." He breathes. "I've thought about you since seminar. Two years. Never said it. That's my out loud."

Angie looks at him over her glasses for a second, then back down at the catalog, and smiles at the page like the page said something.

"Well," she says. "Small steps. You held the object, I held the confession. Fair trade." She closes the catalog and squares it on the desk. "Stay for coffee. I have a kettle and exactly one good cup, and I want to hear how you ended up driving around buying dead people's stockings catalogs for a living."

"It's a long story."

"Good. I have a long afternoon and no Dianne."

* * *

He tells her the long story anyway. Estate lot, three hours north, twenty dollars for a whole box of junk with one miracle in it. She listens with her elbows on the desk. The kettle clicks off halfway through and neither of them moves.

Then, near the end, he says, "Actually. Hang on. I might still have a pair in the case."

"What pair?"

"Stockings. Props. Dianne would faint." He unlatches the sample case against the wall. "Sellers send me boxes. Some of it's wearable. I keep the good stuff separate." He pulls out a flat tissue package, unwraps it on the desk. A pair of seamed stockings, beige, deadstock, the tag still on. Nothing else.

Angie goes quiet in a way he has not seen from her yet.

"Those are real," she says.

"1956, maybe. Come with the estate, come with me. Which sounds bad. You know what I mean."

She touches the nylon with one fingertip. "Can I feel them? Against my skin. I mean actually on. Is that. Can I say that?"

"You just did," he says. "Yeah."

"Okay." She stands. "Okay okay okay. If this gets weird you have to tell me, I've lost my calibration entirely."

"It doesn't get weird."

She reaches under her skirt, there is a small, furious struggle with a hem, and she hooks her thumb under a strap so he can see it, a garter belt, black, plain, the kind you buy new.

"I came to work wearing one," she says. "Under everything. Like a lunatic. For no reason. For years I've done this."

"That's not a lunatic thing."

"It's a little bit a lunatic thing, Floyd." But she is smiling, and she hikes her skirt up over her thighs, standing there in the green lamp light, the belt sitting loose