The Pawnshop Line Switch

The rain was the kind that doesn't fall so much as hang there, and I'd been standing under the awning next to the diner for ten minutes. The ferry terminal across the wharf had its lights smeared sideways in the wet. I checked my phone. Twenty minutes early. God. Twenty minutes early to a blind date, which meant twenty minutes of standing somewhere looking like I had nowhere to be, which I didn't.

The shop next door had a hand-painted sign. Poppy's Pawn & Trade. The window was fogged from a little electric heater inside, and behind the fog there was a display case, and behind the display case there was a man at a counter with his sleeves rolled up, hunched over something small.

I went in mostly to get out of the drizzle. That's what I told myself anyway. The door had a bell on it, a real bell, not that electronic chirp, and it rang once and the man looked up.

He had dark hair going gray at the temples and reading glasses pushed up on his forehead and he was holding, of all things, a tiny piece of track in one hand and a pair of tweezers in the other.

"Sorry," I said. "Just killing time."

"No killing time in here," he said. "Only spending it well or badly."

I laughed before I could stop myself. That's the danger of a line like that, it comes out of a stranger and you laugh and then you're committed to being a person who laughs in a pawnshop.

He set down the tweezers. "You're not from here."

"Is it that obvious?"

"Nobody from here comes in off the wharf in November without a reason. They all know what I sell." He wiped his hand on his trousers and came around the counter. "Dev."

"Franny."

And then he did the thing I'd learn later he does, where his face does a slow recognition and then a bigger one. "Franny. Hold on. Francesca? Sheila's friend from the mainland, the grain inspector."

I felt my ears go hot. "Oh no!"

"Oh yes!" He was grinning now, actually grinning, arms crossed, leaning back against the display case. "She said a woman, thirty-three, works with grain, hates small talk. I said I'd meet her at the diner at nine."

"So I walked into my own blind date's shop. By accident."

"I didn't think you'd walk into my shop twenty minutes early. What are the odds."

"Well." I shrugged off my coat, which was the wrong move weather-wise but the right move nerves-wise, gave my hands something to hold. "This is mortifying."

"It's not. It's the best thing that's happened in this shop since a fellow tried to pawn a canoe paddle he'd stolen from his own brother." He straightened up. "Look. The diner can wait. It's been there forty years, it'll wait another forty. Come see this instead."

I should have said no. I will be honest about that impulse, or I won't, whatever, the impulse existed and I ignored it, because he'd already turned and was walking toward the back of the shop and I was already following.

The thing on the back counter was a model railway. Not a kid's set, not a circle of track on a sheet of plywood. A proper layout, maybe six feet by three, with little hills made of plaster and a tiny harbor town and a bridge over a painted river, and a locomotive sitting on the main line painted a deep maroon.

"My grandfather's," Dev said. "He ran it in his basement in Katarina for thirty years. I got it when he died and rebuilt half the wiring. It's the only thing in this shop that isn't for sale."

"It's beautiful."

"Wait till it runs."

He picked up a controller, an old brass-and-bakelite thing with one big dial, and turned it a quarter turn. The engine hummed, took a breath, and rolled. It went along the main line past the little harbor, under the wire of a telegraph pole, over the bridge, and the headlamp threw a tiny yellow cone into the painted fog.

I don't know how to explain what that did to me. It shouldn't have done anything. It's a toy train. But the room was warm and the rain was doing its hanging thing against the glass and this grown man with sawdust on his forearms was watching a little maroon engine with his whole face.

"Can I try?"

He handed it over without a word, and our fingers touched on the dial, and something went through me like the engine taking power. Not subtle. Not deniable. He felt it too, I could see that, his thumb stayed where it was half a beat too long and then he stepped back and put his hands in his pockets like a man removing them from a situation.

I rolled the dial up. The engine picked up speed. Too much. It hit the switch at the far end and wobbled and I rolled back down in a panic and the engine settled and Dev laughed, a real laugh, from the chest.

"Slow in, slow out," he said. "That's the whole hobby. Everything else is decoration."

"Slow in, slow out," I said, and rolled it forward again, gentle this time, and the engine ran smooth and long around the loop and I watched it come back to where it started and keep going.

We stood there a while. The heater ticked. Somewhere out front a truck went through the puddles on the wharf road.

"Sheila said you just moved here," Dev said.

"Six weeks ago. Sackville before that, before that the valley. I go where the elevators are." I kept my eyes on the train. "Divorced two years. You probably know that too."

"He worked on the boats, she said."

"Ferries. Different coast." I rolled the train through the switch nice and slow. "It was fine, mostly. It just stopped being anything. That's a worse reason to leave a man than a bad reason, but there it is."

"It's a common reason. Most of the divorces I know are that one."

"What about you?"