Chapter 15: Black Friday

He hung up before I could answer.

I put the phone face down on the floor.

"He means it," I said.

"He means it tonight." Felix pulled the blanket up over my shoulder. "Tomorrow he'll mean something stupider."

He was right.

At 6:45 Sunday morning, every department head in the building got a memo.

I read it sitting cross-legged on my narrow bed, in Felix's white shirt.

Due to the ongoing lease dispute with the Faulkner parcel, all discretionary spending on the holiday windows is frozen, effective immediately.

No overtime. No parts orders. No night electrician.

Laurence Bancroft, President.

"Six forty-five again," Felix said from the pillow. "He thinks it's a power hour."

"There's no lease dispute."

"There is now. He just announced one."

"Can you stop it?"

"Yes. One call."

I looked at him.

He looked back, and waited.

"No," I said. "If you fix it, it's his store versus his uncle's wife again. Let me do it my way."

"Then I'll make coffee."

"You'll make coffee and you won't talk."

"I almost never talk," he said, and got up to make it.

By ten the crew was in the workshop.

Every one of them had read the memo. Nobody had been asked to come in.

"No overtime," Bex said. "So we're volunteers now. Great. I've always wanted to be a church."

"You don't have to do this," I said.

"Shut up, Dess."

At eleven the motor in Window Four burned out.

Window Four was the toy train. It ran a figure eight through a tiny paper Chicago, and on a Sunday it had two hundred people in front of it.

The train stopped dead under the little Picasso.

A boy in a red snowsuit started to wail.

I stood on the sidewalk and looked at the train.

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