Page 35 of Exchanged

We troop down the stairs and into the hallway, and Lana clicks her way out the front door.

Garrett looks at Dad and me. “That was normal, right? GYA does that for everyone?”

Dad nods, but we all know it’s a lie. Because even if GYA checks up on each of their placements, Lana’s questions were not normal. It was as if she were looking for something in particular, trying to find a reason to send Garrett home.

That doesn’t make sense, I tell myself later while taking inventory of the women’s clothing room. It must be GYA’s standard procedure. I’m just being paranoid. I push Lana’s interrogation from my mind and instead dwell on Garrett’s responses. When given the opportunity to get out of the situation, he chose Irontown, chose our family.

He chose to stay.

TEN

Garrett asks Dad if he can work a few shifts each week, so Dad has me train him on the front register. On a Saturday afternoon, I stand behind the counter with Garrett, the soft cadence of an all-day rain pattering against the windows, very aware of how close we are to each other. He wears a navy-colored T-shirt that’s tight around his arms and chest. It looks good with the red-brown of his hair.

I really need to stop thinking about him like this.

“So you just leave all the cash in the register at the end of the day?” Garrett asks.

“What else would we do with it?”

“I dunno. Bring it to the bank? Lock it in the safe or something? It seems like you’re asking for trouble, just leaving it all in there.”

I snort. “I love that you think we own a safe and have enough cash to be worth stealing. Everyone pays with cards these days. Plus, this is Irontown. Who the hell is going to break into our antique shop? We have a fifty-year-old lock on the front door, and that’s about it for security.”

He looks uncertain but doesn’t have a chance to respond. The front door opens, and Mrs. Makinen toddles in. She removes her plastic poncho, hangs it on a peg near the door, and approaches the counter. She’s five feet tall with curly gray hair pulled back by a headband, her teal sweatshirt embossed with a pair of kittens.

“Hi, Enzo!” she croaks, the smoker’s rattle of her throat making my name sound gravelly. Her eyes drift over to Garrett, and her face spreads into a toothy grin. “And who. Is. This?”

“I’m Garrett.”

“You’re not from here,” she says with the self-important excitement of an archaeologist discovering a rare artifact.

“No, I’m from Georgia.”

She reaches forward and gives the back of his hand a playful tap. “A Southern boy!”

I try to save him. “Garrett is staying with us for the year. He’ll be helping out around the shop.”

“Then maybe he can help me! Today, I’m looking for something … surprising. Something … luminous.”

Her favorite pastime is to provide a vague adjective and have me or Emma or my dad, but not Aunt Liz—she hates Aunt Liz—guide her around the shop. She never has a specific thing she wants, other than companionship and a sense of importance. After half an hour, she’ll buy an item, its price based on how enthusiastically we engage her in small talk.

Garrett shoots me a worried glance. “I don’t know the shop that well yet.”

“Nonsense!” Mrs. Makinen says, moving beside the counter and grabbing his arm. The top of her head barely reaches his bicep. He allows himself to be guided out from behind the counter. She gazes at him expectantly.

He looks back at me. I can see on his face that he is trying to figure out where in our shop he might bring her to find something “surprising” and “luminous.”

Unfortunately for him, the door opens again, and Ryan Beltrami enters. He has a great taste in music, and whenever he visits the shop, we spend at least an hour flipping through the new crates of old vinyl records Dad brings in.

“I gotta wait on other customers,” I say helplessly. “But you two take your time.”

Garrett shakes his head at me, the corner of his lip curved upward, and flips me off behind Mrs. Makinen’s back. Then the two of them head off, Mrs. Makinen clutching Garrett’s arm.

For the next half hour, Ryan and I look through the records, but I listen as Garrett and Mrs. Makinen move through the house. I hear Mrs. Makinen telling him all the same stories she tells me. Her voice gradually grows more animated, and I assume he must be a good listener, asking the right questions and responding how she wants. At one point, he makes a joke that causes her to laugh so hard that I think she’ll choke up sixty years of cigarette smoke.

When they return, he’s carrying a psychedelic glass lava lamp from the seventies—both surprising and luminous. Well done, Garrett. It’s also priced at $90, so he must have made a decent first impression on her. I slide behind the front counter, she pays and dons her plastic poncho, and Garrett follows her outside with the lamp.

A moment later, he walks back through the front door, raindrops clinging to his hair. He shakes his head.