Lost and Found
Hurley could feel wary eyes following his progress up and down the Goodwill clearance aisle.
When kids returned to school and neighborhood yards and garage sales wound down with the end of summer, Hurley resorted to charity shops like Goodwill and the Salvation Army for trinkets and trash to resell. The trick to making such shopping trips profitable was buying from these stores’ forlorn clearance aisles.
He was a notorious haggler, too, if he believed his cashier had any real decision-making power.
“Sir, is there something I can help you with?” Hurley heard a young woman ask behind him. “Are you okay? Is there someone I can call for you?”
Hurley slowly turned. The woman was actually a girl, unlikely a day over eighteen. The name tag pinned to her Goodwill smock said Rachel.
“Well, Rachel, do you figure you’ve got the last of these little ice cream dishes to complete the set? In my experience, they go faster as the whole set. Probably not, huh? That’s why they’re in clearance.”
“I’m sorry,” Rachel said.
“No problem,” Hurley replied. “This isn’t exactly my first rodeo. I’ll still squeeze some profit out of them. They’re genuine crystal. But I shouldn’t be telling you that.”
“No, I’m sorry because I thought you might be lost,” Rachel continued. “You looked like you didn’t know where you were. I was afraid you needed some sort of assistance. You know, you’re old.”
“Old?” Hurley replied. He thumbed a strap of his bib overalls defiantly. “I’m only a day older than I was yesterday. Rachel, were you scared I’d wandered into your store from some sort of home?”
“A little bit, yeah,” the girl said, her face flushed pink with embarrassment. “I’m so sorry, sir.”
Hurley smiled slyly. Maybe he could turn this around in his favor somehow. “How about you give me a discount, like an early senior citizen discount, and we forget this little incident ever happened? People my age are always forgetting things. Or so I’ve heard.”
The girl nodded, then ran off to find the floor manager she needed to authorize Hurley’s negotiated senior citizen discount.
Brian Beatty is the author of five poetry collections and a spoken word album. His small Hurley stories have appeared in numerous print and online publications, including The Airgonaut, Alien Buddha Zine, The Blue Mountain Review, Chautauqua Journal, Cholla Needles, Cowboy Jamboree, The Drabble, Hoosier Noir, Hoot, Microfiction Monday Magazine, The Museum of Americana, Paragraph Planet, SoFloPoJo and The Whisky Blot.
