Page 2 of Timeless
“I’m sure I can,” she said, seeing a few old books in the box as well and wondering if any of them were worth anything.
“Okay. Well, it’s yours, then. I’ve got to run,” he said. “Good luck with it, I guess.”
“Thank you,” she replied.
The guy left the shop, clanging the bell above the door as he went, and she went in the back to make herself another cup of coffee. Once it was ready, Quinn returned to the box on the counter, despite having several other things to do, like cataloging and inventorying all the items that were stacked on top of each other and blocking her path from the front to the back in what was sure to be a violation of the fire code, but something told her to pay attention to this box that would make her no money at all.
“I sure do have an eye for business,” she joked to herself.
She pulled the photo box out of the larger box and noticed that it had dust on it, but that fingers had wiped some of it away, probably when they’d found it to begin with. She could make out fingerprints on the front of the long box as well. Those had been left when they’d opened it to see what was inside. That was one of her favorite parts of her job. She never knew what she was about to find when opening something like this. It could be photos, yes, but it could also be something that someone just needed to store somewhere. Maybe it would be old coins that she could sell online and make some decent money on. She’d found a few good stamps on envelopes once. They hadn’t been mint, but she’d made some money on those with a local collector she’d known since she’d moved here.
As she pulled back the old lid, Quinn wondered if thebox itself was worth anything. It was just solid cardboard, so probably not, but she was sure that it held stories, at least. She loved stories. When people came in to sell her something or get it appraised – which she’d gotten certified to do after buying the shop, spending a lot of money to do that and still not making back her investment – there was always a story. She’d found old military dog tags in a box once. A woman had asked her to take a look at her father’s old things after his death, and she hadn’t known that his dog tags from World War II were in there. She’d opted not to depart with those and told the story of his time in the war.
When Quinn took a look inside this box, though, at first, she was disappointed because itwasonly pictures, but after her initial disappointment, she began pulling the old photos out one by one and setting them gently on the counter. Some of them were quite old, and she didn’t want to risk damaging them further than time already had. Some of them were so damaged that she couldn’t make out what they were pictures of. People, probably. Old photos were more purposeful than for pleasure or documenting landscapes, vacations, or your dinner for an Instagram post. People didn’t even smile in older photos because it was so expensive to have them taken. They were a way to almost catalog someone’s very existence because the only way to do that before would’ve been to commission an artist to paint a portrait, and most people didn’t have that kind of money.
“Wow,” she let out when she saw one of the photos. “She’s beautiful,” she said of one of the women in it.
Quinn picked it up and looked a little closer. Time had gotten to this photo, but she could still make out most of the details within it. Staring at it for longer than she should, she eventually set it back down and picked up one photo after the other. Deciding that they probably wouldn’t fetch much but that it was worth setting them out for people to at least look at, she put them aside to deal with later. She laughed because she’d decided to price them at only twenty-five cents apiece. Then, she checked out the few books in the box.
One of them was definitely an old romance novel with a bare-chested, muscled man on the cover, his long blonde hair blowing in the fake breeze, published in the 1980s. She giggled at that ridiculous cover and set the book aside. That probably wouldn’t sell here, but she might be able to give it to a thrift store or donate it to the library. The other two books looked more interesting, though. She wasn’t sure if they’d get much, but she would look them up later to see if they were worth anything at all. One looked to have been bound by hand. It wasn’t a journal, from what she could tell with a brief look, but it seemed like something someone had taken great care in making. She wasn’t sure what to do with that one just yet. Outside of an old spatula that was, for some reason, inside this box, and an old blue scarf that looked like it had been knitted by hand, there wasn’t anything else inside.
She kept the scarf, checked on the spatula because even old kitchen utensils and appliances could be worth something to the right buyer, and then went about adding the photos to another box of pictures she had. Tagging them with twenty-five cents, she set them in the front to give them the best chance of finding a new owner and returned to the books. She didn’t get any other walk-in traffic, which gave her time to look up the books’ possible value, label them, and put them in her book display case. After that, she had to get back to the orders that required processing and shipping out that day.
Still not sure why she felt so strangely calm about the day ahead, she went into the back, where she had her packing and shipping station set up. Using the security camera to keep an eye on the front as she worked, she thought about how if nothing happened today – besides this man bringing her a box that wouldn’t get her much money, if any at all – she’d be disappointed because something inside her had been telling her that today mattered. Then, while she was wrapping up an old candle holder, she heard the bell over the door.
“Oh,” she whispered to herself and smiled when she looked up at the person who had just walked in.
CHAPTER 2
Abby had taken the advice, and after grabbing herself a cup of coffee from the new place down the block, she’d decided to leave her car where she’d managed to find a spot and continue walking. Her writer’s block had been hitting hard as of late, and she wasn’t sure what had changed in her life to cause it. Always able to find a new idea and start typing it out, fleshing out the setting, plot, and characters along the way with relative ease, recently, she’d been staring at the dreaded blinking cursor, wondering if she’d ever be able to write another book.
After the success of her first one, the publisher, who had made a lot of money off her work, was ready for the next, and the one after that, since she’d stupidly signed a three-book deal. She only thought it was stupid now. When she’d signed, it had been amazing. Someone believed that her first book was good enough to not only buy that one but also two more that she hadn’t even written yet. But now that she was supposed to be delivering this second book to them, she wished she’d signed a one-book deal and had taken the time to write her follow-up first before promising it to anyone.
She knew the reason she’d been struggling, if she really thought about it hard enough. It was the fact that the first book was successful. People had been calling her the next big thing as an author and had compared her to a few of the greats. That was enough to go to anyone’s head, but in her case, it hadn’t brought out her ego; it had brought out her impostor syndrome. How was her sophomore novel supposed to compare? She’d only had the one idea and had taken a few years to get that book out. Now, her publisher wanted the next two in two years because that was the best way to capitalize on the success of the first one.
Speaking of that success, it had gotten to be a little too much for her. Never wanting to be a famous author anyway,she’d retreated back to this small town from a suburb of Los Angeles the previous year. LA had been her dream once, and she’d felt accomplished when she’d made the move there after college, but being in that city, surrounded by famous people and with a publisher asking her to go to in-person events and meet with studio execs who were interested in optioning her book, had her anxiety going through the roof. It was only then that she’d changed her mind about living in LA forever and had turned right around and moved back home.
She’d wanted to get out of the world’s smallest town every single day when she’d been growing up, but a few years ago – if she had to say for sure, it would be about five years or so ago – she started to feel this longing, this pull back toward the place she’d once wanted to flee the first second she could. She hadn’t returned right away, but the pull had been getting stronger and stronger, and when she’d finally made the move, she’d brought the money that she’d made off her book and the advance for the next one with her. She hadn’t so much gone house-shopping as she’d found a small ranch with two bedrooms online and had asked her parents, who still lived in the area, to check it out for her. Her dad, a former-farmer-turned-contractor with his own business, had given it an all-clear, while her mom, a homemaker, had told her how it would be a great starter home and how it had a solid kitchen. She’d bought it sight unseen and had spent most days holed up in her office, which she’d turned the second bedroom into.
Lectures from both of her parents were now a weekly occurrence. Her mother wanted her to get out to get fresh air. Her dad thought she should haveotherhobbies outside of writing, which was what he considered her career to be. He didn’t mean it in a bad way. He just didn’t understand it. Her mom had suggested that she at least start taking walks, and Abby had done so. Her walks usually lasted about an hour, and she stayed around her neighborhood. She hadn’t really met many of her neighbors, but she liked their dogs, which always sniffed her and asked for attention as they walked past on their leashes. She was sure their owners were fine, too.
Her initial plan had been to get a dog herself because that would’ve given her another reason to take walks as well as have someone at home so she didn’t feel so lonely, but a dog would need her focus and attention, and right now, she had a book to write. So, she’d tabled that idea until after at least book number two was with the editor, and her mother had then suggested that she not only take walks around her neighborhood but also go into town to check out all of the changes.
“This place is really growing,” her mother had said at dinner one night. “You should stop by and get a coffee, take a walk down the street, and maybe stop into some of the shops.”
“I don’t need to buy anything. I buy everything I need online, Mom. They deliver it to my door. All I have to do is unpack it.”
“And that is unhealthy,” her mother had replied. “If you don’t leave your house, how will you ever make friends or find someone to share your life with?”
‘This again,’Abby had thought to herself.
She was in her late twenties now, and ever since coming back to her hometown, her mom had been concerned that she would die an old spinster with six cats and no one to take care of her when she was old. Of course, it didn’t matter that Abby didn’t want kids, for taking-care-of-her-when-old purposes or otherwise, or that she was a dog person more than a cat one. Her mother had had children and took care of the house, and that was supposed to be Abby’s path, too, her future: pregnant three times, like her mother, grandchildren for the woman to spoil, and a home-cooked meal on the table every night for those three kids and a husband.
Her mother still hadn’t adjusted to the fact that none of that was going to happen and that writing was an actual job. Just because Abby sat behind her desk at home all day didn’t mean she had copious amount of free time to dedicate to a family she didn’t want. Her mom was the kind of woman who was always busy, and her life worked forher. She was cooking, cleaning, working for the church as a volunteer, going to bingo, playing cards with her friends, and getting a littletoo involved in the lives of her three kids. Still, Abby decided that if she took the woman’s advice at least once to get herself a coffee and walk downtown, if it could even be called that, she could go home, tell her mother that she did the thing, and let that be the end of it.
After passing by a few shops she wasn’t interested in, she considered turning back because her mom didn’t sayhow longshe had to walk for, but something kept propelling her forward, and a strange sense of calm came over her the longer she walked. The streets also weren’tthatbusy, not like they’d been in New York on her last trip for a book event. She’d barely been able to get two feet without someone’s shoulder ramming into her own there, butthis, Abby could handle. This was just three or four people on their way wherever they were going, nodding their hellos as they walked past and around her without shoulder-checking her.Thiswas actually kind of nice.
Not long after discovering that she didn’t mind walking on this street, she came to a stop in front of a shop, not sure what had her stopping there. It was just an old antique shop that both looked like it fit here and also like it was somehow out of time. Abby took a drink of her far-too-bitter coffee and tossed the paper cup into the trash can on the sidewalk. At least, she could already tell her mother that she’d never go back there because the coffee was just terrible, but maybe she could also tell her that she went into an antique shop and looked around. Surely, that would give them something to discuss that wasn’t her lack of a love life or friends.