The Loan Shark Smiles

"She's my cousin," you say.

Della looks at Briar. Briar looks at Della. Somewhere downstairs the furnace kicks on, and in the silence it sounds like applause.

"Your cousin," Della says.

"From. Away."

"From away." Della's eyes travel from Briar's bare feet to her bare legs to your shirt to her hair, which looks like someone painted it with fire and then let it dry in the wind. "Your cousin who answers your door at seven in the morning wearing your clothes and nothing else."

"She got in late," you say. "The storm."

"I'm told I'm very distant," Briar adds helpfully. "Several generations."

Della holds out the paper bag. You take it. She doesn't let go right away.

"Where's the fox, Ethan?"

"She got out," you say, which is true, and which you say so badly that Della's eyebrows climb all the way into her bangs.

"She got out. Of a locked crate. With eight stitches in her."

"She was very determined," says Briar.

Della lets go of the bag. She looks at you for a long moment, the look she used to give you in eleventh grade when you said you'd studied, and then at Briar, and something passes over her face that isn't anger exactly. More like a door closing quietly.

"Call me if you see her," she says, and goes down the stairs.

You shut the door and lean your forehead on it.

"She loves you," Briar says behind you.

"She loved me. When we were seventeen. She dumped me for a guy with a snowmobile."

"Hm." A pause. "She still looks at you like you're hers."

"She does not."

"I've been watching people look at people for three centuries," Briar says. "Don't argue with an expert."

You can't leave her upstairs. She tells you so, gravely, and then demonstrates by trying to stay on the landing while you go down to open the store, and you get as far as the register before you hear a soft thump and find her sitting on the top step with her face gone gray and her arms wrapped around her stomach.

"End of the street," she says faintly. "I told you."

"The register is forty feet away."

"Forty feet is a lot when you're attached to a man by a law older than your country."

So she comes down. You find her a pair of your sweatpants with the drawstring pulled tight and a sweater that falls to her knees, and she refuses socks on principle. She walks your aisles barefoot like she's touring a museum.

"Don't touch the nail bins," you tell her.

"Why would I touch the... ow." She jerks her hand back from a bin of tenpenny nails and shakes it. "Why do you have so many?"

"It's a hardware store."

"It's a fortress." She turns a slow circle, taking in the bins and the hanging chain and the old cast-iron stove, and something passes over her face you can't read. "He built himself a fortress and called it a shop."

"Who did?"

She doesn't answer. She goes to look at the seed rack instead, and reads every packet out loud, delighted, as if they're poems.

By eleven she has rung up a customer (Mr. Abernathy, who buys a box of fuses and leaves looking dazed and smitten), asked if the register is a music box because of the way it chimes, and gone upstairs to warm a muffin in the microwave.

You know there's a problem when you hear the bang.

She's standing in the kitchen staring up at your ceiling, where a bright yellow constellation of egg is slowly dripping onto the floor. There's no muffin in sight.

"I wanted to see," she says, "what it would do."

"To an egg."

"In its shell. In the hot box." She looks at you, and her forearms are glowing faintly, and she's trying very hard not to laugh. "I have learned what it does."

You clean the ceiling. She holds the stepladder and tells you about the first time she saw a steam train, in 1851, and how she chased it for two miles because she thought it was a dragon.

The cat appears at noon.

Bismarck belongs to Rosaire Gauthier next door, if a twenty-pound orange tomcat with one torn ear and the soul of a mob boss can belong to anyone. He spends his days on the bench outside your front window, glaring at Depot Street like he holds the mortgage on all of it.

Today, when Briar steps outside to look at the sky, he stands up.

His fur goes up like someone plugged him in. He makes a sound you have never heard a cat make, low and rising, like a kettle with a grudge. Briar goes completely still. Her lip lifts. Just a little. Just enough to show a canine tooth that's a fraction sharper than it should be.

"Don't," you say.

"He started it."

"He's a cat."

"He's a menace," she says. "He's been plotting against me since I walked out the door. Look at his face."

Bismarck spits. Briar, quite clearly and deliberately, hisses back. The cat retreats under Rosaire's porch with tremendous dignity and stares out at her with two burning yellow eyes.

"This isn't over," Briar tells him.

"Please let it be over."

"Foxes don't lose to cats, Ethan. It's a matter of principle."

Boone Vantassel comes in at four.

You hear his car first, the soft expensive purr of the silver Lexus he parks across two spaces in a town with no parking problem. He comes through the door with the bell jangling and rain on his good wool coat and his silver hair perfect, smiling like a man selling you a car you didn't ask for.

"There he is," he says. "The heir apparent."

"Boone."

"Just stopping by. Wanted to see how you're holding up." He runs a finger along the counter. "Wanted to remind you, friendly-like, that your grandfather's note comes due December first. Forty-one thousand. I know that's a lot for a little shop like this."

"I know when it's due."

"Of course you do. Of course." He leans in. "I'll tell you what I told Elden. I'd take the building off your hands tomorrow. Fair price. Clear the note. You could go anywhere. Burlington. Boston. You're young. You don't want to spend your life selling furnace filters to widows."

"I like the widows."

He laughs as if you've made a joke. Then his eyes slide past you, and stop.

Briar is standing at the end of aisle three. You don't know how long she's been there. She's very still, the way she was with the cat, and she's smiling.

It's not the smile she gives you. It's slower. It shows a little too much tooth. The light from the front window catches her eyes and turns them from copper to something brighter, like a coin dropped into a fire.

"Mr. Vantassel," she says pleasantly. She walks toward him. Bare feet, soundless on the maple boards. "You don't know me."

"I don't believe I've had the pleasure." He's still smiling. It's getting harder for him.

She stops close to him. Closer than is polite. She leans in, and says something very softly near his ear. You don't catch it. You catch only a name, and the words the river, and nineteen ninety-one.

Boone Vantassel goes the color of old paste. He takes a step back. Then another. He bumps into the seed rack and a packet of zinnias falls to the floor.

"December first," he says to you, hoarsely, and he leaves without shutting the door.

You stare at her. "What did you say to him?"

"Something nobody else knows." She picks up the zinnias and puts them back very neatly. "He's a bad man, Ethan. He'll be back. But not today."

After closing you drive her to the discount store in Rutland, twenty-five miles away, because she can't stay behind, with her hand gripping the truck's door handle the whole way and her eyes on every bridge, and you buy her a phone. The cheapest one they have. She holds it all the way home in both hands like a bird's egg.

You show her how to text. She watches you do it three times and says, "I understand," in a way that means she absolutely does not.

At eleven she's on the couch under Elden's old wool blanket, and you're in your room, lying in the dark on the other side of the wall, listening to her shift and sigh. You can't sleep. You keep seeing her in the doorway in your shirt.

Your phone lights up on the nightstand.

A fox emoji. A skull. And then, in capitals:

IS THIS THE LITTLE LAMP. ARE YOU IN IT