Sally got to the shop early, very early. Mrs Allister no doubt had a key, and Sally wouldn’t put it past her to let herself or her son in, and there was no way she was going to let the landlord’s son poke around in her shop by himself. She locked the door after herself and put her gas-station coffee down on the reception desk when she noticed something she hadn’t left there the afternoon prior. What now? thought Sally. Her booking diary was open to a random page three months hence, and at the epicenter of a water stain was half a handful of what looked like broken glass. In running blue ink under the glass was a note that read:

  DIAMONDS FOR LEARN BUSINESS AT COLLEDGE

  IPAD FOR FISH TO WATCH STREAMS

  Sally turned on the shop lights and brought the alleged diamonds under a bright lamp. They did indeed look like small diamonds. Most of them were near-worthless little pavé diamonds, but a few were of decent size.

  Another mystery gift? thought Sally. The first one helped her buy the shop, and now someone wants her to go to college? Sally considered this for a moment. Either one of her regulars has more money than sense, or her estranged father has had a significant change of heart, and circumstances, and character… Okay, it probably wasn’t her father now that she thought about it.

  The shopping center was like any you might find in any suburban town. There was a supermarket, post office, newsagency, bakery, two cafes, a local pizza chain and, of course, a fish spa slash salon and cat-petting center. Somewhat unusually for a mid-size shopping center, there was also a jewelers. If these things were worth anything, it wouldn’t take her long to find out. Sally made a promise to herself, though: whether they were real or not, she would enroll in the local community college. She didn’t want to get blindsided in a way that threatened her business ever again.

  Sally gave the already pretty immaculate shop a spring clean while she waited for the builder. By nine o’clock, she wondered what Mrs Allister’s definition of ‘first thing’ was. At ten to twelve, a very portly young man squeezed his way into the shop, panting and sweating so much that he should have been legally forced to wear a yellow shirt that doubled as a slippery floor sign. He was squat, could not have been much over twenty years old and easily weighed more than twenty stone. Despite his young age, he looked only two hamburgers and a flight of stairs away from being the late Mr Allister, as opposed to merely the tardy Mr Allister. He wore three-quarter cargo shorts that reached his cankles and an old shirt that might once have depicted the indecipherable characters of a metal band, but time and mustard stains had corrupted the design into something that looked like it was made by birds after a bad lunch.

  “I’ve come to do an inspection. Mom says you’ve got rust termites,” said the young man.

  “You must be Mr Allister junior,” said Sally. “I was expecting you before business hours.”

  “Jeremy is fine. But yeah, I got caught up on a job. Some of us have to work hard, you know. We can’t all be hairdressers.”

  Sally glowered at the young man.

  “Right. Where’s the ladder?” asked the infuriatingly overconfident building inspector.

  Sally felt like she was catching high blood pressure just looking at him, or maybe it was from listening to him. “We haven’t got a ladder. We’re just a hairdresser slash spa slash salon, not a hardware store,” replied Sally, through her teeth.

  “What, not a cat petting center today? What’s wrong – cat got the day off?” asked Jeremy, clearly trying to goad her.

  “I have some boxes you can stand on, but I’m not sure they’ll take the weight,” replied Sally.

  Luckily the only customers in at the moment were there for the nibble fish, allowing Sally to keep an eye on the ‘inspector’ as he poked around. The young man grunted and walked past Sally, into the back of the shop where there was a small storage area full of neatly labeled plastic boxes on a steel shelving unit. In the ceiling was a manhole cover that was out of reach. He used a broom to lift it slightly and push it to the side, then he extracted a small metallic torch from one of the many pockets in his shorts and peered into the ceiling cavity.

  For a few moments the young man didn’t say anything, he just ummed and ahhed to himself while he scratched at the soft blond hairs that had entirely given up trying to hide either of his chins. When he finally did speak, he had adopted a much deeper tone, and in his most manly builder voice, the young man tried to sound like he knew what he was talking about, despite clearly acting like he didn’t.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  “Looks like you’ve got concrete cancer in your steel girders. Big job that. We would have to prop up this wall with an iron jane and redo the lot. I see some evidence of frassing beneath the steel too. Mom was right, you have got termites.”

  “Concrete cancer in steel? I hope it hasn’t made the termites sick,” said Sally sarcastically.

  The man produced a hammer from another pocket and smashed a small hole in the wall before proceeding to run the crumbling drywall through his fingers. He made a show of loudly sniffing the white powder. “Asbestos, just like I thought.”

  Sally put one hand on a hip and tilted her head. “That must be what caused the concrete cancer!”

  “Might be, might be,” he replied as he nodded.

  “Jeremy,” said Sally, “get the fuck out of my shop and don’t ever come back.”

  Jeremy was taken back; he couldn’t have looked more surprised if she had kissed him.

  “But my mom’s basically your landlord – you can’t talk to me like that.”

  “If you’re a real builder, you’re also six foot three and two-hundred pounds. But you’re not, are you?” demanded Sally, poking an accusing finger at Jeremy’s inflated chest.

  “I am too. I’m a third-year apprentice,” said Jeremy.

  “Really?” asked Sally incredulously. “I don’t believe you.”

  “Well, it’s the third time I’ve been a first-year apprentice, so yeah I’m almost qualified.”

  Sally pointed at the front door. “Out!” she ordered. “Some of us have real work to do”.

  When Jeremy had left and there was a small gap in her appointments, Sally flipped the sign on the door to ‘Closed’ and called in on Mel, the old jeweler just a few doors up. His shop stood out as an anachronism in the fairly modern shopping center. It had once been a two-story brick house, but the bottom floor now served as a fairly large jewelers that somehow managed to feel incredibly pokey despite its size.

  Sally entered the shop and passed between narrow shelves that were crowded with costume jewelry and tchotchkes that spent their lives migrating between the homes of old women and thrift stores. Most of the wares could be described as gift items if you were feeling generous, and as tat the rest of the time. Sally noticed that the only part of the shop that wasn’t dusty and piled high with clutter was one empty chair and a section of the counter beside the jeweler, on which sat a slightly more feminine pair of glasses placed neatly on a worn but clean velvet placemat opposite the empty chair.

  “Hi Mel,” said Sally as she approached the old man behind the counter. He wore thick glasses and had two patches of stubborn hair on either side of his head that stood against the encroaching wave of inexorable baldness like the spears of King Leonidas’ three-hundred men at the pass of Thermopylae.

  Mel put down an ordering catalog and his reading glasses, then picked up his distance glasses and a smile as he noticed Sally approaching. “Hello Sally. After another fish tank ornament?”

  Sally noticed that the old man had a dark bruise around one eye, the deep blue clearly visible under his thin and pale skin. “God are you okay? What happened?”

  “Nothing to worry about, just a little fall. I slipped when I was unpacking some boxes. How can I help you?” said Mel, who seemed his usual cheerful self. He gestured to a collection of bric-a-brac on a shelf that was even gaudier than the rest of the ornaments. “I have a wonderful selection of underwater decorations that I can’t seem to shift.”

  Sally glanced at the offensively colorful artificial corals, sunken pirate ships and treasure chests and shuddered. “Well, one thing that I would like is if you could come by the shop for tea more often. I have hardly seen you this year, and I worry about you sometimes, in here, all by yourself. What happens if next time you trip you need help getting back up?”

  Mel waved a hand dismissively. “I’ve been here for more than fifty years and I’m not as clumsy as I look.”

  Sally furrowed her brow. Then, remembering why she had come, she beamed a smile at the jeweler. “Okay, but today, can you help me with these?” said Sally as she presented the half handful of glittering stones.

  The old jeweler produced a loupe from his breast pocket, took off his distance glasses and put the loupe to his dominant –and unfortunately rather bruised – eye, where it settled into familiar grooves.

  “Glass. Glass. Plastic. Cubic zirconia. Glass. Quartz. Ah, a small diamond, multiple inclusions, I3 grade,” said Mel, who went on like that without stopping for breath until he had sorted all of the stones from lowest grade to highest grade, left to right, and put them into little labeled trays on his table. Everything was either in the lowest grade or so far left that it didn’t make it to a tray. When Sally asked why he didn’t have a tray for those ones, he commented that he did, but he couldn’t reach the bin from where he was sitting. Sally adjusted her expectations pretty quickly after that.

  They turned out to be mostly pavé diamonds, which went for a few dollars between them. Almost everything else was either glass or plastic. When all was said and done, she sold the stones for fifty dollars and a promise for a free fish treatment that usually cost sixty-five. It was more than what she expected, but not what she had hoped. Even still, Sally made that promise to herself – that she would enroll in a business-management course and make her shop work, diamonds or not.

  Damn, thought Sally, I forgot about the iPad request. Whoever had given her those ‘diamonds’ would be expecting to see at least one tablet in the shop. Sally sighed and went to find something that would satisfy the odd request. She returned with a second-hand, off-brand tablet she had bought for fifty dollars, and clips to attach it to a tank that set her back another four dollars. All in all, she was now four dollars worse off, but at least her mysterious benefactor would be happy – probably her fish too.