The Artful Trade

Mercy Sometimes on a Friday night in August, all any working man wants is the small and fleeting mercy of a dark bar and a cold beer. John Dalton nodded to the woman with tired eyes, on the barstool next to him. When she didn’t reply, he shrugged and smiled. "I’m John. I work at the autobody place down on Harding." The silence swallowed his sentence then seemed to echo for a moment between them. He tried again. "I started there a few years back thinking it was just paycheck for a while. You know how that goes." She glanced at him. He was handsome in a common way, the memory of a younger man trapped in an avalanche of advancing gray. Blue collar trim but the center of himself had moved lower the way it sometimes does in a man. But Katie Dowling could see there was something else. Something damaged about him, like sea salt on a paint job. Something slightly battered that hung in his eyes. She recognized it. She saw it every night in the mirror. A dented up in...

It was slow at first. Small towns can carry suspicion and the pastry that peered out of those first floor windows seemed foreign and so in question. But that first year Jack Whitaker’s wife had planned a wedding reception at their house on Elm. Their only son, just 18, was marrying a girl from the next town over. The girl’s mother asked Ms. Whitaker to make the cake. Ms. Whitaker loved her only son and she wanted it to be special so she asked around town and collected recipes and studied them until she settled on one. She gathered the ingredients and two days before the wedding began her labor of love. She measured carefully, greased the pans and stirred the batter as the recipe demanded. When she put the cake in the oven the day before the wedding she was sure it would be the best thing she had ever made. It had to be perfect. Her mother had told her a wedding cake is a sign …a sign of how sweet a marriage would be. And Ms. Whitaker, a sentimental woman, believed it beca...

The Great Replacement The baker, an old Italian man, whispered “I’m sorry.” He had spent his life trying to bring something sweet to the life around him. But that morning all he could taste was the bitter in the words he knew would bring only heartache. When Giuseppe, his apprentice, arrived at dawn he decided it was best to be quick. But as he spoke he felt something in himself sour. “My daughter…she is marrying. Her husband will need work. I cannot keep you both.” “You are replacing me?” Giuseppe asked. The old man watched his young friend tremble with distress, then nodded. He touched Giuseppe’s shoulder but his hand felt heavy and cold. He caught sight of himself in some glass, at the crumble of his own expression, at the disappointment in himself, that he could do such a thing. But what choice did he have? This Depression made even good men cruel. As he stepped away Giuseppe told himself that great things often have bad beginnings. But all he could feel was loss filling...

The Shape of a Ring The train from the island ran in circles, express to midtown at dawn, then back again after the close. The men it carried barely noticed the winter cold or the summer heat as the world spun through each year. In, then back. Day after day, year after year. The older men, graying at the temples, with wedding bands and wingtips, stared out the window as the world rushed by. The younger men, like me, studied the Journal, trying to decipher some simple black and white secret to wealth and the happiness we were sure it could buy. I was a new hire. Still proud I passed the Series 7. Still hungry for the house and the cars, for the wife and the high life. Still sure that success was as inevitable as dawn and happiness was a birthright. I was certain that if you’re smart, keep your eyes open and your head down, it all falls to you. Wealth and happiness and love were all a law of nature. Like gravity. The owner of the brokerage was balding, overweight, fifties. He ...