I flipped on the lights. The stockroom door was open the width of one cat. Seconds later a guilty Soot appeared with Styrofoam pellets stuck to his whiskers. He took one look at Ivory, hissed, and ran upstairs.
“I’m sorry I was late getting the store opened,” I said to the woman.
“Time is such an abstract concept,” she said. “Five minutes here, five minutes there. Not a big deal.”
I set Ivory behind the counter and prepped the register for a day of sales. The woman flipped through a rack of Hawaiian attire behind the window. She moved on to the picked-over wall of flapper dresses, and then to the display of clown clothes next to it.
“Please let me know if I can steer you in a direction,” I called out. “I’m Margo, and this is my family’s store. Sometimes people like to wander and get ideas, and other times they know exactly what they want.”
“I’m a wanderer,” she said. She let the sleeve of a brightly colored muumuu fall from her fingertips and looked at me. “I’m Willow. I just moved to Proper a few days ago, and I’m thinking about throwing a small get-together for a few clients. After I saw the photos from the other costume parties people have had on the Proper City website, I thought dressing up might be fun. Help break the ice.”
I smiled. One of these days I’d meet the person who maintained the Get to Know Proper page on our website and I’d thank him or her. The photos that residents submitted of their parties showed off some of the best costume concepts we’d ever thought up. No way was I letting Candy Girls be the only game in town.
I welcomed the distraction of talking about costumes. After building a barrier out of clown shoes to keep Ivory contained, I gave Willow my full attention. “If you’re looking for costumes, you’ve come to the right place. We sell or rent. With rentals, there’s a refundable deposit. If you rent and decide to buy, you can. If you buy and decide you wished you’d rented, well, I can’t really do much about that after the fact.” I stopped talking long enough to realize that I’d just hit her with a lot of sales jargon in a short amount of time. “Have fun looking around. We just acquired the sailor costumes that you see in the window, and there’s lots of other stuff in the back stockroom.”
Willow had a genuine look of curiosity about her. She pointed at the stockroom. “Anything back there that I don’t see out here?”
Bobbie had mentioned the acquisition of ice cream shop uniforms, but I hadn’t come across them yet. Who knew what else my dad kept back there in the disorganized mess?
“Aliens and G-men,” I said. “We just acquired a collection from a sci-fi collector in Area 51. There’s the usual, the little green men and some government-type outfits, but also some unique items that were handmade.”
“Little green men! That sounds perfect. Is there any way I can see them?”
I looked at the stockroom door. Tak and I had made a little progress, but I wasn’t comfortable letting a new customer get a behind-the-scenes look at the way we did business. Besides, there was the matter of the dead mouse that Soot had found, and the last thing I needed was for a customer to stumble upon one of those!
“I was going to work on a display of them today. If you don’t mind waiting, I’ll bring a sampling out front.”
“Take your time,” she said.
It occurred to me that a flowy floral dress and cowboy boots was a good outfit for someone who wanted to appear nonthreatening. Soot must have thought the same thing. He wandered into the shop and brushed his fur up against Willow’s ankles. She squatted and held her hand out for him to sniff. When he reached the same conclusion I had, he stepped forward and bumped his head into her open palm.
I left them alone and ducked into the stockroom, stacking several boxes onto the dolly. I added two white Tyvek suits that hung on hangers, and the single blue plastic suit that I’d gotten from the crime scene cleanup crew, and then wheeled the cart back out front.
“The boxes have heads inside, but this is a sampling of what someone could wear for the body of their costume,” I said. I handed her the hanging costumes and unfolded the flaps of the cardboard box. From inside I pulled out three papier-maché heads: two with antennae that bobbled around the top, and one vaguely peach-colored headpiece designed to look like a classic SNL Conehead. Her eyes lit up and she picked up the Conehead. “I haven’t seen one of these in forever. Do you have any more?”
I looked in the bottom of the box. “To be honest, I don’t know. When I said this collection was a recent acquisition, I wasn’t kidding. I drove them here two days ago.” I opened the next two boxes and peeked inside. Three more Coneheads.
“So far, there’s four. Chances are good that there’s more in the back. How many costumes do you need?”
“Eight, I think.” She handed me back the Tyvek suits on hangers. “This seems a little heavy for the kind of weather we’re having, but this blue thing looks like it might be perfect. Do you have eight of them too?”