The second chance store, p.1
The Second Chance Store, page 1
Dedication
For Matt,
my very favorite old thing
Epigraph
If only one could clear out one’s mind and heart as ruthlessly as one did one’s wardrobe.
BARBARA PYM,
Some Tame Gazelle
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Gift
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Dust
Chapter 4
Scrabble
Chapter 5
Shoes
Chapter 6
Hat
Chapter 7
Tie
Chapter 8
Souvenir
Chapter 9
Slippers
Chapter 10
T-Shirt
Chapter 11
Travel Guides
Chapter 12
Paperback
Chapter 13
Ring
Chapter 14
Brooch
Chapter 15
Watch
Chapter 16
Huge Hits ’97
Chapter 17
Coat
Chapter 18
Hoodie
Chapter 19
Handbag
Chapter 20
Dress
Chapter 21
Clock
Chapter 22
Disposable Camera
Chapter 23
Shirt
Chapter 24
Clock
Chapter 25
Jeans
Chapter 26
Jumper
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Cookbook
Chapter 29
Hardback
Chapter 30
Scarf
Chapter 31
Pickle Forks
Chapter 32
Disposable Camera
Chapter 33
Vase
Chapter 34
Tie
Chapter 35
Tie
Chapter 36
Jeans
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Plant Pot
Chapter 39
Coat
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Going-Out Top
Chapter 43
Puzzle Box
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Shoes
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Jumper
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Slippers
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Handbag
Chapter 53
Hat
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Scrabble
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Vase
Chapter 58
Umbrella
Chapter 59
Scarf
Chapter 60
Goalkeeper Gloves
Chapter 61
Ring
Chapter 62
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise for The Second Chance Store
Also by Lauren Bravo
Copyright
About the Publisher
Gift
It sits outside the shop, self-conscious in its splendor.
An odd sight among the usual split bin bags and supermarket carriers, spilling old sweatshirts and balled-up T-shirts like soft guts across the pavement. A gold holographic gift bag—pristine, not a reuse—with a foil rosette stuck to the side and carefully curled ribbons around the handle.
The bag stands proudly upright despite the wind. Something heavy inside weighs it down, from within a crinkling nest of polka-dot tissue paper. There is a tag on the side—inscribed, so now it can’t be reused—with a message in black ink, slightly smudged.
Suzy Q, saw this and thought of you. Hope you like it. Lots of love.
1
It was the dinner that did it.
Gwen sat, chewing. She rolled the braised ox cheek with buttery Parmesan polenta around her mouth, and as she did so the thought popped into her head. It arrived in two beats, ba-dum, like coins dropping into a slot machine.
This might be one of the nicest meals I’ve ever eaten, it went, and there is nobody here to tell.
It wasn’t self-pitying, exactly, the thought. She didn’t bat it away, the way she might have done—had done—so many times in recent years. She merely took the thought out as if from some mental filing cabinet, held it up and considered it as fact.
It was fact. There was nobody else here to share it with, except the waiter. The nice waiter, who had discreetly turned the sleeve of her coat the right way out again and picked up her hat in one clean, deft motion when she had dropped it on the floor with an apologetic “oof.” Did the waiter count? Not really.
She would tell him it was nice, but it wouldn’t be news to him. The waiter probably ate braised ox cheek with buttery Parmesan polenta for his dinner three nights a week, whenever he wasn’t eating leftover razor clams or picking at the blackened ends of rolled loin of pork. No, the waiter wouldn’t care that this meal set a kind of high watermark in the oral history of Gwen’s stomach. He would smile, because she would smile. He would smile, because she would tip.
She hadn’t even had dessert yet. What would happen when dessert came? Sticky toffee pudding with bourbon ice cream and—because Gwen liked to believe she had given up living within other people’s limitations, at least when it came to sweet condiments—a jug of custard. Both, not either/or.
Perhaps dessert would be disappointing, she thought. She half hoped it would be, for by now she was swept up in the idea of this dinner, this surprisingly good dinner in a near-empty suburban gastropub, as both pivotal and fateful. Perhaps the pudding would be dry and claggy with not enough sauce, and she’d snap out of it and remember all the reasons she was alone here with nobody to tell. Good reasons! Multiple reasons! Reasons she had recited once, over and over, in gulping half-sentences on the top of the 43 bus.
Or would she take one bite of the best sticky toffee pudding she’d ever had in her life, and cry in front of the smiling waiter?
The pudding came. It was dark, sticky and dense with dates, swimming in a generous lake of treacle. It wasn’t the best she’d ever eaten, but undeniably top five.
Gwen didn’t cry. Instead, she made a list.
Find something to do
This was too vague, she knew even as she was halfway through writing the sentence. The TED Talk she’d watched several months ago on Better Goal-Setting to Harness Your Untapped Productivity Superpower had made it clear: be specific. Or at least she thought that was the gist.
But if Gwen had specifics then she wouldn’t be writing the list, or surreptitiously licking a dribble of toffee off the paper with a smeary finger. Vagaries were the best she could manage right now. The weak, fridge-magnet platitudes of the suddenly unemployed.
Unemployed. She repeated the word a few times under her breath, plodding and ominous. Three dumpy syllables that felt too heavy for someone who hadn’t even left yet. Not technically. Not for another four days.
Officially, it was company cutbacks. The economic climate, necessary restructuring and streamlining in the face of a fast-evolving market, yada yada, blah blah.
Unofficially, it felt like no small coincidence that Gwen had lost her job a week after pointing out, in a client meeting, that the agency was overcharging a small not-for-profit with inflated rate cards and several billable services they weren’t providing at all. Gwen didn’t usually cause scenes. A tense silence had fallen over the sandwich platter.
Her redundancy package—her boss had insisted on calling it a “package,” as though the money might come wrapped up with a complimentary tote bag and a selection of snacks—was generous, enough to live on for a few months at least. It was a token of appreciation for her loyalty to the company, he’d said, though this felt spiked with irony. Besides, Gwen knew the amount was stipulated by contract on the basis of how many years she’d been either too lazy or too underwhelming to get hired elsewhere. HR were probably kicking themselves for making her too comfortable. She was kicking herself for not dumping them before they could dump her.
Still, it turned out mediocrity had a price tag, and it was enough to cover her rent and bills and food while she found something new. Gwen should feel lucky, really—and perhaps she would, once she had stopped putting herself into the recovery position to ease the breathless panic that choked her sleep every night. Once she’d stopped sitting down in the shower.
For now the future was hazy, a distant shape at the end of a long corridor that could be squinted at more closely in time. It was tomorrow and the next day that worried her. She could see their form clearly: an arse-shaped indent in an already sagging sofa, strewn with hairs and crisp crumbs.
So: find something to do. She muttered it under her breath. Anything. Do a thing! Next.
Instigate social occasions
Gwen regretted this one before the ink was dry, because nobody wanted to come to social occasions instigated by a person who called it “instigating social occasions.” But she supposed it did the job. She would, she vowed, make more effort. She would take a pair of jumper cables to the friendships that had begu
But how did anyone do that? How did a person in their thirties round up their friends without the three-line whip of either a wedding, baby, or significant birthday as their weapon?
How did you text someone and say “Hey! Fancy going to the cinema tomorrow?” without making it sound like you were going to look deep into their eyes and tell them you were secretly in love with them, or had cancer?
If she knew the answer to that then she wouldn’t be here, slurping at what had been gin but was now a glass of lukewarm molten ice, resisting the urge to chew the lemon slice in case the nice waiter saw her.
Losing her job, was that anything? Enough to warrant coos and a sympathetic head tilt, yes—but enough to summon people to dinner on a weekday night at will? Unclear.
She had long fantasized about something she liked to call “the rally round.” Friends dropping everything to race across town and appear on each other’s doorsteps, the way they did so frequently and easily on TV. In recent years, in darker moments, she’d caught herself cooking up elaborate daydreams about divorces, bereavements, broken hearts, broken limbs. Any tragedy in which distance and practicality might go out of the window and people would simply turn up, diaries cleared and arms outstretched.
But even in her daydreams she was never the object of the rally round, just a willing participant with a bag full of wine and frozen pizza, briskly running baths and tucking her friends into bed with the kind of intimacy and affection they hadn’t seriously enjoyed since about 2008. She watched the shows and the films and read the books about intense female friendships and wondered if it was bad that nobody had ever wanted to share a bath with her. Gwen had never held anyone’s skirt while they peed on a pregnancy test, and sometimes this felt like a fundamental failing.
Still, it hadn’t always been this way. At one time it had been easier: back when her social life simply happened around her like a fast-moving river, and it was actually more effort to resist than to give in and let it carry her off to another pub quiz, another semi-ironic dinner party, another round of leaving drinks for the friend of a friend’s boyfriend who was going backpacking in Acton. (The drinks were in Acton, not the backpacking.)
Once upon a time, Gwen and her friends had done things for the sake of anecdote and little else. And thank god they had, because without being able to say “Remember the time . . . ?” whenever the conversation flagged, their sporadic meetups now would be painful. Perhaps friendship in your twenties was like storing nuts for winter. You spend as much time as you can frantically filling the pantry, so you have enough to live on in your thirties once stocks start to dwindle.
She scooped up the last bite of pudding, making an effort to sluice every remaining bit of sauce from the bowl with it—and then, carefully, poured the last of the custard directly onto the spoon. Gwen looked at it for a second: the final, glistening mouthful. Forced herself to stop and savor a moment’s delayed gratification before shoveling it in. She’d always been sentimental about endings.
Call Mum and Dad
This one was not so much from a desire to be a better daughter, but because it had now been five weeks, three days and Gwen was forced to admit that her latest game of emotional chicken had failed. Again. What had started as an experiment, to see how long it would take them to worry and check in on her, had only highlighted their ongoing lack of concern while exacerbating her own.
Things had been heading this way in the Grundle family for years. At first, it was a forceful jollying-on; a refusal to go all touchy-feely in the face of tragic events that, by most people’s estimation, would warrant it. Not wanting to drag each other down, or rile each other up, or puncture the thin skin that had begun to grow again over the open wound, like clingfilm on a too-full jug of gravy. Better not to ask than to get an honest answer. She understood, even as she resented it.
But more recently she’d started these games: leaving longer and longer between her phone calls, waiting with curiosity to see when her silence might jolt them into making contact. It hadn’t yet. And what if something terrible had happened to them in the meantime? What if she was forced to explain to the authorities that she was a grown woman playing hard-to-get with her own parents?
She decided to call tomorrow, to check they were alive. Then get off the phone before she was dragged into a lecture on herbaceous borders.
Go to the dentist
At some point over the past decade, going to the dentist had quietly evolved from something nobody actually did, to something everyone did but never talked about. And so Gwen had been merrily ignoring the regular text reminders for years, assuming everyone else was too, until Sonja at work had taken a morning off for a dentist appointment that turned out to genuinely be a dentist appointment—not, as Gwen assumed, a covert job interview or leisurely bikini wax—and the question had come up.
It turned out that nobody over twenty-five on her team had gone longer than eight months without a checkup. Some of them even owned floss, and used it. Gwen was, as the interns said, shook.
She wasn’t even afraid of the dentist. In fact she had a respectable threshold for pain, and a secret fondness for any activity that involved being intimately cared for by a stranger. Having her hair vigorously washed by a salon junior, for example, or her pulse checked by a soft-handed GP. She had once spent hundreds of pounds on six months of appointments with an osteopath above a chicken shop, who failed to fix her bad knee but would cup it, tenderly, while they both talked about Masterchef. She never examined this memory too closely in case it made her a pervert.
Gwen even quite liked the idea of taking an afternoon off for the dentist, and sitting in a coffee shop afterward. A treat.
Really there was no reason at all for never going, except that the dentist tended to fall into that unreachable void in her head, along with the texts and emails left unanswered until it was too embarrassing to reply, the birthday check from an aunt she still hadn’t deposited and the yogurt that had moldered at the back of the fridge for going on eight months now. Seemingly easy, straightforward tasks slipped into this void, sometimes without warning, and leaning in to retrieve them took more effort than Gwen could muster. So she didn’t. But now she would.
Get rid of it
To anyone else reading her list this one would be confusing, she realized, then felt briefly embarrassed for even thinking the thought. When would anyone read this, Gwen? As your estate sorts through your personal effects, perhaps, looking for things to publish after you’ve died? Is that likely to happen, to a senior account manager from Dorking?
A former senior account manager.
Gwen blushed and scrunched up her face as hard as she could, a form of outward grimace that doubled as an inward sneer. Don’t be ridiculous.
“It” meant the piles of relationship detritus she had bagged up, methodically, ritualistically, all those years ago. “Your emotional baggage,” Suze had called it at the time, as she tripped over the black plastic sack every time she went to get the Hoover out of the landing cupboard. After a month it had been gently suggested that the emotional baggage needed to go somewhere—a bin, ideally, but if not the bin then perhaps back into Gwen’s room, where she could trip over it herself?
She’d relented, and so the bag had taken up residence behind her bedroom door, where it could be forgotten in the presence of others but would taunt her each time she was alone.
Over time, the bag had become buried. In an old towel, a fallen-down dressing gown, a sheet of bubble wrap saved for a hypothetical future padding emergency. The grain at the center of a shitty emotional pearl. Before long, the bag had slipped further into The Void than perhaps anything else ever had, until the very idea of unpicking the dusty layer cake and extracting that black sack of memories felt so beyond her it was almost hilarious. When she’d moved out, she’d simply scooped up the whole heap in her arms, dressing gown and all, dumped it into a blue Ikea bag and carried it calmly into the next place. Then the next. In this way she managed to almost neutralize the bag; it became a piece of admin, something to be shunted aside while looking for a lost sneaker. It caused her physical pain roughly twice a year, when it fell on her head from a top cupboard, and emotional pain only slightly more often than that.
But not anymore. She was going to get rid of it. The list had spoken.
Gwen might have continued into further specifics, but at this point the nice waiter appeared in her peripheral vision, doing the polite hover that signaled it was time to pay up and let him get back to . . . what? Wife and kids? Husband and schnauzer? Comrades in a warehouse squat? Hot bath and tin foil package of three-day-old vanilla cheesecake with sea buckthorn coulis? Gwen forced herself to look up as though she’d only just noticed him, caught his eye and mimed the universal “bill please” mime. Unfortunately the nice waiter had moved closer in the last few seconds, so that she was now silently mouthing the word “please” at an audible distance, to a man standing five feet away in an empty restaurant.
