October was more than half over. Halloween should’ve been everywhere, but the aisles were already plastic Christmas—perfect, except for being plastic. Thanksgiving sat between like a spacer, there to keep the momentum through the new year. Time moved the way stores wanted it to move: on to the next thing. You either spent, or you sat there wondering where it went.
Jack walked into a big-box home-improvement store for a fitting to a faucet that leaked worse the tighter you turned. The gasket had been cut into the threads, worn to a razor’s edge with every crank—proof, to Jack, that in this case brass sharpened brass.
He paced the plumbing aisle, facing a wall of blue-and-orange boxes with SKUs that didn’t match the parts inside. He thumbed gaskets, pictured the fitting, replayed the feel of the thread, and chose an orange-red ring that looked right.
On the way to checkout he stopped at a display: a skeleton in coattails and a Santa suit—ten feet of cheerful nightmare. The placard called him Jack. Of course it did. Halloween bleeding forward into Christmas, one holiday leaking into the next. He nodded. “Covers both,” he said. “Smart.”
Mrs. Meyer’s valve stem was still dripping at home. Rust had only stained the cabinet floor so far, not the full emergency she believed, but enough to keep her awake. She’d saved Jack’s number from when phones were tethered to walls, when conversations ran through copper and pole lines and the whole system felt like it carried touch. Now everything moved through the air—Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, satellites you couldn’t point at—and the words seemed easier to lose. It didn’t really make sense, and Jack knew it. He just missed what he missed.
He called himself old-fashioned before anyone else could, though he did catch a laugh from the young now and then when he held his phone like a votive and asked for directions to the nearest whatever. The map would bloom a path from his shoes to the door he wanted. “How does it do that?” he’d whisper, genuinely pleased.
At checkout a single frazzled cashier worked a line ten people deep. The row of self-check machines sat empty, bright and impatient. Jack took the gamble.
The screen said Start scanning. He swiped the glass. Nothing. Then he saw the little pistol tucked in its cradle. He lifted it, squeezed the trigger at the gasket. No barcode. The machine kept blinking, as patient as a stone. Jack wasn’t. He slid the gasket back into his pocket and rejoined the human line.
Ahead of him a contractor had stacked twenty sheets of drywall and boxes of mud on a groaning flat cart. Jack’s back ached in sympathy just looking at it. The line moved in the slow glacier rhythm of “next, please.”
When his turn came, he offered his best “Good morning.” A gum-chewing young cashier with white things growing out of her ears turned the gasket over, then met his eyes. “This doesn’t have a SKU.”
“I know,” Jack said.
She sighed, called plumbing, described an orange rubber ring the customer swore he found in plumbing. Manny couldn’t place it. The line rustled. She covered the mic. “Do you know how much it was?”
Jack pictured the shelf, the wrong labels, the nickel-and-dimes. “Near eighty-nine cents,” he said, then started to add he remembered paying a little more last month, but she was already punching keys.
“Ninety-seven with tax.”
He handed over a dollar. She returned three bright pennies and a practiced smile that landed somewhere over his shoulder. “Have a good day.”
“You too,” Jack said to the air.
Outside, the afternoon had the flat shine of a parking lot after heat. He climbed into his truck, rolled it backward in neutral, pressed the clutch, and turned the key. Then he popped the clutch and let the engine catch—saving the starter, he told himself, but really because he liked doing at least one thing the old way.
Willie Nelson crackled through the AM about getting old and doing fine. Jack hummed what he remembered. The orange-red gasket sat warm in his pocket. Mrs. Meyer’s drip waited. The tall skeleton in a Santa suit kept watch in his head, bridging one season to the next. Between holidays and SKUs, between leaks and fixes, he eased the truck into gear and let it pull. Brass on brass. The old way reminding the new it still worked.
BB Grey--musings 
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