Needful Things

“If it doesn’t hurt him. I don’t want to hurt him. I hurt my husband, you know.”

“It won’t hurt him,” Gaunt said softly, stroking Nettle’s hands.

“It won’t hurt him a bit. I just want you to put some things in his house.”

“How could I get in Buster’s-”

“Here.”

He put something into her hand. A key. She closed her hand over it.

“When?” Nettle asked. Her dreaming eyes had returned to the lampshade again.

“Soon.” He released her hands am stood up. “And now, Nettle,

I really ought to put that beautiful lampshade into a box for you.

Mrs. Martin is coming to look at some Lalique in-” He glanced at his watch. “Goodness, in fifteen minutes! But I can’t begin to tell you how glad I am that you decided to come in. Very few people appreciate the beauty of carnival glass these days-most people are just dealers, with cash registers for hearts.”

Nettle also stood, and looked at the lampshade with the soft eyes of a woman who is in love. The agonized nervousness with which she had approached the shop had entirely disappeared. “It is lovely, isn’t it?”

“Very lovely,” Mr. Gaunt agreed warmly. “And I can’t tell you… can’t even begin to express… how happy it makes me to know it will have a good home, a place where someone will do more than dust it on Wednesday afternoons and then, after years of that, break it in a careless moment and sweep the pieces up and then drop them into the trash without a second thought.”

“I’d never do that!” Nettle cried.

“I know you wouldn’t,” Mr. Gaunt said. “It’s one of your charms, Netitia.”

Nettle looked at him, amazed. “How did you know my name?”

“I have a flair for them. I never forget a name or a face.”

He went through the curtain at the back of his shop. When he returned, he held a flat sheet of white cardboard in one hand and a large fluff of tissue paper in the other. He set the tissue paper down beside the cake container (it began at once to expand, with secret little ticks and snaps, into something which looked like a giant corsage) and began to fold the cardboard into a box exactly the right size for the lampshade. “I know you’ll be a fine custodian of the item you have purchased. That’s why I sold it to you.”

“Really? I thought… Mr. Keeton… and the trick…”

“No, no, no!” Mr. Gaunt said, half-laughing and half-exasperated. “Anyone will play a trick! People love to play tricks! But to place objects with people who love them and need them… that is a different kettle of fish altogether. Sometimes, Netitia, I think that what I really sell is happiness… what do you think?”

“Well,” Nettle said earnestly, “I know you’ve made me happy, Mr.

Gaunt. Very happy.”

He exposed his crooked, Jostling teeth in a wide smile. “Good!

That’s good!” Mr. Gaunt pushed the tissue-paper corsage into the box, cradled the lampshade in its ticking whiteness, closed the box, and taped it shut with a flourish. “And here we are! Another satisfied customer has found her needful thing!”

He held the box out to her. Nettle took it. And as her fingers touched his she felt a shiver of revulsion, although she had gripped them with great strength-even ardor-a few moments ago. But that interlude had already begun to seem hazy and unreal. He put the Tupperware cake container on top of the white box. She saw something inside the former.

“What’s that?”

“A note for your employer,” Gaunt said.

Alarm rose to Nettle’s face at once. “Not about me?”

“Good heavens, no!” Gaunt said, laughing, and Nettle relaxed at once. When he was laughing, Mr. Gaunt was impossible to resist or distrust. “Take care of your lampshade, Netitia, and do come again.”

“I will,” Nettle said, and this could have been an answer to both admonitions, but she felt in her heart (that secret repository where needs and fears elbowed each other continuously like uncomfortable passengers in a crowded subway car) that, while she might come here again, the lampshade was the only thing she-would ever buy in Needful Things.

Yet what of that? It was a beautiful thing, the sort of thing she had always wanted, the only thing she needed to complete her modest collection. She considered telling Mr. Gaunt that her husband might still be alive if he had not smashed a carnival glass lampshade much like this one fourteen years ago, that it had been the last straw, the one which finally drove her over the edge. He had broken many of her bones during their years together, and she had let him live. Finally he had broken something she really needed, and she had taken his life.

She decided she did not have to tell Mr. Gaunt this.

He looked like the sort of man who might already know.

3

“Polly! Polly, she’s coming out!”

Polly left the dressmaker’s dummy where she had been slowly and carefully pi

Her purse was under one arm, her umbrella was under the other, and in her hands she held Polly’s Tupperware cake container balanced atop a square white box.

“Maybe I better go help her,” Rosalie said.

“No.” Polly put out a hand and restrained her gently. “Better not. I think she’d only be embarrassed and fluttery.”

They watched Nettle walk up the street. She no longer scuttled, as if before the jaws of a storm; now she seemed almost to drift.

No, Polly thought. No, that isn’t right. It’s more like… floating.

Her mind suddenly made one of those odd co

Rosalie looked at her, eyebrows raised. “Share?”

“It’s the look on her face,” Polly said, watching Nettle cross Linden Street in slow, dreamy steps.

“What do you mean?”

“She looks like a woman who just got laid… and had about three orgasms.”

Rosalie turned pink, looked at Nettle once more, and then screamed with laughter. Polly joined in. The two of them held each other and rocked back and forth, laughing wildly.

“Gee,” Alan Pangborn said from the front of the store. “Ladies laughing well before noon! It’s too early for champagne, so what is it?”

“Four!” Rosalie said, giggling madly. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. “It looked more like four to me!”

Then they were off again, rocking back and forth in each other’s arms, howling with laughter while Alan stood watching them with his hands in the pockets of his uniform pants, smiling quizzically.

4

Norris Ridgewick arrived at the Sheriff’s Office in his street clothes about ten minutes before the noon whistle blew at the mill. He had the mid-shift, from twelve until nine p.m right through the weekend, and that was just the way he liked it. Let somebody else clean up the messes on the highways and byways of Castle County after the bars closed at one o’clock; he could do it, had done it on many occasions, but he almost always puked his guts. He sometimes puked his guts even if the victims were up, walking around, and yelling that they didn’t have to take any fucking breathalyzer test, and that kind of they knew their Constipational rights- Norris just had a stomach. Sheila Brigham liked to tease him by saying he was like Deputy Andy on that TV show Twin Peaks, but Norris knew he wasn’t.

Deputy Andy cried when he saw dead people. Norris didn’t cry, but he was apt to puke on them, the way he had almost puked on Homer Gamache that time when he had found Homer sprawled in a ditch out by Homeland Cemetery, beaten to death with his own artificial arm.

Norris glanced at the roster, saw that both Andy Clutterbuck and John LaPointe were out on patrol, then at the daywatch board.