"Is that Nettle? Is it really?" Rosalie almost gasped.
"It really is."
"my God, she's going in!"
But for a moment it seemed that Rosalie's prediction had queered the deal. Nettle approached the door... then pulled back.
She shifted the umbrella from hand to hand and looked at the faqade of Needful Things as if it were a snake which might bite her.
"Go on, Nettle," Polly said softly. "Go for it, sweetie!"
"The CLOSED sign must be in the window," Rosalie said.
"No, he's got another one that says TUESDAYS AND THURSDAYS BY APPOINTMENT ONLY. I saw it when I came in this morning."
Nettle was approaching the door again. She reached for the knob, then drew back again.
"God, this is killing me," Rosalie said. "She told me she might come back, and I know how much she likes carnival glass, but I never really thought she'd go through with it."
"She asked me if it would be all right for her to leave the house on her break so she could come down to what she called 'that new place' and pick up my cake-box," Polly murmured.
Rosalie nodded. "That's our Nettle. She used to ask me for permission to use the john."
"I got an idea part of her was hoping I'd say no, there was too much to do. But I think part of her wanted me to say yes, too."
Polly's eyes never left the fierce, small-scale struggle going on less than forty yards away, a mini-war between Nettle Cobb and Nettle Cobb. If she actually did go in, what a step forward that would be for her!
Polly felt dull, hot pain in her hands, looked down, and saw she had been twisting them together. She forced them down to her sides.
"It's not the cake-box and it's not the carnival glass," Rosalie said. "It's him."
Polly glanced at her.
Rosalie laughed and blushed a little. "Oh, I don't mean Nettle's got the hots for him, or anything like that, although she did look a little starry-eyed when I caught up with her outside. He was nice to her, Polly. That's all. Honest and nice."
"Lots of people are nice to her," Polly said. "Alan goes out of his way to be kind to her, and she still shies away from him."
"Our Mr. Gaunt has got a special kind of nice," Rosalie said simply, and as if to prove this, they saw Nettle grasp the knob and turn it. She opened the door and then only stood there on the sidewalk clutching her umbrella, as if the shallow well of her resolve had been utterly exhausted. Polly felt a sudden certainty that Nettle would now pull the door closed again and hurry away. Her hands, arthritis or no arthritis, closed into loose fists.
Go on, Nettle. Go on in. Take a chance. Rejoin the world.
Then Nettle smiled, obviously in response to someone neither Polly nor Rosalie could see. She lowered the umbrella from its position across her chest... and went inside.
The door closed behind her.
Polly turned to Rosalie, and was touched to see that there were tears in her eyes. The two women looked at each other for a moment, and then embraced, laughing.
"Way to go, Nettle!" Rosalie said.
"Two points for our side!" Polly agreed, and the sun broke free of the clouds inside her head a good two hours before it would finally do so in the sky above Castle Rock.
2
Five minutes later, Nettle Cobb sat in one of the plush, high-backed chairs Gaunt had installed along one wall of his shop. Her umbrella and purse lay on the floor beside her, forgotten. Gaunt sat next to her, his hands holding hers, his sharp eyes locked on her vague ones. A carnival glass lampshade stood beside Polly Chalmers's cake container on one of the glass display cases. The lampshade was a moderately gorgeous thing, and might have sold for three hundred dollars or better in a Boston antiques shop; Nettle Cobb had, nevertheless, just purchased it for ten dollars and forty cents, all the money she had had in her purse when she entered the shop.
Beautiful or not, it was, for the moment, as forgotten as her umbrella.
"A deed," she was saying now. She sounded like a woman talking in her sleep. She moved her hands slightly, so as to grip Mr.
Gaunt's more tightly. He returned her grip, and a little smile of pleasure touched her face.
"Yes, that's right. It's really just a small matter. You know Mr.
Keeton, don't you?"
"Oh yes," Nettle said. "Ronald and his son, Danforth. I know them both. Which do you mean?"
"The younger," Mr. Gaunt said, stroking her palms with his long thumbs. The nails were slightly yellow and quite long. "The Head Selectman."
"They call him Buster behind his back," Nettle said, and giggled.
It was a harsh sound, a little hysterical, but Leland Gaunt did not seem alarmed. On the contrary; the sound of Nettle's not-quite-right laughter seemed to please him. "They have ever since he was a little boy."
"I want you to finish paying for your lampshade by playing a trick on Buster."
"Trick?" Nettle looked vaguely alarmed.
Gaunt smiled. "Just a harmless prank. And he'll never know it was you. He'll think it was someone else."
"Oh." Nettle looked past Gaunt at the carnival glass lampshade, and for a moment something sharpened her gaze-greed, perhaps, or just simple longing and Pleasure. "Well...
"It will be all right, Nettle. No one will ever know... and you'll have the lampshade."
Nettle spoke slowly and thoughtfully. "My husband used to play tricks on me a lot. It might be fun to play one on someone else." She looked back at him, and now the thing sharpening her gaze was alarm.
"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.