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Miles, special offers, coupons or mailing lists, no money-back guarantee.
    “Buy it, give us the money, and keep it” was Dad’s retailing motto.
    I worked there on Saturdays, opening up at ten and closing at five. I usually had the place to myself. When she wasn’t off chasing a story, Mom would be at home and Dad was usually on the road hunting up treasures at auctions and garage sales. There was a brass bell hanging over the front door that summoned me from the workshop when somebody came in.
    I liked the job. There had been a time when I’d had a burst of independence, insisting on a “real job” somewhere outside the family business. I found one, at a department store in the mall. After I’d been there a couple of months the manager told me to follow an old woman around the store and keep an eye on her. Shewas wearing a ratty old cloth raincoat with a scarf on her head. A toddler, wearing clothes that were too small for him, stood in the shopping cart, pretending to pilot it through the store as his grandmother pushed. I watched the woman pocket a kid-size toothbrush, a comb with a cartoon character head on it, a packet of gum. She got on the elevator and I slipped in just as the door was closing.
    “They’re watching you,” I said to the doors. “They know what you’re doing.”
    She rode the elevator back down, got off and put all the stuff back. It touched me when she did that. She could have dumped the items on the elevator floor or laid them on a shelf somewhere and walked away. They caught her putting the comb back in the display case. Security had called the cops.
    When the manager ordered me to tell Security what I had seen I said, “Nothing.” Red-faced and cursing, he fired me on the spot. When I left the store, the old lady and her grandson were sitting in the back of a police car. I guessed I wasn’t hard-hearted enough for the commercial world.
    Anyway, on a sunny Saturday a week or so after the blizzard, I opened the store as usual.Cars hissed past, throwing dirty slush to the edge of the sidewalk, and shoppers walked briskly in the chilly air. Across the street the giant icicles hanging from the eaves of the opera house were turned to crystal by the morning sun.
    I put a Mozart CD on the stereo and switched on the electric heater in the shop. Then I ducked into the espresso bar for a double-shot latte, took it back to the shop and put on my apron.
    I was working on a replacement slat for a crib bed — an easy job, just a matter of cutting it to length and planing it smooth. It was a slow morning, normal for that time of year. I sold a few pieces of the pottery we take on consignment from a local artisan, and a couple of old medicine bottles. Just before lunch the bell tinkled again.
    I brushed the wood shavings from my apron, drained the last of the latte and went into the showroom. Standing in the doorway, wiping her boots on the mat, was Raphaella.
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    She was wearing a red woolen Hudson’s Bay coat and a floppy white tam. The cold air hadraised a bit of color in her pale skin, seeming to darken the birthmark. She caught sight of me.
    “Oh” was all she said.
    I couldn’t find my voice. I felt my neck and face flush hot, and something leapt in my stomach.
    “I didn’t know you worked here,” she said, pulling off thick knitted mittens.
    “Er, we own the place.”
    “Oh. Well, that’s great.”
    Her eyes roamed the room. Mine stayed locked on her. How many love songs had I heard that said, “She takes my breath away”? Now I knew what that line meant. My legs were numb. My vocal cords didn’t seem to work properly any more. I was painfully conscious of my stained apron and the block plane in my hand.
    “You have some nice pieces here,” she commented, running her hand along a maple sideboard.
    “Thanks. Dad finds them.”
    “I wouldn’t have figured you for the antique type,” she said. “No offence.”
    “I refinished almost everything here,” I blurted. “The