Just Boxes

They'd gone half on the yard signs — three hundred dollars for a hundred and fifty each, double-sided, planted at the two busiest corners in town.

If we get one job off these, they'd said, they pay for themselves.

Eight days later, someone called.

She was specific on the phone, the way people are when they've decided exactly what they want you to hear.

Just boxes on the porch, she said.

From the move. And there's a stove I don't need anymore, if you can pull it.

Oh, and there's some copper back there too — if you want it, it's yours.

Copper's the word that gets a junk guy to call back twice. Steel's nothing. Aluminum's a little something. Copper's real money, pound for pound the best thing that ever turns up in a pile — and she said it like it cost her nothing to offer, like she was doing them a favor just by mentioning it.

They agreed on a time before she'd even finished the sentence — end of the workday, she said, whatever worked for them.

She was still in her work clothes when they pulled up, corporate, pressed, the kind of pretty that made most men adjust how they stood.

Whether that was the only time she had, or the only time she wanted to be standing there in, wasn't something either of them could have told you.

She smiled the whole walk up the steps.

The enclosed porch had a pile against the left wall — boxes, stacked the way boxes get stacked when nobody's counting, some flattened, some still taped.

From the door, it read exactly like what she'd said it was.