I looked at the shelves against the back wall, all of them stacked with boxes and boxes of cards. “Did you do all of these?”
“Yep. I’ve done about two or three a week since art school.” She gestured towards them. “I mean, I have cards here from ten, fifteen years back.”
“Do you only do death cards?” I asked her.
“Well, I started out with the standard line,” she said, straightening a can of pens on her desk. “Birthdays, valentines, et cetera. But then I hit big in the eighties with NonniCards.”
“Wait,” I said suddenly. “I know that name.”
She smiled, reaching under her desk and coming up with another card. “Yep, she was the motherlode. Nonni made me my name in this business.”
I immediately recognized the little girl in a sailor suit and her mother’s high-heeled shoes. She’d been a greeting card star, the next big wave after Garfield the cat. I could remember begging my mother for a Nonni doll at a gas station once when I knew we couldn’t afford it.
“Oh my God,” I said, looking up at Mira. “I never knew she was yours.”
“Yep,” she said, smiling fondly at the card. “She had her run. Then, after all the hype, I was really in the mood to focus on something different. And condolences just interested me. They’d hardly been explored.”
I was staring all the time at all those boxes, shelves upon shelves. A lifetime of death. “Do you ever run out of ideas?”
“Not really,” she said, her slippered feet, blue and fuzzy, dangling above the floor. “You’d be amazed how many ways there are to say you’re sorry in the world. I haven’t even begun to discover them all.”
“Still,” I said. “That’s a lot of dead mailmen.”
She looked surprised, her eyes wide. Then she laughed, one single burst of “Ha!” A pen fell out of her hair, clattering to the floor. She ignored it. “I guess you’re right,” she said, looking up at the shelves again. “It sure is.”
Cat Norman dragged himself up on the windowsill, settling his girth along its narrow width. Outside, Mira’s collection of birdfeeders was swinging in the wind, several birds perched on each. Cat Norman lifted one paw and tapped the glass. Then he yawned and closed his eyes in the sun.
“So,” Mira said to me. “It’s your first day. You should go exploring, check out the town or something.”
“Maybe I will,” I said, just as the front door slammed.
“It’s me,” someone called out.
“Norman Norman,” Mira called back. “We’re in here.”
Norman poked his head in, looked around, and stepped inside. He was barefoot, in jeans and a green T-shirt with a pair of red, square-framed sunglasses hooked over the collar. His hair, just to his shoulders, wasn’t long enough to be truly hippie-annoying, but it was close.
“So, Norman,” Mira said, uncapping another pen and outlining a tree on a new piece of paper, “any decent finds this morning?”
He grinned. “Oh, man. It was a good day. I got four more ash-trays for that sculpture—one’s a souvenir from Niagara Falls—and an old blender, plus a whole boxful of bicycle gears.”
I knew it, I thought. Art freak.
“Wow,” Mira said, pulling a pen out of her hair. “No sunglasses?”
“Three pairs,” Norman said. “One with purple lenses.”
“It was a good day,” she said. To me she added, “Norman and I are into yard sales. I’ve furnished practically this whole house with secondhand stuff.”
“Really,” I said, eyeing the cracked fishtank.
“Oh, sure,” she said, not noticing. “You’d be amazed at what some people will throw away! Now, if I just had time to fix everything, I’d be all set.”
Norman picked up a sketch, glanced at it, then put it back down on the table. “I saw Bea Williamson this morning,” he said in a low voice. “Lurking about looking for cut glass.”
“Oh, of course,” Mira said with a sigh. “Did she have it with her?”
Norman nodded solemnly. “Yep. I swear, I think it’s almost gotten . . . bigger.”
Mira shook her head. “Not possible.”
“I’m serious,” Norman said. “It’s way big.”
I kept waiting for someone to expand on this, but since neither of them seemed about to, I asked, “What are you talking about?”
They looked at each other. Then, Mira took a breath. “Bea Williamson’s baby,” she said quietly, as if someone could hear us, “has the biggest head you have ever seen.”
Norman nodded, seconding this.
“A baby?” I said.
“A big-headed baby,” Mira corrected me. “You should see the cranium on this kid. It’s mind-boggling.”
“She’s going to be very bright,” Norman said.
“Well, she is a Williamson.” Mira sighed, as if that explained everything. Then, to me, she added, “They’re very important in Colby, the Williamsons.”
“Mean,” Norman explained.
Mira shook her head, waving him off with one hand. “Now, now,” she said. “So, Norman. I was just telling Colie she should go exploring today. You know, she met Isabel and Morgan last night.”
“Yeah,” Norman said, smiling at me in a way that made me look over at the birdfeeders, quick. “I heard.”