It was the Monday after Thanksgiving, November 29, 1982.
The factory floor at Belaire Filters had the smell of hot metal and machine oil, and over that, faint but constant, the mineral tang of the pleated paper that would end up, weeks from now, inside a furnace in some house Ryan Mendoza would never see, filtering somebody else's air. He had worked the line long enough that the smell rarely registered. Only in November, when the cold outside made the overhead heaters kick on and the whole building seemed to exhale at once, did it come back strong enough to notice.
The walls were painted the color of old seafoam, a green that had probably looked cheerful on a paint chip in some distant office in 1968 and now, fourteen years and a hundred thousand shift changes later, looked like something left too long in standing water. Fluorescent tubes buzzed in long rows overhead. Two of them flickered and one was dead, and had been since September, and would likely stay that way until June, because maintenance requests at Midaire moved at roughly the speed of continental drift.
Doug Meyers stood at the next station, his hands moving on the line with the easy, unconscious competence of a man who had made the same motion eight hours a day for the better part of a year. His eyes were on his work. His mouth, as usual, ran well ahead of it.
"You know what you should get Jaimie?" Doug said, not looking up. "A microwave oven."
"Yeah, I know." Ryan didn't look up either. You learned, on the line, to talk without looking, the same way you learned to eat lunch in ten minutes flat and to read your own fatigue in the ache that settled into your lower back around hour six.
"She's mentioned it to Hayley like three times that I know of. Hayley wants one too, but not like your wife wants one. According to Hayley, Jaimie's obsessed with the idea of heating up a potato in ten minutes."
"She's always looking at them when we go to Joslins," Ryan admitted. "Stands right in front of the display like she's waiting for one to start talking to her."
"So get her one. Perfect Christmas present."
Ryan laughed, short and without much humor in it. "Yeah, right. You know what those things cost? I'm not exactly next in line for Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. You know what I make. I'd be lucky to afford an Easy-Bake oven for Maddie, let alone a microwave oven for Jaimie."
"So put it on layaway."
"Huh?"
"That new store on 28th Street. Infinite Emporium. You seen it yet? Huge place, used to be the old Montgomery Ward before they pulled out. They've got everything in there. Furniture, tools, toys, jewelry, you name it. And they'll put anything on layaway. Anything. I just got Marcus an electric guitar there. Kid wants to be the next Eddie Van Halen. And it's a real one, an Ibanez, same brand Randy Rhoads played. Not one of those cheap ones they sell at Sears."
"How's it work? How long do they give you?"
"Thirty days on most stuff. But the manager's cool about it. Totally cool, actually. Told me if I run into trouble before the due date, just come talk to him and he'll work something out."
"How much was the guitar?"
"Two-fifty. I've put down a hundred so far. Owe one-fifty by the tenth, but that's payday, so I'm not worried."
"So you get the guitar on the tenth."
Doug grinned, the particular grin of a man who had been sitting on good news and waiting for the right moment to let it out. "Actually," he said, "it's already wrapped and sitting under the tree."
"How?"
"I know it sounds crazy. But the manager, Henry, his name is, he's real fair about it. He'll trust you to take something home early, before it's paid off, if you pass the test."
"The test?"
"They've got a polygraph machine. Hooked up to a chair, wires and everything, real official-looking setup. It's optional, nobody makes you do it, but if you want to walk out with the merchandise before you've finished paying, that's how. Pass the test, they trust you."
Ryan's hands kept moving, pleating stock into frames, the motion so automatic that his mind could wander a long way from it without the work ever slipping. He thought about Jaimie standing in front of that display at Joslins, the soft, wanting look on her face, the one she tried to hide because she knew what things cost as well as he did and didn't like to want things out loud.
"Infinite Emporium," he said, mostly to himself. "What's that even supposed to mean?"
"Hell if I know." Doug grinned again. "Guess it means they've got everything. Or maybe it means the lines never move. I didn't exactly interview the guy who named it." He bumped Ryan's shoulder with his own, the way he had been bumping it since they were fifteen and sneaking cigarettes behind the gym. "Go check it out, man. Seriously. Get the microwave. Make Jaimie's whole Christmas."