Infinite Emporium occupied the old Montgomery Ward the way a hermit crab occupies a shell several sizes too small. The building itself hadn't changed, loading docks and all, but everything inside had been gutted and rebuilt into something that didn't quite make sense on a map of a town the size of Greeley. The aisles ran back further than the outer walls seemed to allow. Furniture gave way to electronics gave way to tools, and somewhere past a bend Ryan didn't remember the layout accounting for, a jewelry counter glowed soft and gold, and beyond that were the toys, their shelves stocked floor to ceiling with bicycles, Big Wheels, Cabbage Patch Kids, Rubik’s Cubes, E. T., Smurfs, Strawberry Shortcake, and some things he had never even seen advertised on TV.
He found the microwave without much trouble. It was the same Panasonic Jaimie had stood in front of at Joslins more times than either of them had ever said aloud, white, with a digital clock on the front instead of the mechanical dial on their old stove's timer. It sat boxed on a shelf as if it had been waiting there specifically for him.
The Layaway department was at the very back of the store, through a plain steel door that looked as if it belonged to a different, more serious kind of building than the one Ryan had just spent twenty minutes wandering. Beyond it was a waiting room: rows of plastic chairs, fluorescent light even flatter and whiter than the factory's, and a steel door marked EXIT on the far wall that led to the back parking lot. A horizontal mirror ran along the opposite wall, and it looked exactly like one of those two-way mirrors in police interrogation rooms Ryan had seen on TV. Set into the wall between the steel door and the mirror was a window of glass so thick that Ryan understood, without anyone telling him, that it was bulletproof. Behind it sat a man in grey coveralls, a name patch stitched above his breast pocket reading JOSE.
"May I help you, sir?"
"I found a microwave oven I'd like to put on layaway," Ryan said. "The Panasonic."
"Fill out this form." Jose slid a clipboard out through a drawer at the base of the window with practiced ease, a pen clipped to the top. "And I'll need to make a copy of your ID."
"How's the plan work, exactly?"
"Ten percent down today. After that, pay whenever you like, however much you like, as long as the full balance is settled within thirty days." Jose glanced at a calendar taped beside his register. "Thirty days from today puts your due date at December twenty-ninth."
"My buddy told me about a guy named Henry. Said if I take some kind of test, I can bring it home before it's paid off."
Something crossed Jose's face, brief, there and gone. If Ryan had put a word to it, he would have said nerves. "Yes," Jose said. "That can be arranged. Let me call Henry."
Henry came through the steel door a few minutes later, and Ryan's first impression of him was of a man built entirely out of warmth: a wide, easy smile, a handshake firm enough to mean something without trying to prove anything, grey at the temples in a way that read as distinguished rather than old. "You must be Ryan," he said. The fact that he already knew the name sent one small, cold thread through the warmth of the greeting, which Ryan noticed and then, just as quickly, talked himself out of noticing. "I'm Henry. Come on across the hall, and we'll get you squared away."
The room across the hall held a single chair, wired with sensors for the fingertips and a band for the chest. Henry worked the straps with the unhurried competence of a man who had done this many, many times.
He studied the form on the clipboard that Ryan had filled out. Then, he began asking questions.
"Is your name Ryan Mendoza?"
"Yes."
"Do you work at Belaire Filters?"
"Yes."
"Have you ever cheated on your wife?"
The question landed in the small room like a dropped plate. Ryan felt his pulse jump somewhere the machine could presumably see even if his face didn't show it. "What?"
"Just answer yes or no, please." Henry's voice hadn't changed at all, still warm, still unhurried. "These questions are completely confidential. Nothing leaves this room. They're standard questions used to reveal deception. I'm only here to confirm you're a truthful man. Now, have you ever cheated on your wife?"
Ryan sat with the needles tracing faint lines across the paper and thought, against his will, about a night four years ago. It was the fight he and Jaimie had had in their first year of marriage, the one that sent him out the door and into his Camaro, over to Doug's apartment just to breathe air that didn't have her anger hanging in it. He’d cranked Goodbye to Romance from his Blizzard of Ozz 8 track the whole way there. Seemed appropriate.
Doug's sister Julie had been staying with him, back when Doug still tended bar. He was already halfway out the door when Ryan arrived.
“Gotta get to my shift, dude,” he had said. “Bar closes at two if you’re still around. You’re welcome to hang out. Julie made some righteous sloppy joe and there’s beer in the fridge.”
Ryan and Julie had started drinking not long after, innocently enough at first, two people killing an evening. Then Julie got flirty the way people do three drinks in, and Ryan, tired, angry, still raw from the fight, young enough to mistake being wanted for being loved, let it happen.
He had regretted it before his head hit the pillow that same night. He had carried it, silent, for four years. Jaimie didn't know. Doug didn't know. He had never said it out loud to another living soul.
But Henry had said confidential.
"Yes," Ryan said.