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“No! Oh, no, no, no. Fuck!” David drops his phone on the counter and crouches behind the cash, stooping awkwardly in an attempt to keep his pants clean, though his heart’s not really in it. Wincing, he reaches out and gingerly brushes the pieces of busted frame and shattered glass into a pile, careful not to put enough muscle into it for the shards to pierce his skin. He picks up the larger pieces and drops them into the nearby trashcan. Once he’s cleared away enough of the debris, he grips the edge of the sheet of paper in his first two fingers and peels it carefully from the mess. Just as he’s laying it on the counter, the bell over the door rings. David freezes, still crouched, and nudges his glasses back into place with the back of his hand. After a moment, Stevie’s face pops over the counter.
“Hey, pal, watcha doing down there?”
“I’m…cleaning.” David tosses his head back in an attempt to seem casual. Given his current position, he’s not sure he quite pulls it off.
“Cleaning?” She blinks innocently. “Cleaning what? And why are your glasses all fogged up?”
“Nothing! What? I’m hot.”
Stevie fixes him with a look.
“Okay,” David huffs. He grabs a few more pieces of the shattered frame and presses the heels of his hands to the counter for leverage as he hauls himself to his feet. “If you must know, there’s been a small, frame-related incident. I was cleaning it up, and I got flustered.”
Stevie takes in what he’s holding and sucks in air in a sympathetic wince. “Is that the…?”
“Business license for the store. Yes it is.” He takes off his glasses and wipes the lenses with the soft cloth he keeps under the cash.
“Also the first gift Patrick ever gave you,” she adds unhelpfully.
“Okay, I was on the phone with a vendor!” David shoves the glasses back on his face. “And… things got… heated. And I miscalculated how close I was standing to the wall when I was making a point! It could’ve happened to anyone.”
“So… you flailed the frame off the wall. That’s what happened.”
“I was gesturing. Emphatically. It’s not important.” He waves a dismissive hand to indicate how not important it is. Stevie rolls her lips between her teeth to bite back a laugh. David doesn’t appreciate her using his own facial expressions against him like that.
“I’m handling it,” he tells her. “Patrick is being interviewed today by Ray for his podcast–”
“Ray’s Real Schitt,” Stevie reminds him.
“–and god knows that’ll take hours. Which means I have time to replace it before he even realizes it’s gone.”
“So you’re going to lie to your husband?”
“Okay!” He throws up his hands. “Are you here to shop for something or verbally harass me?”
“Has the answer to that question ever been anything other than both?”
David clucks his teeth at her. “You could at least help, if you’re going to loiter about my store.”
“How dare you? I do not loiter,” she says, crossing her arms across her chest. “I lurk.”
“Well, do you think you could lurk yourself behind this counter and keep an eye on things while I quickly run to Elmdale for a replacement frame?”
“Kind of ironic, isn’t it?” Stevie teases, but she’s already moving to take his place behind the counter, so David’s willing to let her taunt him to her heart’s content. “The owner of a general, yet very specific, store having to run to another town to buy something that he doesn’t have?”
“Okay, I can’t be expected to carry everything.” He grabs one of the pieces of frame from the counter and waves it at her. “And I would never sell such corporate monstrosities here.”
“Why keep it on your wall, then?” she counters. “Why not replace it with something more your brand?”
“Maybe I will,” he tells her. He grabs his phone, checks that he has his wallet, and heads for the door.
“David, there’s still glass all over the floor.”
“You know where the broom is!” he calls over his shoulder before exiting dramatically from the store.
++++
So David lied to Stevie. So what? He lies to Stevie literally constantly. To mess with her. To get out of things she wants him to do that he doesn’t want to do. To preserve his dignity and that of his spouse when she learns something about their private time together that she shouldn’t know. One more lie was nothing. He didn’t lie about how the frame was broken. Oh, no, that was unfortunately true. But the other truth, the larger truth, is that David has no intention of getting a frame that’s more his brand. Not for this.
Was the original frame completely wrong for the color story he’d carefully curated for the Apothecary? Naturally. Did it look cheap and nondescript hanging there where everyone could see? Of course. Did David cringe every time he caught sight of it?
No. No, he did not.
As Stevie so helpfully pointed out, that stupid frame was the first gift Patrick ever gave him. (Well, other than I was able to fill out your forms for you.) It was the first stamp Patrick ever put on the store – a little piece of himself that reminded David, even in those early days, that he wasn’t alone. David had that business license in large part because of Patrick. It was Patrick who’d swooped in and helped him build the store, and later an entire life, and of the many, many thoughtful gifts Patrick had given him over the years, it was maybe that tacky, corporate-looking frame that David cherished most.
So, no, he would not be replacing it with something more on brand. He would be replacing it with an exact fucking replica, hopefully soon.
+++++
It does not happen soon. How do none of the big box stores in Elmdale have what he needs? It’s the most basic silver frame ever conceived by god or man – there should be dozens, hundreds of them. He should be drowning in frames that looked exactly like his chintzy, run of the mill frame. The stores should have such an overstock that they should be giving them away, gift with purchase style.
Instead, David has driven to six (SIX!!) retail chains with no luck. Nearly four hours (which included a litany of increasingly profanity-laden texts from Stevie) after he set out from the store, David has to admit that his plan is probably not going to go how he’d envisioned. Sighing a long sigh, David shoots off a quick text to Stevie that he is on his way back and points his car toward home.
Take your time, she texts back and okay, her sarcasm is unwelcome but probably warranted at this point.
David is two-thirds of the way back to town when he spots a familiar little hand-painted wooden sign on the side of the road announcing the turn off to Dennis’s Wee Shop. He doesn’t know how he’d forgotten about it. He and Stevie laugh about the name on every trip to and from Elmdale. He can only blame his compromised emotional state for neglecting to hit it first on his way out of Schitt’s Creek. He hangs a hard right and crosses his fingers that Dennis, of all people, will have what he needs.
Ten minutes later, he’s back in the car, his hard-won prize in the passenger seat. He hasn’t been yelled at that aggressively by an Irishman since that night in Grogan’s with Domhnall Gleeson, but, unlike Domhnall, Dennis didn’t let him down in the end.
He can only pray that Ray has managed to keep Patrick talking (or, as is more likely the case, keep talking at Patrick) all this time.
+++++
When he gets back to the store, he’s confused. First of all, there’s no one there. They don’t close for another half-hour, but Stevie seems to have fucked off to who knows where. Secondly, and most disturbingly of all–
“What the fuck?” David swoops around the counter to inspect the spot on the wall where someone has rehung the business license in a sleek, matte black frame. “What the fuck is this?” he demands of the empty store.
“It’s our business license.” Patrick appears from the back. He points to the offending frame as though David isn’t already squinting hatefully at it. “We’re actually required by law to display it.”
“Um. This frame is wrong, though?” David definitely does not whine.
“We have three of this exact frame in our home,” Patrick logically and reasonably points out. Ugh.
“Y-yes, but,” David nudges his glasses up so he can pinch the bridge of his nose, “the silver frame goes here.”
“It broke,” Patrick shrugs, crossing his arms. “Stevie wouldn’t tell me how it came to be broken, but she assured me that you could.”
“That’s not what’s important right now.” David waves a hand. “How did you even– where did you get this frame so fast?”
“I ordered, like, six when we bought the house. You said you liked the style.” Patrick shrugs again, like that’s just a thing that people can say. Like buying a half-dozen frames because one person said one time that they liked the style is in any way normal.
“I do,” David admits, after he’s taken a moment to gape at this strange, kind man who he somehow finds himself married to. “I do like it. I just– not for… here.”
“Oh,” Patrick deflates a little. “Why? Is the light wrong or the – the vision is different? Is it something to do with the color story?”
David walks his hands up Patrick’s arms and onto his shoulders and Patrick, predictably, steadily, uncrosses his arms to wrap them around David’s middle.
“Yes, it’s the color story,” David tells him.
“Well, we can order whatever you like, David. I want you to be happy with it. I know the silver frame wasn’t really your favorite.”
“No, I liked the silver frame.”
Patrick squints at him, like he’s trying to tell if David’s setting him up. David smiles sweetly back at him.
“No, you didn’t.”
“Okay,” David huffs a sigh, relaxing further against Patrick’s sturdy build. “No, I didn’t, but also, yes. I did. I do.”
Patrick’s still eyeing him suspiciously, so David wiggles a little and winces and grips Patrick’s shoulders with his fingertips.
“Okay, you must promise to immediately forget what I’m about to say, and if questioned, I’ll deny I was ever this sentimental.”
Patrick makes no move to make any promise of the sort, but the corners of his mouth tip down a fraction in that amused way, so David barrels on.
“I liked the frame because it was from you. It was the first thing you ever gave me, actually, and I just– I like it, and I– I want to keep it the same.”
Patrick’s face does something unbearable, and David has to roll his eyes toward the heavens in an attempt to escape it.
“Okay,” he says softly, once David’s worked up the resolve to look at him again. “We’ll keep it the same.”
David blows out a relieved breath. “Good, because I already bought another one.” He releases Patrick’s shoulders and steps away to retrieve his bag from the counter.
“Ah. So that’s why you abandoned our store in the middle of a workday.”
“Stevie was supposed to be watching the store,” David points out.
“Stevie doesn’t work here, though.”
“Clearly. She didn’t even empty this trash can.”
“David.”
“Ugh, fine,” David strips the black frame from its place on the wall and busies himself removing the license from it. “I wanted to get a replacement and get back here before you came back from Ray’s.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, I just– that’s your frame. It’s the first part of this store that was ever yours. I didn’t– I didn’t want you to walk in here and see it, just, gone.” He frees the license from the black frame and starts in on putting it into the silver one. “Which, I’m realizing now, is exactly what happened.”
“David, there’s a lot more of me in this store than one frame. I wouldn’t have cared.”
“I know, but…” David drifts off, unsure how to even finish that sentence. It had felt so important, at the time. Why had it felt so important? He hears Patrick sigh and shift behind him.
“It’s okay, I get it. I made Stevie stay here so I could run home and grab that frame because I wanted it to be up before you got back.”
“Oh,” David finishes reassembling the silver frame and turns around to face Patrick. “Why?”
“Dunno. I know– I thought,” Patrick raises his eyebrows, “you hated the silver frame. I wanted you to have a better one.”
“Well. That was very sweet of you.”
“Well, I’m a very sweet person,” Patrick assures him. David smirks and moves to hang the new frame on the wall, but Patrick puts out a hand, stopping him.
“Hang on,” he says. He grabs the frame, turns it so that the lettering is facing David, and presents it back to him. “David, I just came by to drop off your business license. I took the liberty of having it framed; I hope you like it.”
“Mmm,” David works hard to reign his smile in. “It’s very nice. Thank you, Patrick.” He hangs the frame, taking a step back to make sure it’s even.
“I hope maybe we can work here together someday,” Patrick adds.
“You’re an idiot.” David shakes his head, biting his cheek to keep his laugh in check. He won’t give Patrick the satisfaction.
“Wow, okay, I take it back. I definitely don’t want to work with you.” Patrick turns away from him, but David just uses the opportunity to wrap himself around his husband’s back, tucking his chin over Patrick’s shoulder.
“Oh no, I’ve got some bad news for you, then. We actually run this store together.”
“That’s horrible.”
“I know.”
They stand there for a beat, admiring their new-old business license, before David feels Patrick shift slightly in his arms.
“How did it get broken, anyway?”
“Okay, the circumstances under which the frame became broken aren’t important.”
“Mm-hm.”
“I may have been involved in a… let’s call it passionate? Debate with a vendor over the phone…”
“Alright.”
“And I may have been standing a bit too close to the frame as I was making a very important point…”
“You flailed it off the wall, didn’t you?”
“Stevie did tell you!”
“Nope. I just know my husband.”
David hums. “A fact which proves to be both a blessing and a curse.”
“For me, too,” Patrick teases. Then, “Thank you for the frame, David.”
“Thank you for the frame, Patrick.”
“Any time.”