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“And, André,” Eléonore said, holding the front door for him, “do not use the shop money to buy heavy cream this time.”
“Yes, Eléonore,” André said.
“Benoît can only handle the books if there are no big surprises.”
“Yes, Eléonore.”
She looked at him, looked at his feet crossing the store threshold the way she watched everyone leave the Coldstone Charmery. “We can talk about setting aside something for your,” she waved a wrinkled hand, “dessert venture. But it will take time, André.”
“Yes, Eléonore, but—”
“Savings takes time.”
“Eléonore,” André tried, “I told you; it wasn’t the shop money; I paid for it with—”
“The money that pays for what is sold at the Charmery is shop money, André. It doesn’t matter where or who it comes from. It must go in the books.”
“If an employee pays separately and directly—”
“André: the books do not care about those rules. Shop money is shop money; this is not a question of an economic technicality but of a territorial animal. We can discuss this when you come back with the order.”
He considered pressing the issue, but Eléonore’s expression was firm. “Yes, Eléonore,” he said. She shut the door behind him.
André pondered the issue of the ice cream as he bought several successive bus tickets and made his roundabout way to the pickup site. The truth was, and Eléonore knew, he had more than enough money in savings to fund a dozen attempts at making his own ice cream. He didn’t understand why Eléonore wouldn’t let him pay for it independently. The Charmery had enough space, and if André paid for it independently then the money wouldn’t need to be managed by Benoît. And how had Benoît even found out about the last purchase? Unless André had made a mistake, he’d paid for those ingredients with his own money. Was Eléonore surveilling him?
It was too much to think about, and the boxes of powders, sands, salts, and dusts he was now wheeling were too heavy to allow him extra focus. He nearly ran over a bird as he got off the bus near the Charmery. It gave him a wheezy trill.
“Sorry,” he muttered without feeling. “It’s a shit day.” Something about the bird’s movement made him stop and look at it more closely, and he saw it was dragging one of its wings in the road grit. It was a pigeon. It looked at him.
André sighed. “Shit day for both of us. Wait here,” he said. “If you’re not too stupid to walk away, I will bring you some water and birdseed. Once I unpack these fucking boxes, anyway.”
He managed to get the boxes halfway through the stockroom door before Eléonore bustled up to him and said: “André. Language.”
“It’s French,” André growled, struggling to pull the hand dolly over the stupid, raised threshold. “How would you—even know what I said—outside?” he managed between tugs.
He swore Eléonore rolled her eyes. “I don’t,” she said, “but the chances of you swearing? Astronomical. You get so anxious when you’re grumpy. I told you we will talk about the ice cream—”
“Forget it,” André said. He settled for picking up the boxes over the back of the dolly, carefully stacking them in their place. Even upset, he would never risk damaging the merchandise.
“We will talk,” Eléonore told him, nodding once as if he had made an agreement with her. “Well. Back to the counter.”
André thought he ought to have been given an award for not throwing more curses at the back of her head. He finished with the boxes, crammed the hand dolly behind a shelf, and rummaged through supplies for familiars until he found a decent pair of bowls and bag of birdseed. The water he simply conjured; his magical stamina was the one thing that today hadn’t managed to drain.
He caught his toe on the back door as he exited into the alley because that was simply the luck he was having. Midway through possibly the longest chain of swears ever invented, he remembered the pigeon.
Fortunately, it hadn’t moved from the roadside, and André was able to scoop it into his apron without any fuss. “You’re in worse shape than I am,” he begrudgingly admitted. A healthy bird would have put up a fight.
In the alley, the pigeon attacked the food and water with relish, much to André’s relief. After watching long enough to soothe his nerves, he went back inside to fetch medical supplies. He returned to find Eléonore and Benoît watching the pigeon from just inside the stockroom doorway. How they’d slipped past him was anyone’s guess.
“Very nice bird,” Benoît hissed, smiling with all of his teeth. “Come back this evening, little bird.”
“Don’t be cryptic,” Eléonore told him. “You aren’t any good at it. André, will you need any help with him? The pigeon, I mean.”
André found he wasn’t as angry with her as he had been. “No. I should be able to handle it. Him.” He gestured with the roll of bandages he’d grabbed.
Eléonore nodded and slipped back out to the store. Benoît kept staring for a moment, then backed into the corridor, blinking.
“Don’t mind them,” André told the pigeon, kneeling beside it in the alley. “Eléonore is a good friend, and Benoît just… does what he does. Will you let me handle your wing?”
He had to wait until it finished eating, but the pigeon eventually allowed him to inspect and wrap its wing. André supposed that pigeons had once been domesticated, and perhaps this one was returning to its roots.
“I have to work the rest of my shift,” he told it. “I’ll refill your food and water, but I won’t be back until dusk. You’re better off staying here, but I can’t make you.” Eléonore had told André something similar when she’d first hired him. André tried not to feel pathetic about repeating it to a feral pigeon.
At approximately ten minutes to sunset, André folded up his apron and gave the stockroom one last check before he left. Eléonore stepped in just as he opened the back door.
“André,” she said, “I just know you’ve misunderstood me, but I’m going to have to tell you to give me time. I understand where you want the money for your ice cream to come from. Give me three days and I will give you the exact way we and the Charmery can make it work.”
André wanted to believe her. He really did. “I have been trying to tell you, Eléonore,” he said—but he stopped. He had a wounded pigeon to check on, and he didn’t want to fall back into despair so late in the evening. “Three days,” he repeated. “Of course, Eléonore.”
She held the door for him as he exited. At his first footfall in the alley, there was a sudden noise of feathers, then fabric, then a light thump.
“Oh, how interesting,” Eléonore said, not sounding surprised at all. The door closed behind André’s back.
The pigeon André had been tending to all day was now no pigeon at all: it was a man. A skinny, pallid man in what might have been a nice suit a decade ago but was now mangled and shredded and filthy and somehow the exact physical representation of how André had felt earlier that day, or how he had felt back at his old office, or, indeed, how André simply felt every time he was reminded that he wasn’t a boy anymore.
“Ouch,” the man said. Then he saw André. “He-ll-o-o,” he warbled, getting to his feet in a lopsided way that showed André his arm was very much as wounded as the pigeon’s wing had been. “I am so sorry to intrude upon your, ah, establishment… property… space. I shall simply be on my way, and you shall never suffer my presence again. Good da—evening. Yes.” As he spoke he tried to sidle out into the street.
André, of course, blocked him. “You were the pigeon,” he found himself saying. Very good, André, he thought. Very wise.
“I don’t know what you mean,” said the man who had been a pigeon moments ago. “So sorry to have bothered you.”
André held up his hands, but regretted it when the man flinched away from him. “Wait—wait. This is a magic shop. Are you cursed? Are you a were?”
The man, winding up to no doubt spew another slurry of polite ramblings, froze in place. His awkward-friendly demeanor shattered, and he wilted like a cut flower. “Cursed is… the closer answer. It’s not something you or anyone else can cure,” he said. His real voice was hollow and breezy, not unlike a pigeon’s coo. “If you don’t mind, I’ll be on my way.”
“Not with that arm, you won’t,” André said, planting his feet. “The bandages for weres should work; I would have used them if I’d known.”
“Then bandage me and I’ll be off,” the man said. “I’m not staying.”
“You’d be better off staying, but I can’t make you,” André told the pigeon man for the second time that day. “Please,” he said, a word he still wasn’t used to. “This place will not expect anything of you. Stay until you’ve recovered, and I will not try to stop you from going.”
The man eyed him suspiciously for a long moment. “Fine,” he said. “Only because I expect the pigeon will want to come back, anyway. It always goes back to people who feed it.” He scoffed.
“Wise bird,” André said. He carefully moved to the stockroom door. The man did not flee. “My name is André Glacier,” he said, opening the door.
“I’ll tell you my name,” the man said, slinking in with one arm holding the other, “once you’ve fed me something that isn’t birdseed.”