cool dry place

An old man walks up to the kiosk where I’m eating an apple and doing the crossword. “Is there a Bell store in this mall?”

“Nope.” There’s a Dollarama and a Super Discount City and an As Seen On TV! in this mall, but no Bell store. C’est si dommage.

“Whassat?”

“Nope.”

“Is there a Bell store here?”

“There is no Bell store in this mall.”

“Oh.” He’s carrying an ancient rotary telephone under his arm. Its Bakelite shell is nicotine-yellowed from decades perched on an end table in the front hallway of the kind of home you always see in TV depictions of prairie life in the late 1970s. “I need to return this to the Bell store.”

“You can’t do that here.”

“It’s a $2500 phone.”

The cord looks like it’s been chewed by a small fluffy dog or possibly a toddler. When he shifts his weight from foot to foot the phone emits a cheerful clink.

“It doesn’t look like it.”

The mall PA plays “Christmas All Over Again” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. The old man shuffles out the door, an RJ-11 jack and five feet of cord trailing behind him on the scuffed tile.

I’m trying to imagine how a simple rotary phone could possibly be worth $2500 to a cranky old man. So far the best I’ve got is that it fell off an end table and fatally crushed Mitzi, a 3-years-running Best-in-Show Pomeranian, and the old man is taking the phone to Bell so he can clunk it down on the counter in front of the 17-year-old part-time seasonal employee and shout incomprehensibly for six and a half minutes before demanding to speak to a manager and threatening to sue for monetary damages and emotional distress.

The telecommunications industry Retail is a harsh mistress.