The Pawn Shop

Every object has a story. Some of them aren’t finished yet.

J.T. McClendon has spent years behind the counter of his pawn shop, surrounded by things other people have left behind. But when those objects begin behaving in ways he can’t quite explain, J.T. discovers that some things aren’t waiting to be sold. They’re waiting to find their way home.

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Lucy Asks George

The story behind the story.

Lucy: George, The Pawn Shop starts with a simple but unusual idea: “What if the things we leave behind remember us long after we’ve forgotten them?” Where did that idea come from? Was there a particular pawn shop, object, or memory that first made you wonder about the lives things might have after their owners leave them behind?

George: It’s an idea that’s been with me for years. A friend and I used to haunt pawn shops on Saturday mornings looking for deals, and I’ve also done advertising for pawn shops throughout my career. Then, once I was married, I found myself spending time in antique malls and used-merchandise shops, too.

One day I was looking at an ancient anvil and wondered, What if this thing could talk? Think of the stories it could tell—about shoes it had made for the horses of marshals and desperados alike.

My mind started doing the same thing with old guitars. Who played you? What were the crowds like? What songs did you play?

Then I began wondering how all these things had ended up where they were. Had they been discarded? Sold for quick cash when somebody was in a pinch? And eventually came the bigger question: What if these supposedly inanimate objects remembered their old lives? What if they wished they could go home again?

Lucy: You could have made this a much darker supernatural story—a creepy pawn shop filled with haunted objects—but you didn’t. J.T. is a lonely widower, the objects aren’t really frightening, and even their conversations can be funny. Why did you decide to make the story gentle and a little melancholy instead of turning The Pawn Shop into a ghost story?

George: Over time, my youngest son was killed in a freak auto accident. Two years later, my wife died unexpectedly. Then my oldest son married and moved out of the house.

I found myself alone, and without much of an identity, really. I wasn’t the husband anymore. I wasn’t the dad involved in day-to-day parenting. I’d simply lost an identity I’d carried for some twenty-five years.

And, honestly, I was sort of lost between two worlds—the old one that had passed on and some new, unidentified future life.

In a way, I was like those objects sitting on the shelves of a pawn shop or antique store. I was between lives. I missed my old life—I still do—but eventually I was redeemed. And it took years.

That’s what I wanted to show with J.T. In a sense, he’s just as firmly fixed on a shelf, waiting for the next thing in life, as the objects he buys and sells.

I never thought of any of it as creepy or haunted. The Pawn Shop is really more a story about a strange kind of loneliness than any kind of horror.

Lucy: Darlene is obviously drawn to J.T., but she seems to have some loneliness of her own. Did you see her as another one of those people who, like J.T. and the objects in the shop, is somewhere between an old life and whatever might come next?

George: In one sense, yes. But Darlene is also sitting on a shelf. She’s a widow running her restaurant. She’s attractive and no doubt has plenty of social offers, but somehow she’s landed on redeeming that scruffy, hard-headed old friend of hers from across the street.

I think she’s just as reluctant and uncertain as J.T. is. She’s just stubborn enough herself to keep plugging away.

There was a woman like that in my own life who seemed to show up at just the right time. She helped me begin finding my way into whatever came next.

And she also made fantastic food. [chuckles]

Read Chapter One

Closing Time

By six o’clock, Main Street had moved on to supper, television, and whatever else people did to avoid themselves, while the pawn shop remained the only place that still looked awake.

Its neon sign had been missing one letter for years, so after dark it simply read PA_N. Behind the barred front windows sat guitars, cameras, tools, wedding rings, watches, and the remains of promises people swore they’d come back for. Every shelf in the place held somebody’s unfinished sentence.

Inside, John Thomas McClendon—J.T. to everyone who had ever known him—stood behind the counter, counting twenties with the steady hands of a man who had spent half his life handling other people’s emergencies.

He was sixty-two, broad through the shoulders, silver at the temples, wearing a light blue Oxford shirt with J.T. stitched over the pocket. His wedding ring still rode his finger ten years after Rebecca died. Some mornings, he still caught himself leaving room on the kitchen counter for a second coffee cup.

Other men hid in bars or churches after life went sideways on them, but J.T. McClendon had spent the better part of the last decade hiding inside a pawn shop.

Across the street, in the diner window, Darlene Mercer was wiping down a table and pretending not to look over.

The bell above the pawn shop door gave a tired little jingle.

A young man stepped in wearing work boots and worry.

“Evenin’, J.T.”

“Evenin’.”

The man approached the counter and slowly opened his hand. A gold wedding ring rested in his palm. J.T. looked at the face before he looked at the jewelry. The man had red eyes, looked as though he hadn’t slept, and carried the worried expression of someone trying not to bring his troubles home with him. His pride was hanging by a thread.

“Need a loan?” J.T. asked.

“Yes, sir.”

J.T. picked up the ring, turned it beneath the light, and already knew most of the story: the rent was due, the month had gone badly, and some fresh expense had arrived at exactly the wrong time. He also suspected the man had a wife at home who was pretending not to panic.

He checked the stone anyway.

“What’d you pay?”

“Thirty-two hundred.”

“Where?”

“Mall jewelry store.”

That explained it. J.T. set the ring down gently. “Son, I’m going to tell you the truth because lies won’t help either one of us.”

The young man braced himself.

“This ring isn’t worth what they charged you.”

The man swallowed hard, hearing J.T. say aloud what he had already admitted to himself. Without adding to the humiliation, J.T. opened the register, counted the bills, and slid them across the glass.

“I’ll loan you a thousand.”

The young man stared at him. “A thousand?”

“It’s me being kinder than the numbers.”

The fellow’s eyes watered before he could stop them.

“Yes, sir,” he said quietly. “Thank you.”

J.T. handed him the pawn ticket. “Ninety days. Come back sooner if life improves.”

The man nodded once and left, carrying the money like oxygen.

The bell gave a slower sound on the way out.

J.T. watched the empty doorway a moment and thought: some days this business felt like commerce, some days it felt like a confession, and some days it felt like triage.

A few minutes later the bell rang again, and this time a skinny little man with bad teeth rolled in a shiny red child’s bicycle that immediately struck J.T. as belonging to somebody else.

“I need forty dollars.”

J.T. looked over the bicycle and noticed that the training wheels had been removed recently, the chain was freshly oiled, superhero stickers covered the frame, and a single blue ribbon remained tied to one handlebar.

He looked back at the man. “What’s your son’s name?”

The man blinked. “What?”

“Boy this size ought to have one.”

The man’s jaw tightened.

“You buying it or not?”

“I’ll need ID.” The man patted first one pocket and then the other before checking them both again, more slowly this time. “I—I swear it’s mine.”

J.T. stepped from behind the counter and rolled the bicycle forward a few feet. The rear brake squealed sharply in the quiet room.

“No receipt?”

“No.”

“Paperwork?”

“No.”

J.T. nodded once. “Well, the law says I can’t pawn it without proof of ownership.”

The man’s shoulders sagged.

J.T. studied him for another moment, then reached into his own wallet and handed him ten dollars. “This isn’t a pawn, and I’m not buying the bicycle. I’m giving you ten dollars, and you’re leaving the bike here until you come back with something proving it belongs to you.”

The man looked at him, caught between relief and humiliation. “That’d help.”

He grabbed the bill and hurried out.

The bell sounded softer this time, almost as though it were embarrassed for him. J.T. carried the bicycle to the back room and leaned it against the wall. Everything about it said stolen, but he’d hold it for a few weeks.

Sooner or later, some parent would come through the door with anger in one hand and heartbreak in the other. When the rightful owner eventually came through the door, J.T. would let them have the bicycle back for the ten dollars he had in it, because fairness mattered more to him than squeezing a few extra dollars out of somebody’s misery.

He returned to the front counter and lifted his coffee. By then the coffee had gone cold, which irritated J.T. more than it probably should have, so he set the cup back down with the mild disgust of a man who never trusted people willing to drink iced coffee voluntarily.

Most evenings were like this, filled with small emergencies, poor lies, and temporary defeats, followed by the long, deep quiet that could settle over a widower if he allowed it to remain too long.

His eyes wandered around the shop, taking in the rows of watches that no longer knew whose time they belonged to, the violin resting in its cracked case, the three guitars hanging patiently on the wall, an old camera with no film, a wedding dress sealed inside yellowing plastic, and the swollen pawn ticket drawer that had been keeping other people’s promises for longer than he cared to remember.

His eyes also passed over the old snub-nosed .38 revolver resting on the top shelf in back, a gun he never sold and never discussed, before moving on to the darkening diner windows.

Across the street, the diner lights dimmed one row at a time. Then the front bell rang again.

The odd thing was—he hadn’t heard the door open.

Darlene Mercer stood just inside the shop, carrying a covered pie dish.

She was in her late forties, auburn-haired, and handsome in the honest way time sometimes grants to people who keep going, with tired eyes, good posture, and very little patience for nonsense.

“You’re closed, aren’t you?” J.T. said.

“I know.” She lifted the dish slightly.

“Brought you peach pie before you tried to make supper out of peanuts again.”

“I had peanuts yesterday,” J.T. offered.

“Tonight, I was planning on crackers.”

“That’s not helping your case.”

He almost smiled.

She set the pie dish on the counter. “Thought you might forget to eat.”

“That happens.” J.T. shrugged.

“I know it does,” she said without looking up at him. For a moment, neither of them said anything. They had become practiced at that kind of silence. “Well,” she said, “I’ll leave you to your glamorous evening.”

“You always this judgmental?”

“Only with men trying to starve politely.”

She turned and stepped back outside. The bell gave no sound this time.

J.T. watched her cross the street, then carried the pie into the back room and set it on the small table where Rebecca used to sort receipts. He rested one hand on the back of the chair she once claimed as hers. He poured himself a fresh cup.

Across the table sat another cup, empty now and chipped along the rim, though Rebecca had never allowed him to throw it away. “It’s worth saving,” she used to say, “it’s still got a lot of use left in it.” Her voice echoed in his mind.

Sometimes grief came loud, but mostly it came as furniture.

Over the years, J.T. had come to believe that people rarely pawned things they didn’t love. They pawned the things life had temporarily managed to separate them from.

Out front, the pawn shop settled into its familiar closing-time hush of dust, glass, and things waiting to be reclaimed. He was reaching for the light switch when the bell above the locked front door gave a soft, lonely jingle.

J.T. looked up sharply.

Then, from the darkness near the back wall, came the bright little ring of the red child’s bicycle bell. J.T. stood perfectly still for a long moment, listening for another sound.

Somewhere in the darkness, so faintly that he could never have sworn to it later, someone laughed softly.