Department stores -- Fiction; Families -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories; Time travel -- Fiction
A sorting clerk in the mail order department wasn't used to liquor. She
picked up the envelope and looked around vaguely for the mail-opening
machine.
"Hell, Milly, you aren't working!" someone shouted at her. "Have
another!"
Milly snapped out of it. She giggled, suppressed a ladylike belch and
returned to reality. Looking at the envelope, she said: "Oh, I see.
They must have stuck it in to tighten the frame. Gee, it's old."
Mr. Hawkins had refreshed himself. He decided that he liked Milly's
voice. To hear more of it, he said to her: "I'll bet that's been in
there ever since the picture was framed. There's a company legend that
that picture was put up the day this branch opened, eighty years ago."
"I didn't know the company ever used buff envelopes like this." Milly
turned it over in her hands. The ancient glue crackled as she did so.
The flap popped open and an old-fashioned order blank fell out.
Mr. Hawkins' eyes widened. He bent, reached painfully over his potbelly
and picked up the order form.
"This thing has never been processed!" Raising his voice, he shouted
jovially, "Hey, people! You're all fired! Here's an order that
Hartshorne-Logan never filled! We can't have such carelessness. This
poor woman has waited eighty years for her merchandise!"
* * * * *
Milly was reading aloud the scrawled words on the order form:
"Best electric doorbell. Junior detective kit. Disposable sacks for
vacuum cleaner. Dress for three-year-old girl." She turned to the
assistant general manager, struck with an idea for the first time in
her young life. "Let's fill this order right now!"
"The poor woman must be dead by now," he objected, secretly angry
that he hadn't thought of such a fine party stunt himself. Then he
brightened. "Unless--" he said it loud enough for the employes to scent
a great proposal and the room grew quiet--"unless we broke the rules
just once and used the time warp on a big mission!"
There was a silence. Finally, from an anonymous voice in one corner:
"Would the warp work over eighty years? We were always told that it
must be used only for complaints within three days."
"Then let's find out!" Mr. Hawkins downed the rest of his drink and
pulled a batch of keys from his pocket. "Someone scoot down to the
warehouse. Tell the watchman that it's on my authority. Hunt up the
stuff that's on the order. Get the best of everything. Ignore the
catalogue numbers--they've changed a hundred times in all these years."
Milly was still deciphering the form. Now she let out a little squeal
of excitement.
"Look, Mr. Hawkins! The name on this order--it's my great-grandmother!
Isn't that wonderful? I was just a little girl when she died. I can
barely remember her as a real old woman. But I remember that my
grandmother never bought anything from Hartshorne-Logan because of some
trouble her mother had once with the firm. My mother didn't want me to
come to work here because of that."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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