Learning to Shine and Other Stories

By Teresa Hubley

Join six souls at a crossroads in these stories. You’ll meet a woman struggling to come to terms with a criminal relative, a fictional character denying reality, an under-appreciated assistant wondering how much more to take, a man facing a fantastical family secret, a married couple fretting over a potential piece of criminal evidence, and a writer with a strong-willed lead character.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Teresa Hubley
• Release date: Nov 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9781311334442

Teresa Hubley

Teresa Hubley was born in Minneapolis and moved every couple of years after that, winding up in a handful of small Midwestern towns, suburban California and even west Africa. As an adult, she acquired a doctoral degree in anthropology and has lived most of her life in Maine, where she works in the health field. She usually has too many books to keep track of going at any time on her reading list. Favorite authors include Charles Dickens, E.M. Forster, Agatha Christie, Elizabeth Peters, and Dave Barry. Lunch out with Teresa and her family usually includes the reading of a few pages while the meal is delivered. When she's not reading or writing, she might be drawing, going for a long walk, or sneaking a guilty pleasure moment playing games on her tablet.

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Learning to Shine

and Other Stories

By Teresa Hubley

Copyright 2013 Teresa Hubley

Smashwords Edition

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Table of Contents

Learning to Shine

Keep it Real

Borrowed and Blue

Orlia

A Case for Conscience

The Ninth Life

Learning to Shine

The biggest thing I learned while working for my Mother’s cousin Huey was that even a cover business needs to do some work. That was where I came in. Since my mother never really talked about Huey, I don’t know to this day if she knew what she was doing when she sent me off to take a summer job with him. I just remember her in a blinding patch of sun, dressed in one of her ever-present gingham shirtdresses, wiping her hands from doing the morning dishes and telling me how I was going to spend my summer.

You need a job, Winifred, she told me, as if my reading the want ads at breakfast every morning for two weeks hadn’t somehow alerted her to this fact sooner. I grimaced at the sound of my own clunky name. I liked being called Freddie at that time, the height of the tomboy era of my pre-teens. Later in life, I just went by my middle name, Ophelia.

I made some calls, she said. I’ve got a lead on a job. You remember your Uncle Huey?

He was her cousin but we always called adult men who were not our direct elders by the title Uncle in those days, as a sort of gesture of respect.

He’ll take you on in his business, honey, as long as you work hard and follow his directions. It’s a sure thing. Ain’t no other sure thing in that paper.

How do I dress? What’s the job? I asked.

Lucky you, Mom replied. No dress-up job, this. You can go to him in your jeans and t-shirt. As long as there’s no rips or tears and everything is clean, including the saying on the shirt.

I looked at my shirt, a seemingly innocent tourist relic from the Grand Canyon. It had no words at all, which was probably best. The one that read Do It in the Canyon mysteriously disappeared from my wardrobe all on its own. Maybe Huey would find something wrong with this one too but the odds seemed better for its survival.

And the job itself?

Brass conditioning, she said.

Huh?

He has a little business polishing and restoring brass fixtures.

Brass fixtures? You mean beds? Doorknobs?

Railings too, like on boats and in old time pubs. You’ll learn a trade and find out what it means to run a business.

When do I start?

9:30 AM tomorrow. Meet him in front of the war memorial in the park. He’ll bring all the supplies.

Of all the jobs I ever had, that one did have the nicest schedule. We started later and ended earlier than anything I ever experienced after.

When I showed up the first morning, Huey was the one who came late. I waited fifteen minutes for him to appear. I paced around the base of the stone statute that commemorated our city’s contribution to all the conflicts going back to the civil war. Plaques had been attached to the base with every new war listing the names of a fresh crop of soldiers. My Dad, Lyle, is listed on the Korean War side. I had trouble reading his name with all the crud that covered it. I guess the city never thought of paying my cousin to fix things and my cousin never thought to do it for free.

I stopped pacing and started throwing pinecones at