The elephant and the giraffe

It had been one of those days where every minute had been taken up with something, the sort of day where the till actually had a queue and it seemed there was a never-ending stream of people pulling up into the car park  with boot-loads of things to donate. Some people had more than a boot load, one guy turned up in a transit van full of boxes and bags.

"House clearance," he said.

Amanda gave him a cheerful smile and tried not to sigh in dismay at the rapidly growing stack of boxes inside the charity shop. If the area manager was to come down, he would not be happy. It didn't look professional, having the place cluttered up with donations like that. But today there were only two of them in the building. One volunteer had rung in sick and the other was away on holiday. So Danny was on the till and she was doing everything else. She grabbed the nearest box and walked through to the back of the shop where the sorting took place. As she passed the till Danny smiled apologetically.  It wasn't his fault, even if he wasn't serving customers, he was in his late sixties and quite frail. He shouldn't be lifting boxes anyway.

She's been working in the charity shop for three years now. It had started as something to occupy her time once the children went to school. She supposed she could have looked for paid work, but James had been funny about that. She had no experience or qualifications, could only have gotten low skilled and low paid work. James had argued that it was demeaning. They had no need of a second wage in the house, she had no need to work at all. He said it looked bad if she was working at something so low-brow. Charity work didn't count as low-brow, apparently.

James had a lot of funny ideas. When they had first met, he was a newly qualified solicitor and she was on work experience. They had kept their relationship secret for months, she had thought her father would be angry at her dating a man ten years her senior. She was right. When the cat was finally let out of the bag, her father went ballistic and demanded she stop seeing him. She hadn't. Instead she'd married him.

Over the years, the relationship between Amanda and her father declined. By the time her mother died, she and her father were barely speaking. Her father called James "that snobby bastard", and James refered to her father as "that old goat".  Caught between the two of them, Amanda chose James, she'd never got on particularly well with her father, he was ex military and spent most of her childhood abroad, she figured it was too late now to make up for all those lost years, all that time gone.

Once she'd brought all the boxes in, she opened the first one and began to sort through its contents. Books mainly. Almost exclusively history tomes and historic thrillers. She had no idea people still read them. Three of the boxes contained nothing but books. Another couple of boxes held housewares. Nothing fancy, it seemed who-ever had died, had been a very plain living man. And it must be a man, because all the clothes in the black bags were men’s. The older looking clothes bigger sizes than the new.

The last of the bags held a surprise. She opened it expecting more men’s clothes but instead pulled out a wedding dress. It was old, the lace yellowing a little. Something about the dress seemed familar. She put it on a hanger, hung up on the back of the sorting room door and stared at it. She felt she’d seen it before.

Just a couple more boxes to look through. Trinkets and ornaments in these. She lifted out a wooden carving, an elephant with its trunk held high. A memory came to her. Of when she was small, crouching by the old fireplace and playing with an elephant like this. Her father had a whole menagerie of wooden creatures on the mantelpiece. He'd caught her once, elephant in one hand and giraffe in the other, playing in the still warm ashes.  He'd tanned her hide for that little game.

She put the elephant to one side and reached into the box. There was a giraffe. A rhino. An elegant heron. All of these she remembered so well. She looked up at the wedding dress. Her mother's.

Then she put her hands over her face and began to cry.