Buckeye

A stranger's kiss in a hardware store basement ignites two lives

Cal was leaning over the counter at Hanover Hardware, sorting washers, when a redheaded woman in a mint-green dress swept past him and descended to the basement.

A stranger's kiss in a hardware store basement ignites two lives

Cal was leaning over the counter at Hanover Hardware, sorting washers, when a redheaded woman in a mint-green dress swept past him and descended to the basement. She wanted a radio. He switched on the Zenith, and within seconds they heard Truman announce Germany's surrender. Through the hopper window came car horns and cheering. Cal babbled about how he would have been in Berlin if not for his leg—wobbling his thick-soled corrective shoe. Margaret Salt wasn't listening. Her husband was somewhere in the Pacific, and this news meant he might come home. Her eyes glistened. She took Cal by his shoulders and kissed him. They kissed until Truman finished speaking. She gave her name, shook his hand, and left. He stood at the window wiping coral lipstick from his face, watching her turn the corner and vanish.

Cal's shortened leg bars him from war and steers him toward Becky

Cal was born in 1920 in Bonhomie, Ohio, with his left leg two inches shorter than his right—enough to bar him from service after Pearl Harbor. His childhood friend Sean Robison had promised they were each destined for something special; Sean shipped out and died in Germany. Cal stayed, hauled concrete, and felt useless. One afternoon at Fink's Drugstore, a young woman in a beret slid onto the stool beside his and asked if he'd been contemplating her. Becky Hanover was intuitive, bookish, and claimed to hear voices of the dead. They married in September 1942. Five weeks into dating, she'd handed him a sealed letter she'd written at age eight—a vision of her future self—and asked him to return it on her sixtieth birthday. Her father Roman gave them a house and Cal a job at his hardware store, calling him a bum and a son in the same breath.

Becky's growing spirit practice draws a fraud to Taft Street Becky's gift was real to her, even if Cal couldn't see it. As a child, she'd heard a drowned man's voice and helped locate his body. During wartime, grieving mothers and widows found their way to Taft Street, seeking contact with their dead. She placed an ad in the newspaper without telling Cal. When he discovered it over breakfast, he erupted—didn't believe in what she did, didn't want strangers in the house. Then Casey LaGrange arrived from Indiana, posing as a researcher writing about mediums. In truth, he wanted Becky for…