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Lee walked slowly up Sixth Avenue from 42nd Street, looking in pawnshop windows. “I must do it,” he repeated to himself. Here it was. A cutlery store. He stood there shivering, with the collar of his shabby chesterfield turned up. One button had fallen off the front of his overcoat, and the loose threads twisted in a cold wind. He moved slowly around the shopwindow and into the entrance, looking at knives and scissors and pocket microscopes and air pistols and take-down tool kits with the tools snapping or screwing into a metal handle, the whole kit folding into a small leather packet. Lee remembered getting one of these kits for Christmas when he was a child.
The clerk wrapped the shears in brown paper and taped the package neatly. It seemed to Lee that the crackling paper made a deafening noise in the empty store. He paid with his last five dollars, and walked out with the shears heavy in his overcoat pocket. He walked up Sixth Avenue, repeating: “I must do it. I’ve got to do it now that I’ve bought the shears.” He saw a sign: Hotel Aristo. There was no lobby. He walked up
Finally he saw what he was looking for: poultry shears like the ones his father used to cut through the joints when he carved the turkey at Grandmother’s Thanksgiving dinners. There they were, glittering and stainless, one blade smooth and sharp, the other with teeth like a saw to hold the meat in place for cutting. Lee went in and asked to see the shears. He opened and closed the blades, tested the edge with his thumb. “That’s stainless steel, sir. Never rusts or tarnishes.” “How much?” “Two dollars and seventy-nine cents plus tax.” “Okay.”
a flight of stairs. An old man, dingy and indistinct like a faded photograph, was standing behind a desk. Lee registered, paid one dollar in advance, and picked up a key with a heavy bronze tag. His room opened onto a dark shaft. He turned on the light. Black stained furniture, a double bed with a thin mattress and sagging springs. Lee unwrapped the shears and held them in his hand. He put the shears down on the dresser in front of an oval mirror that turned on a pivot.
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