Marlon Greaves

Greaves runs the back pages, where the listings come in over the transom and he sets them in the same plain type as everything else. For sale, lightly used. Wanted, will pay cash. Lost, reward offered, no questions. He fixes the spelling, trims the word count to fit the column, and takes the four-dollar fee in exact change. He does not ask where the listings come from, which is a courtesy, because some of them are selling a year they already had and want back, and one standing ad has run since 1951 offering a working key to a door the seller declines to name. Greaves says the key sold twice and got returned twice. He keeps a ledger in pencil and balances it every Friday, and it has never once come out wrong, which he files under good luck.