A Flickering Light by Jane Kirkpatrick

Jessie suspected that any number of bicycles found their way into the hands of men who used them, returned them, and never did pay despite the name on the shop as a livery.
    “Oh, it all works out,” Mr. Steffes told her. “If a man has need of wheels but lacks the funds to pay, he will in time. Besides, eventually they purchase and I’ll have their business making repairs. They tell others who rent, then buy, and so it goes, one day to the next.”
    It seemed a precarious way to run a business, but then she was just a girl and didn’t understand commerce—despite heeding Mr. Bauer or watching her father or listening to her grandparents or even quizzing her uncle August about this and that. Still, if people had a reason to come inside, they might consider purchasing a bicycle and not just renting.
    Mr. Steffes never took out an ad in the Republican-Herald or the Winona Independent , the latter being a morning paper that might serve his clients well. Well, she was pleased it was part of her job at the Bauer Studio to find out what she could about managing a business, the way people paid, how they got postcards printed, what the costs of ads were, how money came and went. That reminded her of another question she wanted to ask Mr. Bauer.
    “Don’t you ever stop working?” Voe shouted at the locked door. “You’re in there, aren’t you, Jessie?”
    Jessie wiped the tools Mr. Steffes had used during the day, then lined them up on the wooden bench. She unlocked the door. Voe appeared as she often did, as a star just showing up in the night. “I’m just keeping my agreements. Don’t you think this would make an interesting photograph?” Jessie asked. “See how the size diminishes with each pair of pliers? I could fan them out and—”
    “You do see things in the strangest ways,” Voe said. She tucked a strand of her blond hair back into the circle of braids at her ears. She wore a straw hat with a flat top and looked ready for fun, her double chin jiggling as she laughed and suggesting she was heavier than she really was. “I stopped by to see if you’d come to the beach with us.”
    “Who’s ‘us’ and for what?” Jessie asked. She picked up the broom and began to sweep as Voe chattered.
    “Just a few of us chums. We’re going to the lake and putting canoes in.”
    Jessie did like the water.
    “I’d have to go home and talk to my parents first. They always like to know where I am.”
    “Don’t they let you do anything without asking? Some girls our age are already married.”
    “Not in my family,” Jessie said. “No dancing, no drinking, no smoking, no card playing, no—”
    “But there’s no rule against canoeing, is there? Or sitting at the beach and watching the rest of us?”
    “I imagine they’d let me do that,” Jessie said. “But I really don’t know if I want to.”
    Jessie’s parents would likely let her go with her chums. But today, digging a bit in the garden or reading to Roy seemed preferable to the chatterings that would happen at the lake.
    “My brother’s going to be there,” Voe said in a singsong voice. “He’s kind of sweet on you, you know. He asked me specific if you’d come.”
    “I get pretty tired by the time I’m through here,” Jessie said.
    “How long will your parents make you do this? Seems a tough punishment just because you left the house early one morning, especially when you got the job at Mr. Bauer’s and everything.”
    “It’s because we’re not getting paid,” Jessie said. “I need to help at home. Just like you do.”
    “Not this time. My ma liked your argument that it was a free education, and she said if I could get myself a trade, it would be worth having me studying and not tiring myself with extra work for six months.”
    “I don’t really mind the work. I get to see lots of picture possibilities,” she said.
    “In bicycle wheels and tools?” Voe laughed as she said it, careful not to allow her light summer dress to flounce