“I wanted to show you something and see what you thought-” Rob busied himself with opening his briefcase. It was only two latches, but he wanted to make Mr. Maltley wait, so he pretended to have trouble with it. “Ah, there we go.” He lifted up a beautiful ornate cookie jar and placed it in his lap. It was a panda bear, arms and legs wrapped around a bee whose body was the actual jar. Its insectoid eyes were the lid, giving it an sinister vibe that was counteracted by the jolly bear with its amygdaliformic eyes.
Up until this moment, Rob had thought of the jar as just a tool to get what he wanted out of Mr. Maltley. It didn’t even occur to him to wonder why a cookie jar might be important or valuable or that it might really have an artistic statement. Once he pulled it out of the briefcase, however, he briefly saw it in the same light that Mr. Maltley did, and it made him feel flush with fear, disgust, comfort, humor, hunger, warmth, cold, all at once. It hummed and buzzed and rolled and frolicked, and when he touched it, Rob was struck with sunny warmth and the comfort of a hug, and the smell — no, not the smell, the feel, the vibe — of fresh-baked cookies wafted through his senses. The cookie jar brought him back to a childhood he’d never had, and for a moment that his mind constructed into an eternity, Rob saw the passage of his life, but not his actual life, his life if he had been born to the kind of mother who baked cookies and put them in a jar like this. He saw flashes of himself as a child, helping her cook, sneaking cookies, baking them for her for Mother’s Day, binging on them in his teenage years, eschewing them as baby-stuff, receiving the jar as a gift and filling them with his own cookies to dole out to the children this imaginary Rob presumably had, just out of sight.
He was almost reluctant to give it up. But that was the only reason he bought it, the only reason he brought it here. Of course he was going to give it up.
“It doesn’t need to be gorgeous. You don’t understand. A cookie jar is not just a place to store cookies. It is a living, breathing piece of art, a piece of childhood set in a fixed form. It is more than you can dream of, little man,” Mr. Maltley said.
