The Chocolatier

A Story of Family, Love, and the Bonding Power of Chocolate

“Hello. How can I help you?”

“I came for the chocolate,” I say, pointing to an elegant case in the corner of the furniture store. The owner, Jim Painter, lights up as he moves behind it.

“What’ll it be?”

When my wife and I first moved here from Los Angeles, we had a house to furnish and this was one of the first places she stopped in.

“There’s a place called Contempo Furniture,” she told me with amazement, “that sells Belgian chocolates.”

I tell this to Jim and he laughs. Chocolate and furniture seem like an unlikely combination, but he and his late wife, Donna, were inspired on a trip to London. They had seen a fancy department store with a florist shop and a chocolatier flanking the entrance. They brought the idea of flowers and chocolate home to their store on 4th Street. The florist shop was a bust, but the chocolate was a hit. That was twenty years ago.

Jim has been in some form of the furniture business here in town even longer—since the 1970s—doing manufacturing, interior design, and sales. He and Donna built the business together and even raised their kids in it. One of their sons now runs a furniture delivery and storage operation down the road and handles all of Jim’s orders. A true family affair.

He shows me Donna’s picture on the home screen of his phone, partially covered by app icons. “I’m not tech savvy,” he says. “I don’t know how to show you just the picture.”

I nudge the icons aside, glimpsing a pretty, stylish lady in a camel coat and Burberry scarf, dressed up for a buying trip to New York City. Her short blonde hair is perfectly coiffed with a little swoop through the bangs, and she’s got a real smile—the kind that lights up the eyes. Her head is tilted a little and she’s looking up the way a woman does after she’s just looked down, demure, then flicked her eyes back up at the man holding the camera. Like she’s in love.

He tells me they went to a fancy steakhouse on that trip without reservations. The maître d’ chastised him: “You can’t come here on a Saturday without a reservation.” He quoted them a three-hour wait.

“It’s okay,” Jim told him. “We’ll wait.” It was her favorite place.

He went to the bar to get a Coke to lift his wife’s blood sugar, and as he was carrying it back across the dining room, “Who do I see but Donna and the maître d’ walking across with menus.”

“I thought it was going to be three hours?” he said.

The maître d’ shrugged. “She smiled at me, and I can do what I want.”

“She must’ve had some kind of smile,” I say. Jim nods.

“You have no idea.”

She was his next-door neighbor growing up, occasionally babysitting for his family. He was fifteen with a giant crush. She was nineteen and beautiful. She had just returned from visiting her fiancé in Europe, where she was shocked to discover he had a new girlfriend.

Back home, she nursed a broken heart. Jim’s mama sensed her son’s feelings. Perhaps she saw an opening, or perhaps she and the girl’s mother were friends who talked about their kids.

“You should ask her to a movie,” his mama said. “I bet she’d say yes.”

“How am I going to take her to a movie? I’m fifteen. I can’t even drive.”

But he did ask. And she did say yes.

The door to the store opens and a man walks in. He hands Jim a package from a mutual friend—a book they had discussed. Jim reaches for his wallet, but the man waves him off. “She said she won’t take money for it, but you can pay in chocolate next time you see her.”

The man exits and Jim grins. “You know why I do it?” he asks. “I can make a friend with a piece of chocolate. Put an extra one in there for them. People remember, and they come back.”

“How are you adjusting to living in Winston-Salem?” Jim asks, sitting down on a chair in the corner of the showroom. “It’s not Los Angeles.”

I pull up a chair across from him. “LA’s got nothing on Winston-Salem. This place is just the right size, and the people here will actually take the time to talk with you.”

Jim nods. “Oh, yes.” He points to the space between our chairs. “If we pulled up a little checkers table here, we’d be like the Andy Griffith Show.”

I fish around in my bag of chocolates, trying to decide which one to try and which to save for my wife. “That one was Princess Diana’s favorite,” he says.

“Really?” I take a bite through the soft crust filled with a creamy center. “Wow.” I’m with Diana on this one.

One of the chocolates in Jim’s case

Jim tells me he’s been in the furniture game since he was 18. He had just been drafted into the Vietnam War, but when the Army doctor tried to feel for a pulse, he couldn’t find one—something about his collarbone pressing on a blood vessel. So Jim was classified 4-F, ineligible for service. The doctor said he’d be fine but should consider a desk job.

As it happened, he had just been looking at furniture in a showroom and liked everything about it. On the spot, he decided he’d go into the business. He and Donna were married the same year, and he never looked back.

“I moved out of my parents’ house and moved in with her, and we were never apart again.”

I ask if it’s nice to talk about her. “Yes,” he says. She’s been gone a year now, but he knows he will see her again. He opens the drawer of his desk and pulls out a handwritten letter. “Would you like to hear what she wrote to me before we got married?”

It is the voice of a 22-year-old woman in love with an 18-year-old young man. She fears he will be taken off to war or simply grow out of his affections as he matures. She wonders, “Will there be a place for me in your life?” She’s been terribly hurt before and can’t bear it again.

Of course, it was all just the opposite. Over the arc of fifty years, they built a life, a family, and a business together in this city. And when she grew sick, he says, pointing to an L-shaped arrangement of tall bookcases and hutches in the showroom, “I made a little room with a couch, and we’d spend the day together right here.”

He folds the letter and puts it back into the drawer. I ask if he plans to keep going with the business.

“I don’t know what I’d do with myself in retirement.”

I look at him in his pressed dress shirt—well-groomed, in command of a business he knows inside and out, and deeply tied to the community through fine furniture and the unexpected power of chocolate.

“On Thursday the next shipment comes in,” he says. “You’ll have to try the pistachio.”