After Hours at Dooryard Books

“You’re allowed to take breaks,” Patrick says when Nathaniel finishes sweeping the floor and cleaning the grimy shop bathroom. It isn’t even noon. Patrick’s exhausted just watching him. “Go have a cigarette or something.”

Nathaniel glares at him. Patrick isn’t sure whether the glare is for suggesting a break or for letting the shop acquire what Patrick likes to think of as a respectable patina.

It doesn’t matter. This is his shop. Or, Mrs. Kaplan’s, but she lets him have free rein.

The old Fourth Avenue store housed three stories of disorganized books and over four decades of dust. By comparison, this place is practically an operating theater in its cleanliness, a minimalist paradise in its aesthetics.