After Hours at Dooryard Books

1

At the jangling of the door chimes, Patrick glances up, eager to find out what kind of lunatic goes shopping for secondhand books when the sidewalks are ankle deep in trash.

Sanitation workers have been striking for over a week and the city smells like a sewer.

Patrick hasn’t had a customer in days. It’s been amazing.

But it isn’t a customer. It’s Mrs. Kaplan, the store owner, who isn’t the kind of person to be deterred by blockades of rotting garbage or anything else.

She’s wearing what he recognizes as her Good Dress, a navy blue number with brass buttons and a drop waist. It must have been brand new during the Hoover administration, and only gets brought out for funerals, air travel, and doctors’ appointments.

She isn’t alone.

“I brought you someone!” Mrs. Kaplan calls out, the chimes ringing again as the door swings shut.

Patrick replaces the lid on his paste pot and studies Mrs. Kaplan’s new project.

This one’s even more dubious looking than usual, and that’s saying something: he’s thirty-five, maybe even forty, milk-pale, brown hair past his collar, dark eyes that dart around the shop like he thinks cops might jump out from between the overstuffed bookshelves.

None of his clothing fits right, likely because Mrs. Kaplan went to the thrift store without knowing his size, so Patrick can’t tell whether he’s thin or just plain skinny.

He has the wary, vigilant look of a man with a warrant out for his arrest.

“This is Nathaniel Smith,” Mrs. Kaplan says, all smiles, like she’s proud to have produced this specimen.

It’s always the same story: it’s her hairdresser’s brother, or her rabbi’s wayward nephew, or a guitarist she found busking in the Union Square subway station.

They’re dodging the draft or kicking a habit.

Maybe they wake up in cold sweats twice a night, thinking they’re still in a faraway jungle, or maybe they’ve just gotten out of Riker’s.

Patrick knows himself and his shitty disposition well enough to admit that he’d judge every last one of these strays if he hadn’t been one of them himself.

A decade ago, he’d been a surly teenager with nothing to recommend him but a black eye and a chip on his shoulder.

Mrs. Kaplan not only hired him, but let him sleep in her spare room.

It’s a miracle the woman’s managed to reach the age of seventy-five without getting herself killed, but Patrick’s afraid there’s time for that yet.

“Smith,” Patrick repeats. “Sure, why not.” Half of them are something like Smith or Jones.

Hell, Patrick might have been a Smith or a Jones too if things had gone a little differently.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he adds, and it’s true enough, because the inside of a safe, warm bookstore is better than anywhere else this guy is likely to find himself, and Patrick is, generally speaking, against people freezing to death.

Mrs. Kaplan beams at Patrick, dentures gleaming, like he’s the smartest boy in the whole class. He tries to look like he isn’t actively preening.

“Nathaniel,” she says, “Patrick runs the shop for me.” And then, to Patrick, “I’m sure Nathaniel can tidy up or learn to do inventory.

” She manages to say this without making it sound like she’s accusing Patrick of having failed to tidy up or take inventory, even though they both know he very much failed on both scores: the store is dusty, even by the lax standards of secondhand bookstores, and some boxes upstairs have been sitting around, persistently uninventoried, since before Prohibition.

The last time he opened one, the first thing he saw was a 1927 issue of the Daily Worker . He sealed that box right back up.

“What are you working on?” Mrs. Kaplan asks, peering at Patrick’s desk.

“Fixing the binding on that first edition of Twice Told Tales .”

“The one you picked up for a quarter?”

“Twenty cents.” He found it at an estate sale in Pelham, on a shelf with outdated almanacs and church fundraiser cookbooks. He’ll be smug about it for a good long while.

“Can I?”

“Go right ahead.”

She picks it up, careful not to disturb the half-finished binding, and makes the kind of approving noise she usually saves for new babies and nice loaves of bread.

“Nathaniel needs somewhere to stay,” she says, putting the book down. “Is that apartment on the third floor still empty? Sylvia’s getting her gallbladder out, so I’m off to Florida to look after her.”

Usually the strays stay in Mrs. Kaplan’s floral-wallpapered spare room in Forest Hills, eating schnitzel and brisket until they get back on their feet.

But obviously she isn’t leaving junkies—Patrick’s learned it’s best to assume they’re all junkies until proven otherwise, no hard feelings, there but for the grace of god, et cetera—unsupervised in her home while she’s out of state.

“Sure it’s empty,” Patrick says, instead of asking how long this man has been staying with her and why Patrick’s only hearing about it now, or pointing out that she’d know better than anybody if there was a new tenant, because not only does she own the bookshop, she owns the rest of the building too.

“We’ll have to sweep it out, put some clean sheets on the bed, but otherwise it’s in decent shape. ”

“I can clean,” Nathaniel says, the first words he’s spoken since entering the shop. “I don’t mind cleaning,” he repeats, the slightest emphasis on I , with a bitchy little glance at the dirty windows. Or maybe the glance isn’t bitchy so much as appalled.

“Well, pal, it’s your lucky day,” Patrick says, gesturing expansively at the vast array of cleaning opportunities the shop provides.

“Where do you keep your broom?”

Patrick has no idea where the broom is. None of his business, frankly.

“Settle down, Cinderella. The dust has been here longer than you. It isn’t hurting anybody.

Just—have a drink or something. There’s a box of cookies around here somewhere, and there’s a kettle in the back room.

The tea is…” He’s pretty sure he saw that box of teabags yesterday. Maybe the day before.

Mrs. Kaplan and Nathaniel exchange a glance, then Nathaniel heads toward the rear of the shop.

“He even looks like a bookseller,” Mrs. Kaplan says.

“What’s that supposed to mean? I look like a bookseller. I am, in fact, a bookseller.”

She pats his arm. “You look like a Coney Island strongman. All you need is the handlebar mustache.”

If she means the bodybuilders who used to pose in leopard-skin leotards, Patrick has no idea whether it’s supposed to be an insult or a compliment.

“Get me something to read on my flight, will you?” Mrs. Kaplan asks.

The Kaplans opened Dooryard Books in 1920.

Anyone might have thought nearly half a century in the business would have left her with some strong opinions about what she likes, but instead she plucks books off the shelves virtually at random and reads them cover to cover.

Patrick has seen her do that with a cookbook.

A road atlas. A collection of jokes for kids.

When she asks for recommendations, Patrick tries to assemble the three most disparate books possible, the literary equivalent of going to the A&P and buying a rack of lamb, frosted flakes, and a bottle of drain cleaner.

Today he brings her a novel about a village in Kenya, a doorstopper on the Spanish Civil War, and a mystery in which a cat solves crimes.

“Thank you,” Mrs. Kaplan says, taking the books and dropping them all into her enormous purse without even glancing at the titles. “I know the shop is in good hands.”

“Anything I need to know about your new friend? Should I lock up the booze? Worry about loud noises? Hide any sharp objects?”

She hesitates. Mrs. Kaplan is not a woman who hesitates much in her life. Patrick knows the darkest secrets and medical histories of her entire extended family. If she’s hesitating now, he doesn’t like it.

“He may be a little paranoid,” she says. “Skittish.”

“Drugs?” Patrick asks. “Or the war?” Nathaniel’s old enough to have fucked his brain up in two wars. Plenty old enough to have fucked his brain up in a bunch of ways .

“He’s getting better,” she says, which isn’t an answer. He’s about to ask where she found this man, what his story is, but she checks her watch and says, “I’d better go. I left the cab waiting.”

Patrick walks her to the door. As the cab pulls away, a gust of icy wind whips down the length of the street, lifting tiny whirlwinds of coffee grounds, eddies of cigarette butts and onion peels, and resettling them in drifts of debris along the sidewalk.

* * *

At four, Iris and Hector from apartment 3R come clattering into the shop in a tumult of bookbags and soda bottles, in the middle of an argument they abruptly cut off with hissed whispers.

Mrs. Valdez is a hospital nurse who works odd hours, and Mr. Valdez does something backstage at a midtown theater, so there’s often nobody home after school.

Ever since they moved in two years ago, Patrick’s been letting the kids do their homework at the table in the back of the shop as long as they keep quiet and stay out of his hair.

Hector and Iris are good kids—or as good as a pair of fifteen-year-olds are going to get, which probably isn’t anything to get excited about.

Today, Patrick orders a couple pizzas—Hector alone can put away an entire pie—tipping the delivery boy extra for having to wade through trash to reach the door.

He explains to Hector and Iris that Mr. Smith is the new shop assistant and will be staying across the hall from them in apartment 3F.

Iris casts an assessing eye over Nathaniel, and Hector waves distractedly before returning his attention to an old transistor radio he’s been taking apart and putting back together over the past few weeks.

Not wanting to leave a strange man alone with the kids, Patrick finds a reason to stay in the back of the shop.