2
“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.
Dooryard Books is the Mies van der Rohe of used bookstores.
Hell, some of the shelves are even alphabetized.
He tells Nathaniel this. Nathaniel stares at him for ten full seconds, his face a study in disapproval, then goes back to cleaning the windows. “Mies van der Rohe,” he says a moment later. “Spare me.”
Patrick prefers bitchy Nathaniel over quiet and terrified Nathaniel, partly because terrified is, objectively, not a great state, but mostly because it’s just a sad fact of Patrick’s life that he’s drawn like a magnet to the most irritable bastards on the planet.
Give him a man with a pretty face and a list of complaints and Patrick is putty in their hands.
It’s too quiet, so Patrick puts on the radio.
WBAI is playing “Alice’s Restaurant.” Patrick keeps an eye on Nathaniel, looking for signs he disapproves of protest music, but Nathaniel just wipes down the radiator, the cash register, the telephone.
“Okay, quit it,” Patrick says when Nathaniel gets too close to his typewriter.
“Leave that alone.” Nathaniel cleans the rest of Patrick’s desk, leaving a neat perimeter of dust and smudged ink around his typewriter.
There aren’t any customers, which may have something to do with how there’s even more trash on the streets now than there was yesterday. Patrick’s managed to make his groceries last for a week, but he’s down to a few tablespoons of milk and a brown banana, so he’ll have to go out in this mess.
He finds Nathaniel in the back of the shop, dusting the bookshelves. “Want to go to the A&P?”
Nathaniel freezes, feather duster in the air. Patrick would love to know where he found a feather duster.
“I can watch the shop,” Nathaniel says.
“Don’t you need groceries?”
Nathaniel looks like he wants to say that he doesn’t need food, that he’ll figure something else out, like photosynthesis, or maybe starvation.
“Mrs. Kaplan gave you money?” Patrick asks. Nathaniel nods. “And you still have it?” he adds, because maybe Nathaniel sneaked off in the middle of the night to get a fix, who knows.
“Yes,” Nathaniel says, mightily offended.
“Okay, then you should spend some of it on food. It looks like it’s about to snow, so we should hurry.”
“What if you have a customer?”
“We can lock the door and flip the sign to Closed for half an hour.” That’s what Patrick does whenever he leaves the shop during business hours, unless Mrs. Kaplan wants to come in for a bit.
Nathaniel shoots a wary look toward the front of the shop, toward the street, and it’s the same reaction as last night when Patrick suggested that he buy groceries.
Maybe he can’t take cold weather. Maybe he likes rotting garbage even less than most people.
Or maybe he has a screw loose in his head, like some people do about getting stuck in elevators or washing their hands.
Patrick’s experience with people who find themselves homeless and alone is that it’ll loosen a few screws all right.
It took Patrick a while to tighten his own back up.
“Or,” Patrick says, “I can pick you up a few things.”
“Yes,” Nathaniel says. “Please.”
They make a list. It’s the saddest grocery list Patrick’s ever seen, and he has ten years of sad grocery lists under his belt. Milk, cereal, bread, coffee, peanut butter, a few cans of soup and tuna fish.
“Do you want to cook anything?” Patrick asks. “There are some pots and pans in your apartment.”
“No,” Nathaniel says, appalled, like Patrick suggested cannibalism. That’s pretty much Patrick’s own attitude toward cooking, so he can’t really judge.
Patrick buys some eggs anyway, and also some butter to cook them in.
Then he remembers that fruit exists, so when he comes home it’s with two overfull paper sacks.
Nathaniel’s waiting at the door like he wasn’t sure Patrick was going to make it back alive, which is fair, because the trip took twice as long as it should have.
Before he even got to the grocery store, he found a coatless girl at the entrance to the Sheridan Square subway station, a look of grim determination on her face and the piss poor judgment to solicit clients in broad daylight in front of what’s pretty widely known as a gay gym.
He can’t afford to buy coats for every kid on the planet, but he can make sure girls barely older than Iris get a hot coffee and cab fare, so that’s what he did.
It’s about ten percent of what Mrs. Kaplan would have done.
Nathaniel takes his share of the groceries and scrupulously gives Patrick ten dollars. Patrick rolls his eyes and gives him back eight dollars, because just how much does this guy think a jar of peanut butter and some tuna fish cost.
While Nathaniel is bringing his groceries upstairs, Patrick checks the cash register. Nothing is missing. He isn’t particularly surprised. Whatever Nathaniel’s problems are, the contents of the cash register aren’t going to solve them.
Mr. Valdez has the night off, so the twins go straight home after school. When seven thirty rolls around with no customers and the sky is dumping snow onto the streets, Patrick closes the shop.
“If you let me use your kitchen, I’ll scramble some eggs for dinner,” Patrick says. Sometimes, inspired by the novelty of it, he’ll cook a couple eggs in a little pan over the hot plate in his apartment, but there’s no way that pan will fit enough eggs for two people.
Nathaniel accepts so readily that Patrick is sure at least one of them should be embarrassed about it.
“These eggs aren’t very good,” Patrick observes when they sit down to eat. They’re badly overcooked, but with some raw egg still visible. He doesn’t know how he managed that.
“An abomination,” Nathaniel agrees, and Patrick nearly chokes on his admittedly abominable eggs.
Well, whatever Nathaniel is afraid of, at least he doesn’t seem to be afraid of Patrick.
Patrick knows he isn’t exactly approachable.
Hector—six feet tall and built like a truck—skittered away from Patrick for a full two months after the Valdezes moved in.
Patrick isn’t sure what exactly he’s doing to be scary—maybe it’s his size, maybe it’s the beard—but whatever it is, Nathaniel’s apparently immune.
“I promise never to cook for you again,” Patrick says.
“In exchange, I can promise never to cook for you either. A fair trade.”
Now Patrick is sure of it: Nathaniel’s voice doesn’t fit. If Patrick shut his eyes, he’d expect that voice to come from someone in a suit and tie. He doesn’t, as a rule, spend a lot of time with people in suits and ties.
Patrick is trying to decide whether he’s going to ask some questions he won’t like the answers to or whether he’s going to go watch Star Trek in the peace of his own apartment, when the buzzer rings—not the one in this apartment, but the shop doorbell all the way downstairs.
The only reason he can even hear it this far up is that it sounds like someone’s leaning against it.
For fuck’s sake, nobody needs a book that badly.
“I need to get that,” Patrick sighs, checking his watch.
The shop would normally still be open. It could be a late delivery.
He runs down the stairs, aware of Nathaniel’s footsteps behind him.
On the second floor landing, there’s a locked door that leads to Patrick’s apartment and the upper story of the shop, but it’s easiest to take these stairs right down to the street, then use his key to let himself back in through the shop’s front door.
When he reaches the sidewalk, he’s hit with a blast of freezing air and powdery snow. A customer is waiting at the shop door, a woman with long black hair cut in a fringe across her forehead, a suitcase at her feet and a—he’s very much afraid that’s a baby in her arms. She turns to face him.
“What the fuck is all this garbage for?”
“Susan?” He’s known her longer than he’s known practically anybody but she’s so out of context that he doubts his own eyes.
“I’ll explain the garbage if you explain the baby ,” Patrick retorts.
He pulls the key chain from his pocket and unlocks the door, then impatiently waves everyone into the shop.
Why Nathaniel is still there is anybody’s guess.
“You knew I was pregnant,” Susan says in the near dark of the closed shop. “What did you think was going to happen?”
Patrick’s been doing his best not to think about it at all.
He still can’t make sense of Susan—the same Susan whose locker had been next to his, the Susan who rolled his first joint and helped him definitively determine that he isn’t into women—as a mother .
Twenty-seven is a perfectly normal age to have a baby, but it still seems implausible, even with the proof staring him in the face.
Susan and Michael have a baby is a nonsense series of words, like the phrases they make you repeat when you’re learning a foreign language.
The monkey has a hat. My aunt has the pen. Susan and Michael have a baby.
“A baby,” Nathaniel says, sounding about as stricken as Patrick feels.