4 #2
“You paid me two weeks ago.”
Two weeks ago, Susan gave Patrick an apparently random amount of cash for February and March rent. Before taking the money to the bank, Patrick gave Nathaniel a handful of ten- dollar bills, said “Wages?” and then forgot about the entire transaction until this moment.
“Okay, New York minimum wage is a buck sixty or seventy, I can’t remember. Let’s call it two dollars. You’re easily working eight hours a day, so that’s forty hours a week.”
“Not really. Some of that time I’m looking after the baby.”
“This is shitty bookkeeping, but I’m just going to consider baby work and shop work as the same thing, two bucks an hour, eight hours a day, five days a week.
That’s eighty dollars a week.” Patrick will chip in half that amount for the babysitting.
Eighty bucks a week is probably fifteen more than anybody’s ever made as either a babysitter or a bookstore clerk, but Patrick isn’t nickel-and-diming the only person on this planet who Eleanor can stand.
“So, I owe you one eighty for the last two weeks.”
He unlocks his desk and reaches for the checkbook.
“No,” Nathaniel says.
Patrick still with his hand in the desk drawer. “I can’t really pay much more—”
“I won’t take money for taking care of Eleanor.”
This might be some kind of macho refusal to get paid for women’s work, but Patrick feels like that kind of man would refuse to do the work in the first place. “It’s work. There are people who take care of babies for a living.”
“Obviously,” Nathaniel says, peeved. “That isn’t the point.”
“What, exactly, is the point? I’m not letting you work for free.”
“How do you plan on stopping me? You can’t force a person to take money.”
Jesus Christ. Patrick doesn’t have the patience for this.
“Fine, be my guest.” He begins to fill out the check.
“A hundred ten, then.” Nathaniel, who apparently does algebra with the Valdez twins for fun, can divide one eighty by two and discover it isn’t a hundred and ten, but he only makes an exasperated noise.
“Cash would be better,” Nathaniel says.
“Don’t worry, I made it out to cash.” Patrick manages not to roll his eyes.
Does this guy really think that Patrick was going to make out a check to “Nathaniel Smith”?
It takes Nathaniel three or four tries to remember to answer to “Mr. Smith” when Hector and Iris are trying to get his attention.
They’ve started to call him Nathaniel, which means Patrick might finally win his campaign to get them to stop calling him Mr. Fitzgerald.
“When will you want me to leave?” Nathaniel asks, folding up the check and putting it in his pocket. “Mrs. Kaplan said you’d put me up for a month.”
Patrick feels like the rug’s been pulled out from under him.
More fool him. Usually, if one of the strays has done any work whatsoever, Patrick finds them work at another bookstore.
There isn’t enough work at Dooryard Books for another employee.
They just don’t do that much business. It’s the rare book sales that pay the bills, and Patrick handles those.
When he needs time off, or he has to be at an auction or book sale, either he closes the shop or Mrs. Kaplan pitches in for a few hours.
Now, though, even with Nathaniel sometimes manning the cash register, Patrick’s behind on everything else. There’s a lot of work he can do while holding a drooling baby, but he draws the line at repairing century-old rare editions.
And then there’s Eleanor: they need the extra help. Susan likes Nathaniel, the baby likes Nathaniel, and that’s a majority vote, so Patrick doesn’t need to consider whether his decision has anything to do with the fact that he likes Nathaniel.
“Who said anything about leaving?” Patrick tries to sound impartial. “If you want to stay, there’s work for you here. If you want to go, I can find you work at another store. Either way, you can stay in the spare room if you want.”
Something frustrated and tired crosses Nathaniel’s face. “Of course I’ll stay.”
Patrick tries to look like someone who isn’t giddy with relief. “Same deal? Five days a week, time off as needed?”
“I’ve been working every day.”
“So now you have two days off. Slow days are Monday and Tuesday,” Patrick says. “Go have fun.”
Nathaniel’s lips are pressed into a tight line.
“Or you can stay here,” Patrick says. “You live here. Nobody’s kicking you out. Read. Watch television. Get stoned with Susan. Watch As the World Turns with Mrs. Valdez.”
“That was one time. What about rent?”
Nobody should pay rent on an eight-by-ten room with no furniture other than a single bed, but Nathaniel doesn’t look open to that argument.
“I pay a hundred dollars a month, and it’s only that cheap because Mrs. Kaplan hasn’t noticed it isn’t 1935 anymore.
” And because Patrick’s apartment is only a couple of storage rooms that happen to have access to a bathroom and a fire escape.
And also because he’s basically the building’s superintendent, but Nathaniel doesn’t need to know any of that.
“The going rate for a furnished room in this neighborhood is something like twenty-five a week, but a room at a bare bones hotel over on West Street would be something like fifteen.” Patrick’s well aware that his spare room—hell, his own room—is closer to the latter.
“But I can’t charge you fifteen a week, because then you’d be paying most of my rent for me.
So, seven a week, and I pay for groceries and utilities? ”
Nathaniel sticks out his hand, and Patrick instinctively grabs it. “Thank you,” Nathaniel says without letting go. And then, surprisingly earnest, “I don’t want to be a charity case.”
“I’ve been a charity case, you know,” Patrick says. “Mrs. Kaplan’s charity case, as a matter of fact. Nothing wrong with that, not when you need the charity.”
“Oh. I didn’t mean—”
“No harm done.” He hasn’t let go of Nathaniel’s hand, and Nathaniel hasn’t let go of his.
At this proximity Patrick can’t help but notice that he’s—well, it isn’t any of Patrick’s business what Nathaniel looks like.
He’s Patrick’s employee, his tenant, and, in a way, his responsibility.
He drops Nathaniel’s hand and takes a step backwards.
“Now, let’s see where to get a violin restrung. ”
Susan tells them that if the man who runs the guitar shop on MacDougal doesn’t stock the right kind of violin strings, he’ll at least know where to send them.
“You two go. Eleanor and I will stay at the cash register and grumble at anyone who comes in,” she offers. “That’s the job, right?”
Patrick rolls his eyes, but it’s a good sign if Susan’s teasing him. He puts on his coat, notices that Nathaniel’s only wearing a sweater, then takes off his coat and gives it to Nathaniel. He puts on a leather jacket that someone left at the shop ages ago.
Nathaniel hesitates at the door, still holding Patrick’s coat.
In the month he’s been here, Patrick’s not sure Nathaniel’s left the shop for longer than it takes to put out the trash.
He spends plenty of time looking out the window—the shop window, and the window in Susan’s living room that looks out over Jones Street.
There isn’t anything to look at: wintry trees and dirty sidewalks, parked cars that shift back and forth according to alternate side of the street parking rules.
Nathaniel looks outside in the same way that he looks at pizza, at a fresh pot of coffee.
“Have you always had a thing about going outside?” Patrick asks. “Susan’s like that about heights.”
“No. No, I just…” Nathaniel makes a noise like he’s thoroughly disgusted with himself.
“You can stay here, and I’ll go to the guitar shop,” Patrick offers, quietly enough that only Nathaniel will hear. “Or we can take a cab.”
“Why are you doing this?” Nathaniel asks, an edge to his voice. “You let me eat your food and wear your clothes and watch your television, and now this?” He’s holding Patrick’s coat up like it’s Exhibit A and he’s Perry Mason.
This is mighty rich, coming from a man who not five minutes earlier refused to take money for babysitting.
But it’s not like Patrick’s never asked himself the same question, especially after one of the strays stole his typewriter a couple years ago.
His only answer is that he doesn’t like to think about where he’d be if Mrs. Kaplan hadn’t helped him in 1958.
He can’t walk past someone if there’s a chance he can do half as much for them as Mrs. Kaplan did for him.
It isn’t even like he’s doing that much, really.
Usually, all he does for the people Mrs. Kaplan brings him is train them to work in a bookshop and give them lunch a few days a week.
Maybe take them to the doctor or help them apply for jobs.
It’s more than most people would do, but most people don’t have an old lady presenting them with good deeds that are ninety percent complete, a paint by numbers project.
Mrs. Kaplan calls it a mitzvah. Patrick, who hasn’t set foot in a church since his parents’ funeral, sometimes thinks it might be a sacrament, but then gets embarrassed by the thought.
“Look, the day Mrs. Kaplan met me, she put three stitches in my forehead because I wouldn’t go to the hospital.
See that scar?” Patrick pushes aside his hair and points to his eyebrow.
“Any normal person would have told me to get lost, but she fixed me up, bought me a sandwich, offered me a job, and gave me a place to sleep.”
Patrick hates telling this story. He doesn’t want to remember that kid: that kid had lost all his illusions and he’d lost them too fast. Patrick wants to avert his eyes.
Maybe that’s why he makes himself tell the story—to all the strays, and to a lot of other people besides.
It’s a kind of offering. It keeps him honest.