24
The next morning, the phone rings as Patrick’s opening the shop. “The car won’t start,” Mrs. Kaplan says. “And I don’t have anything good to read.”
He leaves the shop in Nathaniel’s hands, gets on the subway, then walks from the station to Mrs. Kaplan’s house.
She’s waiting for him at the door and won’t let him even look at the car until he’s had coffee and some babka.
The kitchen hasn’t changed at all in the last ten years, or probably in the twenty years before that.
Same yellow paint, same black and white linoleum, same milky-green coffee mugs.
“All right,” he says when he couldn’t possibly eat another bite. “Let’s look at that car.”
The battery’s dead, which is always why Mrs. Kaplan’s car won’t start. Why her useless neighbors don’t come over and ring the doorbell when she leaves the headlights on overnight, he’ll never know.
Mrs. Kaplan sits in the driver’s seat and steers, the car in neutral, while Patrick pushes it into the middle of the road.
“Okay, put it in second gear,” Patrick calls out, even though by now Mrs. Kaplan shouldn’t need to be told how to push start a car—she’s done it as many times as he has.
“And keep your foot on the clutch. Let go of the brakes.” Patrick pushes the car hard and runs with it.
“Let go of the clutch!” he shouts when he can hear the engine running.
“Now brake! Put it in park.” He opens the driver’s side door and Mrs. Kaplan slides across to the passenger side.
Patrick drives the car around the block and parks it right where it started.
“Let it run for a bit, and it should be fine,” he says.
She turns in her seat to pat his cheek. “You did good.”
“I got the car started. It was nothing.” Nothing he hasn’t done a dozen times before, he doesn’t add.
“I mean with everything. What would I do without you?” she asks.
He wants to tell her that she has it backwards; he’s the one who’s grateful. “You know a million people. You’d do fine without me.”
“But you’re the one who always comes when I call.”
Patrick touches the worn cream leather of the steering wheel.
“You taught me how to drive.” He never learned in high school, partly because Susan had been more than happy to drive him around in her father’s baby-blue Cadillac, taking turns at eye-watering speed, but mostly because he didn’t want to ask to borrow his aunt and uncle’s car.
Mrs. Kaplan took him out to a department store in Flushing, early in the morning before it opened, and let him drive around the empty parking lot.
The fact that she’d taught him to drive isn’t really the point. His memories of his parents are fragmented and hazy, and he doesn’t want any memories of his aunt and uncle. He didn’t meet Mrs. Kaplan until he was eighteen, but sometimes he thinks she might have raised him.
“Nathaniel called me last week,” she says, and then doesn’t say anything else. Her silence, as always, works on him like a truth serum.
“He told you?”
“He told me more than one thing.” Her voice is heavy with implication.
Patrick runs a finger over the stitching on the steering wheel. “I think he wants me to be mad at him.”
“Aren’t you?”
“Not at Nathaniel. Are you?” he asks.
“Well,” she says, “why would that matter? He knows what he did. Now he has to make it right. Don’t you think he wants to be better?”
“Yes,” he says. “You don’t mind that he and I are—” He breaks off, feeling silly that he’s looking for her approval.
“Mind? You’re good for one another. When I met him he was like a wet cat. Pitiful and screaming mad about it.”
Patrick laughs, at the image and the accuracy.
“Exactly the way you were,” she adds. “It’s good to see you happy.”
“No telling how long it’ll last,” Patrick says.
“How long do you want it to last?”
Patrick shuts his eyes and tips his head back, the only sound the rumble of the engine. “I’m not sure what I want is on the table.”
Mrs. Kaplan hums. “Sometimes you have to give people a chance to let you down.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Maybe he’ll stay, maybe he won’t. But if you act like he already has one foot out the door…
” She shrugs. “I take in some kid and he steals my television? I don’t like it, but ten other people don’t steal my television.
What’s the use in treating them all like thieves? Did you tell him you want him to stay?”
“He knows.”
She makes a disapproving noise. “Knowing it isn’t the same as hearing it.”
Back inside, he fixes a dripping faucet and a wobbly table leg.
On the kitchen table, he leaves the books he grabbed before leaving the shop: The Coney Island of the Mind , Bonjour Tristesse , and Slouching Towards Bethlehem , books Susan took with her to her parents’ house and left on Patrick’s desk yesterday before everything went to hell.
Nathaniel’s at the cash register when Patrick walks through the door. There are a handful of people browsing, and Patrick has never resented customers more than he does today. Nathaniel, despite the circles under his eyes, chats amiably with each of them as he rings them up.
“Don’t be a hero and decide that you’re going to leave to do me a favor or to spare me some conflict with Susan,” Patrick says as soon as the last of the customers has left.
“I think we’ve established that I’m a lot of things but a hero isn’t one of them. I’ll stick around until you ask me to stop.”
“I won’t.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I can and I do.”
“Because,” Nathaniel says, his hands in his pockets and his gaze on the ceiling, “it’s too late for you to feel otherwise.”
Patrick winces. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“It’s the truth, though, isn’t it?” Nathaniel looks exhausted.
He isn’t sleeping; Patrick sometimes wakes to hear him puttering around downstairs.
His lips are pressed together in a miserable little line, and his sleeves are rolled up with merciless symmetry.
On his shoulder is a tiny stain that he must not know about, a drip of Eleanor’s mashed vegetables that didn’t come out in the wash.
It’s embarrassing how much Patrick loves this man.
“I’m so glad it’s true,” Patrick says. Nathaniel looks confused, so Patrick is going to need to spell it out.
“Look. When I think about what would have happened if I’d missed the chance to have this, I feel like I’ve swerved away from oncoming traffic.
Do you understand?” Nathaniel doesn’t look like he understands a single goddamn thing.
“Nathaniel, for god’s sake. I can’t stand the idea of not loving you. ”
Some of that must have gotten through, because Nathaniel takes his hands out of his pockets and clutches the edge of the desk that’s between him and Patrick. “Me too,” he says, and it isn’t a promise, but it’s something.
* * *
Lunchtime comes and goes, and Susan doesn’t visit the shop. Patrick hadn’t seriously thought that a good night’s sleep would make everything right in the world, but he hoped it might anyway.
But when he stops by her apartment in the afternoon, she takes him up on his offer to take Eleanor. She has to know Nathaniel will see the baby too. That feels promising.
While Nathaniel is minding the shop and the baby, Patrick climbs up to the attic.
It had been hot in June, but now it’s sweltering.
The air feels solid with humidity. When Susan complained about noises overhead, he’d blamed it on cats or squirrels, but there weren’t any signs of animals in the attic.
It only smelled of dust and mildew. The attic door opened suspiciously easily.
He shines his flashlight at the miscellaneous junk on the attic floor: a broken chair, a folding table, some old milk crates.
And then, over by the dormer windows, is the contraption Iris and Hector were working on that spring.
Iris said it wasn’t a radio, and she wasn’t lying, because Patrick thinks he’s looking at some ancient version of a Ditto machine.
God knows where they found it—could have been up here, for all he knows, or in the mess of things on the second story, or in a trash heap somewhere else.
The floor around it is neat, but wedged under the machine is a piece of paper.
He crouches down and extracts it. It’s a misprint of the Louder zine, the text cut off on the right side of the paper.
He folds it and puts it in his pocket, then goes downstairs and shows it to Nathaniel.
Nathaniel huffs out a laugh; it’s the first time he’s laughed in days. “I knew they were up to something.”
“Are they going to get in trouble? With the law, I mean.”
Nathaniel flips through the zine again. “I don’t know. Do you think that would stop them?” He glances up at Patrick. “Do you think it should stop them?”
At the idea of Iris and Hector getting questioned, getting arrested, Patrick’s heart races. “No.”
“I gave the files to Beverly.”
It takes Patrick a minute to make sense of this—what files, and who the hell is Beverly?
He sits down. “Are you going to be all right?” Nathaniel said he wasn’t worried anymore about the CIA coming to get him, but Patrick is ready to believe the CIA is capable of anything.
Even more realistically, there’s no way that sharing classified documents is legal.
“Are you going to jail?” he asks, feeling like a kid asking to be told that everything is going to be fine.
Nathaniel sits on the edge of Patrick’s desk. “The Times will keep my name out of it, but the agency will know it was me. Or at least they’ll suspect it. I don’t know what will happen.”
“I want you to be safe,” Patrick says. The way they’re sitting, he has to look up at Nathaniel, and the only convenient place to touch is Nathaniel’s knee, so that’s where he puts his hand.
“The point is that we aren’t safe. Turning dissidents into criminals is the thin end of the wedge. It always is. The next thing you know there’s a secret police.”
“When does the article come out?”