Page 2 of After Hours at Dooryard Books
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, butinstead 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.
Dooryard Books is the kind of secondhand bookstore that might pass for an antiquarian bookshop, if you’re in the market for nineteenth-century American poetry and fiction. There’s always one or two good editions ofLeaves of Grassin the glass case upstairs. But, like a lot of secondhand bookstores, it’s turned into a chaotic warehouse of books Patrick can’t even remember acquiring.
The way the shop is set up, most of the first floor is covered in bookshelves. Along the walls, shelves stretch from the battered wooden floorboards to the tin ceilings. More shelves, not quite so tall, form alleys and pathways that Patrick swears made sensewhen he put them there back when the store moved here from its old Fourth Avenue location, but since then seem to have tangled themselves up, like a piece of string left too long in your pocket.
The walls, in those rare places where they aren’t hidden by shelves, are painted a nondescript shade that must once have been a dusty green, years ago when this shop was something else—a pharmacy or a grocery store, judging by the contents of some of the junk that was lying around when they moved in. Upstairs are more bookshelves, a locked glass case displaying some rare books, a safe containing the very rare books, and Patrick’s apartment jammed into a back corner, looking out over the scraggly courtyard.
On the first floor, at the front of the shop, are the cash register and Patrick’s desk and typewriter. Toward the back, the maze of shelves gives way to an empty space that’s just big enough for a table and four chairs crammed close together.
Beyond that is the back room, a dusty hellhole full of boxes upon boxes of uncategorizable stuff and one electric kettle balanced on top of one of the more stable piles. Patrick threw some boxes in there when they moved in, but those boxes have multiplied, divided like amoebas, invited their friends over for drinks, and in general taken over the place. He keeps that door shut so he doesn’t have to think about it.
Patrick gets distracted comparing two editions ofThe House of Mirth, and when he turns around both pizzas are nearly gone—they left him two measly slices—and the twins are doing what looks like algebra.
“Where are we?” Nathaniel asks, looking at the poster-sized subway map that hangs on the door to the back room.
“New York,” Iris says, without looking up from her paper, and with the bored patience of a child who’s humored her share of Mrs. Kaplan’s strays.
“New York City,” Hector clarifies. “Manhattan. You’re on Jones Street in the Village.”
“Not Great Jones Street,” Iris says. “People get confused.”
“You do not want to go to Great Jones Street,” Hector agrees. “Well, unless you want to buy—”
