Page 72 of After Hours at Dooryard Books
“They aren’t bad people and I’m not doing Eleanor out of a chance to have grandparents. There’s nothing they can say to me that I’m not ready for.”
“What does that mean?”
“Oh, you know. I’ll find someone new someday, I’m still young, at least I have Eleanor, et cetera.”
“Ah.”
“She means well. If she needs to spend the next week trying to reassure me that I’ll meet someone new, I can ignore her.” She picks up some rolling papers, sighs, and puts them back into her nightstand drawer.
He and Patrick wave goodbye from the curb when Susan and Eleanor ride off in the back of a cab.
“I’m going to miss them too,” Patrick says. He holds the door open and they both return to the too-empty shop.
“What if she forgets us?”
“Do babies forget people after two weeks? Parents travel all the time and you don’t hear about it ruining their kids’ psyches.”
“I don’t know,” Nathaniel says.
Patrick puts his arm around Nathaniel. “Even if she does forget us, she’ll remember us soon enough.”
The weight of Patrick’s arm and the gentleness of his voice are a disaster. Nathaniel blinks a few times. “All right,” he says, aiming for brisk and falling a mile short. “I’m going to take Walt on a walk now.”
He expects the walk to go poorly, that he’ll revert to the way things were in February, but his heart only gives a perfunctory flutter. He stops at the deli around the corner and brings home a pair of corned beef sandwiches for lunch. Patrick’s by the door when he gets back, trying to look like he wasn’t waiting for him.
For the rest of the day, it’s just the two of them, with a mostly comatose Walt napping wherever they happen to be. The city is barreling toward a heat wave. In two windows, Patrick has air conditioners, which he says he purchased a few years back when he realized that sauna levels of heat and humidity can’t be good for books, so the shop is bearable, at least.
That night, Nathaniel finds Patrick on the sofa, reading a pulpy-looking science fiction paperback. When he sees Nathaniel approach, he slides over a few millimeters—an invitation not just to sit, but to sit nearby.
“Let me get a book,” Nathaniel says. He’s read all the books Patrick lent him except the spy thriller, which he abandoned after the first few pages. But Nathaniel’s never been able to leave a job half done, so he getsThe Spy Who Came in from the Coldfrom his old bedroom. When he sits on the couch, he twists around so his legs are in Patrick’s lap.
He’s expecting this book to be something along the lines of James Bond: glamour and intrigue, good triumphing over evil. Instead, it’s the story of an already disillusioned agent getting two hundred pages of brutal evidence that intelligence systems can only function when they stop caring about anything resembling good and evil or right and wrong, stop caring about people as anything other than pieces on a game board. It has more in common with Dashiell Hammett than it does with Ian Fleming.
It shouldn’t feel like anything groundbreaking. “Spies are up to no good” is hardly a new thought. But he’s never really considered that there must be people around the world who’ve been caught up in a rotten system, for good reasons and bad reasons and reasons that made sense at the time.
“You read fast,” Patrick says.
“It’s my only party trick,” Nathaniel says. “Give me ten minutes so I can see how badly this poor man gets screwed.”
“Why did you give me this book?” Nathaniel asks as he closes the cover and straightens the dust jacket. He doubts Patrick thought it had any special relevance to Nathaniel, but there must have been some reason.
Patrick shrugs. “I enjoyed it.”
Of course. Patrick took a look at Nathaniel—miserable, panicked, barely functioning—and decided to let him have things toenjoy.
Nathaniel’s hand strays to the notebook in his trouser pocket, but isn’t there. He must have left it somewhere. He hasn’t written Patrick’s name in it—what if it fell into the wrong hands?—but his name is the secret code woven into all the other items. He’s the precipitating factor. The dividend. He’s the key the music is written in.
“Did you like it?” Patrick asks.
Absolutely not, Nathaniel wants to say. But there’s a moment in the book where the jaded spy tells his girlfriend that spies aren’tgood; they’re horrible people doing horrible things to keep ordinary civilians safe. And that’s more or less what Nathaniel told himself for his entire career. It’s for a good cause. It’s keeping people safe. You can’t be decent when your enemies are ruthless.
Maybe that’s true. Nathaniel doesn’t know anymore. But that’s what police say when they’re shooting teenagers. It’s what the president says when he drafts more soldiers and bombs more civilians.
“I need to tell you something,” Nathaniel says.
“Can it wait?”
“Why,” Nathaniel asks, incredulous, “are you busy?” Nobody has ever looked less busy than Patrick does right now, his head tipped against the back of the sofa, his book open face down on his thigh.
