Page 1 of After Hours at Dooryard Books
I
Debris and Debris
Patrick
1
February 1968
At the jangling of the door chimes, Patrick glances up, eager to find out what kind of lunatic goes shopping for secondhand books when the sidewalks are ankle deep in trash. Sanitation workers have been striking for over a week and the city smells like a sewer. Patrick hasn’t had a customer in days. It’s been amazing.
But it isn’t a customer. It’s Mrs. Kaplan, the store owner, who isn’t the kind of person to be deterred by blockades of rotting garbage or anything else. She’s wearing what he recognizes as her Good Dress, a navy blue number with brass buttons and a drop waist. It must have been brand new during the Hoover administration, and only gets brought out for funerals, air travel, and doctors’ appointments.
She isn’t alone.
“I brought you someone!” Mrs. Kaplan calls out, the chimes ringing again as the door swings shut.
Patrick replaces the lid on his paste pot and studies Mrs. Kaplan’s new project. This one’s even more dubious looking than usual, and that’s saying something: he’s thirty-five, maybe even forty, milk-pale, brown hair past his collar, dark eyes that dart around the shop like he thinks cops might jump out from between the overstuffed bookshelves. None of his clothing fits right, likely because Mrs. Kaplan went to the thrift store withoutknowing his size, so Patrick can’t tell whether he’s thin or just plain skinny. He has the wary, vigilant look of a man with a warrant out for his arrest.
“This is Nathaniel Smith,” Mrs. Kaplan says, all smiles, like she’s proud to have produced this specimen.
It’s always the same story: it’s her hairdresser’s brother, or her rabbi’s wayward nephew, or a guitarist she found busking in the Union Square subway station. They’re dodging the draft or kicking a habit. Maybe they wake up in cold sweats twice a night, thinking they’re still in a faraway jungle, or maybe they’ve just gotten out of Riker’s.
Patrick knows himself and his shitty disposition well enough to admit that he’d judge every last one of these strays if he hadn’t been one of them himself. A decade ago, he’d been a surly teenager with nothing to recommend him but a black eye and a chip on his shoulder. Mrs. Kaplan not only hired him, but let him sleep in her spare room. It’s a miracle the woman’s managed to reach the age of seventy-five without getting herself killed, but Patrick’s afraid there’s time for that yet.
“Smith,” Patrick repeats. “Sure, why not.” Half of them are something like Smith or Jones. Hell, Patrick might have been a Smith or a Jones too if things had gone a little differently. “I’m glad you’re here,” he adds, and it’s true enough, because the inside of a safe, warm bookstore is better than anywhere else this guy is likely to find himself, and Patrick is, generally speaking, against people freezing to death.
Mrs. Kaplan beams at Patrick, dentures gleaming, like he’s the smartest boy in the whole class. He tries to look like he isn’t actively preening.
“Nathaniel,” she says, “Patrick runs the shop for me.” And then, to Patrick, “I’m sure Nathaniel can tidy up or learn to do inventory.” She manages to say this without making it sound like she’s accusing Patrick of having failed to tidy up or takeinventory, even though they both know he very much failed on both scores: the store is dusty, even by the lax standards of secondhand bookstores, and some boxes upstairs have been sitting around, persistently uninventoried, since before Prohibition. The last time he opened one, the first thing he saw was a 1927 issue of theDaily Worker. He sealed that box right back up.
“What are you working on?” Mrs. Kaplan asks, peering at Patrick’s desk.
“Fixing the binding on that first edition ofTwice Told Tales.”
“The one you picked up for a quarter?”
“Twenty cents.” He found it at an estate sale in Pelham, on a shelf with outdated almanacs and church fundraiser cookbooks. He’ll be smug about it for a good long while.
“Can I?”
“Go right ahead.”
She picks it up, careful not to disturb the half-finished binding, and makes the kind of approving noise she usually saves for new babies and nice loaves of bread.
“Nathaniel needs somewhere to stay,” she says, putting the book down. “Is that apartment on the third floor still empty? Sylvia’s getting her gallbladder out, so I’m off to Florida to look after her.”
Usually the strays stay in Mrs. Kaplan’s floral-wallpapered spare room in Forest Hills, eating schnitzel and brisket until they get back on their feet. But obviously she isn’t leaving junkies—Patrick’s learned it’s best to assume they’re all junkies until proven otherwise, no hard feelings, there but for the grace of god, et cetera—unsupervised in her home while she’s out of state.
“Sure it’s empty,” Patrick says, instead of asking how long this man has been staying with her and why Patrick’s only hearing about it now, or pointing out that she’d know better thananybody if there was a new tenant, because not only does she own the bookshop, she owns the rest of the building too. “We’ll have to sweep it out, put some clean sheets on the bed, but otherwise it’s in decent shape.”
“I can clean,” Nathaniel says, the first words he’s spoken since entering the shop. “I don’t mind cleaning,” he repeats, the slightest emphasis onI, with a bitchy little glance at the dirty windows. Or maybe the glance isn’t bitchy so much as appalled.
“Well, pal, it’s your lucky day,” Patrick says, gesturing expansively at the vast array of cleaning opportunities the shop provides.
“Where do you keep your broom?”
Patrick has no idea where the broom is. None of his business, frankly. “Settle down, Cinderella. The dust has been here longer than you. It isn’t hurting anybody. Just—have a drink or something. There’s a box of cookies around here somewhere, and there’s a kettle in the back room. The tea is…” He’s pretty sure he saw that box of teabags yesterday. Maybe the day before.
