Page 20 of After Hours at Dooryard Books
That Patrick can do. A Rex Stout.Stranger in a Strange Land. M.F.K. Fisher’s memoir about Provence.The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. This is as weird a stack of books as any he’s assembled for Mrs. Kaplan. He puts them all into Nathaniel’s arms. “You can borrow books from the shop, you know. Take whatever you want and put it back when you’re done.”
Nathaniel frowns. “What if someone wants to buy it? How will you know whether it’s in stock?”
“I don’t exactly keep track of that.”
Nathaniel makes a noise that’s halfway between a tut and a sigh, pure disapproval, and Patrick doesn’t know why that makes him smile, but it does.
Before they go back upstairs, Patrick swipes a commercial edition ofLeaves of Grassoff the shelf and puts it on top of Nathaniel’s pile.
6
“This is very upsetting to me,” Nathaniel says, sounding aggrieved enough that Patrick puts down the latestAntiquarian Bookmanand turns his attention to what’s going on at the back of the shop. Nathaniel is sitting at the table between Iris and Hector, correcting their math homework.
“It’s the same material you were learning last month,” Nathaniel says, tapping their textbook with the eraser end of a pencil. “Is your teacher obsessed with simplifying equations? Simplifying them stupidly, I might add.”
Nathaniel’s hair falls across his forehead as he scribbles something on a piece of paper. The radiators are having fits, so it’s warm enough in the shop for Nathaniel’s sleeves to be rolled up. On his left wrist is a watch: brown leather band, round face, gold details, in decent shape by the looks of it. Your watch is the first thing you pawn, so either that watch is an irreplaceable heirloom or Nathaniel never got to the point where he needed to pawn things.
“How do you remember this stuff?” Patrick asks. Years of calculating sales tax, mark ups, and the percentage he owes book scouts has left him able to do a lot of math in his head, but anything more advanced than solving for X got left behind in high school.
Nathaniel looks up. “It wasn’t exactly irrelevant to my job,” he says.
“What was your job?” Iris asks. “I mean, what kind of job do you need this for?” She sounds like a kid who just found out you can feed animals at the zoo for a living.
“Engineers use math a lot more advanced than this,” Nathaniel says. “Economists. Statisticians, too.” None of that answers what he did for a living. “Anyway.” He taps the paper he just scribbled on. “That’s what it should look like. There’s a better book around here somewhere.” He gets to his feet and scans the shelves. It takes him less time than Patrick might have guessed to find whatever he’s looking for, but then again he’s started inventorying the browsing stock on the first floor, insisting that Patrick’s method of simply remembering what he has is deplorable, unseemly, and a crass embarrassment.
“Here,” Nathaniel says, handing the book to Iris, open to a page with diagrams and equations.
“We carry math textbooks?” Patrick asks.
“Imagine, if only you had a list of books in stock,” Nathaniel says, and Patrick supposes he walked right into that.
For the next hour, Nathaniel works with Hector and Iris. Patrick goes back to what he was doing at the front of the shop, but occasionally hears laughter. By the time the twins leave, Iris looks almost ecstatic.
“You’re both too smart to be in that class,” Nathaniel says. “We just covered a full unit in barely an hour.”
The twins exchange a look. “Puerto Rican kids don’t usually get put into the advanced classes,” Hector explains. “At least, not at our school.”
Nathaniel presses his lips together. “I see. Well, if they’re going to teach you like you aren’t capable of learning, you’ll need to learn it on your own.”
Patrick bristles, because the real solution would be for the twins to be in the correct math class, but Iris perks up like she’s been offered an ice cream cone.
“It won’t be so bad in college,” Nathaniel says. “At least, I hope not.”
“That was nice of you,” Patrick says after the twins leave.
“It’s an outrage,” Nathaniel says. “Hector is smart enough to do whatever he wants with his life, but Iris is—well. It would be a bad thing for a mind like that to go to waste.”
The door chimes ring, and Patrick turns to see who walked in. It’s a man in a coat much too heavy for a relatively mild March day, and he’s carrying a stack of books so high that Patrick can hardly see his face, just an unruly thicket of iron gray hair. He has an oilskin knapsack over his shoulder.
“Gary?” Patrick asks. “Put those down. Here, let me—”
“You can have them after you pay for them,” Gary snaps, placing the teetering pile directly onto the floor.
“Sure, sure,” Patrick says. Gary is one of the more peculiar book scouts. Seven or eight years ago, after a stint in the merchant marines, he hit hard times and Mrs. Kaplan took him in. From what Patrick can gather, he sleeps at YMCAs or in the back of the rusted out 1954 Hudson Jet he drives up and down the coast, scouring estate sales and church fairs, looking for books.
“Why’s it so clean in here?” Gary asks, looking around him with an expression of disgust. “Ain’t natural.”
“Nathaniel here is relentless,” Patrick says.
