Page 4 of After Hours at Dooryard Books
Once Patrick switches on all the lights, he checks the bathroom for soap and toilet paper, and the kitchen cabinets for the same old pots and pans and mismatched dishes he found the last time he got this place ready for a tenant. He and Nathaniel make the bed. Nathaniel sighs and readjusts every single corner of the fitted sheet.
“This is cop behavior,” Patrick says as Nathaniel checks that the top sheet is symmetrical on both sides.
“Take a look at your desk and then tell me which of us is the pig,” Nathaniel says. Patrick, caught by surprise and always a sucker for a pun, laughs. For a moment, under the too-dim overhead bulb, Nathaniel looks delighted with himself. He isn’t smiling, exactly, but his face is lit up. And Patrick, who spent the afternoon treating Nathaniel the way he treats all Mrs. Kaplan’s strays—like he’s signing a check for the minimum payment on a cosmic debt he racked up years ago, a truly shitty way to treat a person but there you have it—is brought up short. The unforgiving light turns the dark circles under Nathaniel’s eyes nearly purple, and Patrick has to add a few years to his earlier estimate of Nathaniel’s age. But there’s no mistaking the look of unholy glee on his face—at roasting Patrick, and maybe also at making Patrick laugh. It makes Patrick feel like he’s seen too much, like he’s peeked through a keyhole. Like he’s gotten a glimpse of something he wouldn’t mind seeing more of.
Nathaniel’s about twenty years too old to be a runaway. At some point runaways graduate into drifters. They drift in, they drift out. Patrick gives them a hand and he wishes them well when they leave. No point in getting attached.
Speaking of which. “There’s an A&P around the corner,” Patrick says, one foot in the hallway, thirty seconds from being on his sofa. “They’ll still be open, if you need anything.” Mrs. Kaplan will have given Nathaniel at least five twenty-dollar bills, smooth and clean and fresh from the bank, plenty for a man tobuy his own groceries. It isn’t wages, it’s a gift, she always tells them: Mr. Kaplan’s life insurance payout put to good use. If they want to stick around the bookshop and work, Patrick pays them for their time and teaches them a little about buying and selling books. Usually, though, they just need a few weeks with food and rent taken care of to get back on their feet, and then they come up with a plan of their own.
Nathaniel looks a little stricken—and, fair, nobody wants to buy groceries at eight p.m. in the coldest part of the winter, even when the streets aren’t paved with garbage. But that prospect would make most people look annoyed, not like a mouse freezing at the sound of an owl’s hoot.
“Or we can figure out groceries in the morning,” Patrick says. “Don’t worry about breakfast. I have coffee and milk in my apartment. I might even have cereal. I’ll get you tomorrow at nine?”
Nathaniel looks more grateful than anybody should about some corn flakes, and that just pisses Patrick off, which means it’s time to go. He says a terse good night and is halfway down the stairs before he hears the apartment door shut.
2
“You’re allowed to take breaks,” Patrick says when Nathaniel finishes sweeping the floor and cleaning the grimy shop bathroom. It isn’t even noon. Patrick’s exhausted just watching him. “Go have a cigarette or something.”
Nathaniel glares at him. Patrick isn’t sure whether the glare is for suggesting a break or for letting the shop acquire what Patrick likes to think of as a respectable patina. It doesn’t matter. This is his shop. Or, Mrs. Kaplan’s, but she lets him have free rein. The old Fourth Avenue store housed three stories of disorganized books and over four decades of dust. By comparison, this place is practically an operating theater in its cleanliness, a minimalist paradise in its aesthetics. Dooryard Books is the Mies van der Rohe of used bookstores. Hell, some of the shelves are even alphabetized.
He tells Nathaniel this. Nathaniel stares at him for ten full seconds, his face a study in disapproval, then goes back to cleaning the windows. “Mies van der Rohe,” he says a moment later. “Spare me.”
Patrick prefers bitchy Nathaniel over quiet and terrified Nathaniel, partly because terrified is, objectively, not a great state, but mostly because it’s just a sad fact of Patrick’s life that he’s drawn like a magnet to the most irritable bastards on the planet. Give him a man with a pretty face and a list of complaints and Patrick is putty in their hands.
It’s too quiet, so Patrick puts on the radio. WBAI is playing “Alice’s Restaurant.” Patrick keeps an eye on Nathaniel, looking for signs he disapproves of protest music, but Nathaniel just wipes down the radiator, the cash register, the telephone. “Okay, quit it,” Patrick says when Nathaniel gets too close to his typewriter. “Leave that alone.” Nathaniel cleans the rest of Patrick’s desk, leaving a neat perimeter of dust and smudged ink around his typewriter.
There aren’t any customers, which may have something to do with how there’s even more trash on the streets now than there was yesterday. Patrick’s managed to make his groceries last for a week, but he’s down to a few tablespoons of milk and a brown banana, so he’ll have to go out in this mess.
He finds Nathaniel in the back of the shop, dusting the bookshelves. “Want to go to the A&P?”
Nathaniel freezes, feather duster in the air. Patrick would love to know where he found a feather duster.
“I can watch the shop,” Nathaniel says.
“Don’t you need groceries?”
Nathaniel looks like he wants to say that he doesn’t need food, that he’ll figure something else out, like photosynthesis, or maybe starvation.
“Mrs. Kaplan gave you money?” Patrick asks. Nathaniel nods. “And you still have it?” he adds, because maybe Nathaniel sneaked off in the middle of the night to get a fix, who knows.
“Yes,” Nathaniel says, mightily offended.
“Okay, then you should spend some of it on food. It looks like it’s about to snow, so we should hurry.”
“What if you have a customer?”
“We can lock the door and flip the sign to Closed for half an hour.” That’s what Patrick does whenever he leaves the shop during business hours, unless Mrs. Kaplan wants to come in for a bit.
Nathaniel shoots a wary look toward the front of the shop, toward the street, and it’s the same reaction as last night when Patrick suggested that he buy groceries. Maybe he can’t take cold weather. Maybe he likes rotting garbage even less than most people. Or maybe he has a screw loose in his head, like some people do about getting stuck in elevators or washing their hands. Patrick’s experience with people who find themselves homeless and alone is that it’ll loosen a few screws all right. It took Patrick a while to tighten his own back up.
“Or,” Patrick says, “I can pick you up a few things.”
“Yes,” Nathaniel says. “Please.”
They make a list. It’s the saddest grocery list Patrick’s ever seen, and he has ten years of sad grocery lists under his belt. Milk, cereal, bread, coffee, peanut butter, a few cans of soup and tuna fish.
“Do you want to cook anything?” Patrick asks. “There are some pots and pans in your apartment.”
