Page 32 of After Hours at Dooryard Books
“You should see the back room,” Nathaniel says, because Patrick looks like he needs a few deep breaths. “We painted it. There’s tea back there, and coffee.”
Mrs. Kaplan gives him a knowing glance, like she knows what he’s doing, but she follows him to the kitchen and is duly impressed. “I don’t know what you used to do with yourself,” she says, “but I doubt you were a handyman or a housekeeper.”
“I hate untidiness,” Nathaniel says. “I can’t think straight when things are a mess.” His face heats, because he hasn’t presented Mrs. Kaplan with much evidence that he’s ever been able to think straight. “I’ve started inventorying the books.”
“It looks like you’re staying,” she says.
“My plan is to stay until Patrick kicks me out,” he says. It’s the truth. It’s not like he has any better ideas. He has a notebook full of reasons to stay, a notebook full of reasons why he shouldn’t. “But I shouldn’t overstay my welcome.”
Something flickers across Mrs. Kaplan’s face. “With Patrick, that isn’t something you need to worry about.”
Susan comes downstairs to hug Mrs. Kaplan and get congratulated on having produced such a lovely baby. Susan holds on to Mrs. Kaplan for a long time while Mrs. Kaplan speaks quietly into her ear, and Nathaniel remembers that Mrs. Kaplan lost a husband too.
They order Chinese food and Mrs. Kaplan stays for dinner, all of them crammed around the table in the kitchen. She shows Patrick about a hundred photographs of her nieces and nephews and great-nieces and great-nephews. “Did Ezra make first chair?” Patrick asks. “Did Sarah decide whether she’s going to Brandeis?”
Susan leans over and whispers in Nathaniel’s ear. “He’s never met any of these people.”
Nathaniel is utterly charmed. He’s so charmed he might black out.
“Fix your face, babe,” Susan says. Under the table, he pinches her.
9
“It’s stupid of me to get attached,” Patrick mutters. They’re at the A&P, trying to fill their cart with groceries that will form themselves into balanced meals without any intervention more drastic than a can opener. “It’s not like Susan’s going to spend the rest of her life upstairs. She’ll take Eleanor back to California.”
“She had her things shipped here,” Nathaniel points out, stopping in front of the canned vegetables. The music piped in over the speakers seems designed to make you feel like you’re in a movie about people buying groceries: nondescript and familiar, but somehow enough to convince you that canned beans are a bit of a thrill.
Patrick puts four cans of creamed corn into the cart. Nathaniel returns three of them to the shelf, let’s not get carried away here. “I don’t want Eleanor to leave.”
It’s possible—probable, even—that Susan will eventually move out. She and Michael moved to San Francisco in 1966, right after they got married, with no plans of coming back east. “She’s your niece,” Nathaniel says. “She won’t disappear from your life.” He squeezes a jar of peanut butter until his fingers turn white against the glass.
“It makes me feel crazy,” Patrick says. He puts a box of spaghetti into the cart. “Three months ago I didn’t even knowher, and now I’d lie down on train tracks for her, no questions asked. And she isn’t even my kid. That’s crazy, right?”
Nathaniel could explain that he’s experienced this particular mystery, that he knows how the heart can generate devotion out of thin air and find a place inside you to keep it. He could also tell Patrick that he knows about what comes after, how the space remains, the devotion remains, even when its object is gone.
Instead he picks up a loaf of spongy bread that claims to contain vitamins. They need vitamins; he puts it in the cart.
“You take care of her every day,” Nathaniel says. “Of course you love her. That’s the entire point of babies. We would have gone extinct a million years ago if babies didn’t operate that way.”
“I didn’t love her at first,” Patrick says. “I kind of resented her. She was here, and Michael wasn’t.”
Nathaniel is a little touched that Patrick’s telling him all this. And by touched, he means he’s quite smug about it, actually. “And you did the right thing anyway.”
Patrick makes a noise that somehow dismisses the idea that doing the right thing even bears mentioning. Nathaniel can’t figure out whether Patrick is deluded enough to believe everyone is as good as he is or if he holds himself to a different standard.
“No, we can’t get grapes,” Nathaniel says in the produce aisle, putting the bunch of grapes back where they came from. “Susan says we’re boycotting them.”
“Why?”
“Farm workers are striking in California.”
“Does that include wine?” Patrick asks.
“It can’t,” Nathaniel says, alarmed. He and Maria have been drinking a bottle of Burgundy that one of the doctors at work gave her. “French grapes are fine,” he decides. “They have unions.”
Patrick gives him anif you say solook that Nathaniel chooses to ignore. They get bananas.
Patrick is about to make another pass down the canned goods aisle. Nathaniel can’t face the threat of green beans. “I’m requisitioning this cart,” he announces, grabbing the handle and steering it toward the ice cream.
