He imagined calling his friend, telling him something that might matter, but couldn’t think what it would be. Don’t fuck up, or think about this, or something, but they weren’t things they could say to each other. The only way to get the money back would be to point a gun, and he wouldn’t do that, either. In the end, he sat in the bar and watched the two boys through the smoked glass. One tripped the other, who dropped his ball with a detonating crack that made the girl with braces scream, and the boys laughed and gave each other hard high fives like they’d won a prize.
After that he would go and sit on the street and look at the bookstore and wait for the for sale sign to disappear. Twice he went in, walked the stacks, bought a handful of paperbacks, and couldn’t work up the nerve to ask the woman behind the counter about selling the store. One night during a commercial he said something to Theresa, who smacked her hands together and said, “Finally.” She snapped off the TV and went back into her room. The Sanctuary. Off- limits to teenage boys and their dopehead friends. He couldn’t remember the last time he was in there.
She came out with a bankbook and pressed it into his hand. He lifted it toward her, unopened.
“I don’t want this.”
“Open it.”
“No.”
“Is everyone in this family a hardhead every minute of every hour? Honest to Christ.”
“Theresa.”
“What?”
“Use it for yourself. Take a trip. Go on that Niagara Falls trip the Shrine is doing.”
“Oh, that bunch of old ladies? I’d cut my throat.” She took the book back but opened it in front of his eyes.
“Jesus, Theresa.”
“That’s my grandchildren money.”
“So why spend it on this?”
“I’ll tell you why. Because how the hell do I get grandchildren by you sitting on your ass watching Jeopardy?”
IT TOOK LESS time than he thought, and by the middle of November he was standing in the shop, jingling the keys to the front door and looking through the front window at people walking the street, now in jackets, and leaves blowing along the curbs.
Bart and Theresa stood in the little space near the cash register. Theresa was beaming and Bart looking shriveled in a sport coat two sizes too large, his hands in his pockets. Theresa’s name was on the paper for the store, and she’d work the register. Ray walked down the aisles, already stocked with books the last owner had picked out and displayed. He was thinking about paint and some simple carpentry. The shelves were actually a mismatched bunch of secondhand bookcases and unpainted planks roughly nailed into the naked walls, sagging in their middles. There were small windows that looked into an alley and bluish fluorescent lights that gave off a low buzz.
On a whim, he went to the door and flipped the sign over, Theresa clapping and miming delight and Bart clumsily snapping a picture with the little digital camera she’d gotten for the occasion. Ray raised his eyebrows and shrugged, no idea what to do next except get to work. He looked at the street again. Clouds moved and their blue shadows pushed along the street, dividing the world into dark and light.
He was in the storeroom in the back sorting through unlabeled boxes of books when the little bell over the door rang and Theresa called to him, an edge of panic in her voice, to come out. He stood up, his bones cracking, and pulled himself out to the front where he had left his cane and found Theresa eyeing an even smaller, older woman with a baseball cap crusted with glass beads and a cast on one arm. Their first customer. The woman raised her eyebrows, looking from panicked Theresa to Ray with sweat standing out on his forehead and dust striping his work shirt to Bart, his lips pursed like he was expecting her to grab something and run.
The moment passed, and Theresa finally shook her head as if waking up and asked if they could help her.
Janet Evanovich, the woman said, and Ray waved her back to the mysteries, where she began to paw through the stock. She prattled on about her niece who had recommended the books and said she had one of them and wanted the next one and wasn’t it great they took place in Trenton?
When she came to the register, Bart stepped behind the counter and opened a paper bag. Theresa opened the register, which was empty, and then the three of them patted their pockets until Theresa went into her purse and counted out the change. Bart took the woman’s ten and stuck it in a small frame and balanced it on the windowsill, and Theresa took a picture. The woman with the cap got into the spirit of the thing and waved the book at them from the door.
The woman left, and the three of them stood in the silence afterward and shrugged at each other. How hard could it be? The bell over the door clanged again, but it was the woman, scowling. She held up the book.
“I read this one.”
Ray shook his head. Theresa opened her hands helplessly. Bart grabbed the frame from the sill and smacked it open on the counter with a chime of thin glass breaking, then handed the woman back her ten.
WEEKS WENT BY and the days were dark and cold. Ray worked alone in the empty store, ripped the shelving out and replaced it in pieces, creating painted built- in shelves with finished edges and molding and painted a creamy white. He spent hours looking at track lighting at the Home Depot and finally settled on small, blue- shaded spots that he tied to a bank of dimmers near the register. He got up early each morning, made lists of tasks for himself on the backs of envelopes, and started noticing how the stores he visited were laid out and the merchandise displayed.
Bart got sicker, and Theresa stayed away more and more to stay with him. Ray would open later and close earlier. He sat for hours in the back of the shop and heard people come by the front doors, sometimes rattling the handle. He took the books off the shelves and then restacked them, lining them up with soldierly precision and making lists of his stock. The woman who had sold him the store, a long, bent woman with a lesbian vibe named Elizabeth, had given him pages with long lists of contacts for book resellers who bought up stock from closing stores and libraries, a constant reminder that there was nothing guaranteed in what he had begun. With the shop closed he spent hours calling people, looking for more of the westerns and crime novels he loved, and every day brought cardboard boxes from Scottsdale or Presque Isle or Waukegan that smelled of ink and old paper and mold. But the store was open less and less.
In January Bart stopped getting out of bed, and Ray put a small sign in the window, help wanted. Theresa had talked with him about a decent wage, and he added a few bucks to it in his head and the next Monday he sat in the store and tapped his cane against his boot and read Hombre for the ninth time, looking up occasionally to watch people moving down streets lashed by rain, their heads tucked into their chests.
He had just nodded off when the bell rang and he jerked upright and Michelle came in, shaking the rain off of a plastic kerchief and smiling at him as if this were the date they’d set up months before. He stood slowly, putting weight on his hands until he could get steady on the cane, and took one long step out from behind the counter.
She looked around and nodded her head. “Wow. It looks great.”
“Oh,” he said and raised one hand dismissively, “a little car-pentry, new rugs.”
“No, it looks wonderful. Liz would never spend any money on the place.”
“You know her?”
“Oh, yeah. I worked here. Before the other place.”
“So you know the operation.”
“Sure. Well, the way Liz did things, anyway.”
He nodded his head, keeping his hands down to resist the impulse to reach out and touch her.
She pointed to the sign in the window. “You need help?”
He let his smile get away from him, the muscles in his face stretching in unfamiliar ways until he brought a hand up and massaged his cheek. He did move, then. Leaned into the cane and reached past her and took down the sign. Waved it and threw it behind the counter.