Page 56 of After Hours at Dooryard Books
Their lips meet in the cautious way that Patrick’s been expecting, but before now Nathaniel has kept his hands to the same places he might touch Patrick even if they weren’t kissing: his arms, his shoulders, maybe his back. Now, his fingertips are on Patrick’s jaw, his cheek; he’s feeling Patrick’s beard. Patrick lets his own hands land on Nathaniel’s waist. His fingers brush the bare skin between the hem of his t-shirt and the waist of his pajama pants. When Nathaniel draws in a breath, Patrick feels it on his own lips.
This time, Nathaniel kisses back. He kisses the way he does everything else: thorough and precise. It feels like he’s inventing the concept of kissing from scratch.
Patrick tries remind himself that Nathaniel is figuring things out. Patrick happens to be the person who’s around to figure things out with. But then he remembers the way Nathaniel had held on to him that morning after the break-in, the way he’d kissed Patrick’s knuckles.
The kiss is soft and slow, worryingly tender, a kiss under a yellow porch light at the end of a date. It’s a kiss by the luggage carousel, after someone’s finally come back. It’s the sort of kiss Patrick has always known is for other people.
* * *
Mrs. Kaplan comes back a few days later to inspect the work the glazier did on the front window and the glass case.
“Good as new,” she says as she surveys the shop: books back where they belong, window repaired, new typewriter on Patrick’s desk. “Oh, isn’t this nice.” She picks up the new Rolodex. The old one was cracked beyond repair when the cash register landed on it. Susan bought a new one, made of sturdy metal, and transferred all Patrick’s addresses, rewriting the cards that were torn or crumpled. That morning he’d looked up the address of a Thomas Wolfe collector to send them a quote on a fine first ofLook Homeward, Angel, only to find their address written out in Susan’s handwriting.
It’ll be strange, months from now, years from now, to come across her loopy scrawl, unchanged since the seventh grade. Everyone who’s worked in the shop has left their trace. On the flyleaf of some of the older stock, the price is written in an unfamiliar hand that must have belonged to Mr. Kaplan. It was Gary, the book scout, who decided fiction had to be organizedby period, and now Patrick wouldn’t be able to find anything if they adopted a more sensible strategy. Laura, a girl who stayed with Mrs. Kaplan for a few weeks in 1965, used random pieces of paper to level all the bookcases so they’d stop wobbling on the uneven floors; sometimes he’ll come across some playing cards or a folded envelope and think of her as he shoves it back into place. People come; people go. Patrick knows this. He doesn’t like to think of a time when Susan’s handwriting will be her only presence in the shop. When Nathaniel goes, there won’t be a single corner of the shop that Patrick can stand to look at.
Mrs. Kaplan stays long enough to have Chinese takeout with them for dinner. It’s the third time that week they’ve had Chinese food. Patrick is starting to worry that someone in this household will have to learn to cook.
It’s dark, so Patrick drives Mrs. Kaplan back home. “You haven’t sent me anyone in a while.” He doesn’t mean to sound so petulant.
“I think you have your hands full,” Mrs. Kaplan says. “Nathaniel’s settling in well?” She asked him the same question months ago.
“He’s great.” It’s the same answer he gave the last time she asked.
She’s quiet for a moment, the only sound the echoey thrum of traffic in the Queens Midtown Tunnel. He knows it’s a tactic but he falls for it every time.
“I don’t know what we’d have done without him. He’s good with Eleanor,” Patrick goes on. “And Susan.”
“And you?” she asks.
He can’t tell whether she means anything by it. She’s always known about him. It was Mrs. Kaplan who bailed him out of jail. Another man who’d been caught in the raid had been talking to Patrick in the cell, trying to calm him down. He’d used his phone call to get in touch with Mrs. Kaplan and asked her tobail Patrick out too. Last Patrick heard, he was working in a secondhand bookstore in Tucson.
As soon as Patrick started working for Mrs. Kaplan, she started dropping pointed references to “people like that” who she’d known over the years, as if she were giving him her credentials: gay book collectors, lesbian vaudeville stars, her nephew Roger in Wilmington and that nice man he lives with. Patrick had been—well, mostly he’d been mortified, but he’d appreciated the sentiment.
At a traffic light he slants her a look that he hopes is sufficiently severe, and she beams innocently back at him.
“Where’d you find him?” Patrick asks. At this point, he’s all too aware that no answer she gives will change anything.
“Rude,” she says, with no heat in it. “Like he’s a penny I picked up off the sidewalk.” She turns on the radio and pretends to be fascinated by the Mets game.
“Do you even know his last name?”
“Why, it’s Smith,” she says, not particularly bothering to make it sound like anything other than bullshit. “Does it matter?”
“I don’t even know him. I don’t know anything about him. But I—” He swallows and decidesto hell with it. “I’m in pretty deep, I think.”
“I knew Abe for two months before we got married. My parents liked him, he had steady work, and he made me laugh. Did I know him? Maybe not. Did I love him? Who knows. I loved him for the next forty years, though, I can tell you that much.” She shrugs. “Knowing someone isn’t the same as knowing facts.”
Patrick can’t imagine what it’s like to meet someone and decide you’re going to trust them for the rest of your life.
“He isn’t being honest,” Patrick says. Dishonesty’s always made his skin crawl, and Mrs. Kaplan knows it.
“You don’t seem to care.”
He groans, because she’s right. That’s the worst part. He’s always relied on that distaste for bullshit to keep him safe from all the frauds; it’s his own personal burglar alarm and for some reason Nathaniel isn’t tripping the wire.
Patrick sees Mrs. Kaplan inside, waves away her offer of money for cab fare home but takes a jar of chicken soup. He leaves her with three books: a du Maurier that Nathaniel recommended, Patrick’s own copy of Richard Brautigan’sTrout Fishing in America, and a paperback mystery about a literature professor who solves murders.
“Nathaniel came into the shop after getting mugged,” Mrs. Kaplan says as Patrick’s getting ready to head out the door. “I think you were at an estate sale. End of January.”
