Page 77 of After Hours at Dooryard Books
“Are you?” Susan asks.
“No. But I know I should be. If you want me to leave, then I’ll go.”
“Oh, no,” Susan says. “You aren’t going to make me be the bad guy. And nobody’s kicking you out. It isn’t like that.”
The door chimes ring, and a customer walks in, a woman and a mutinous-looking teenager. “Are you still open? Oh thank god. Somebody—not mentioning names—was supposed to readThe Red Badge of Couragebefore the first day of school.”
Susan takes Eleanor from Patrick. “I’ll see you later,” she says, maybe to Patrick, maybe to both of them, and leaves through the front door.
“I can mind the shop,” Nathaniel says, then mouths, “Go with her,” to Patrick.
Patrick hesitates, because he doesn’t think Nathaniel should be alone right now. But neither should Susan. Nathaniel makes a shooing motion, and Patrick heads upstairs. He knocks on Susan’s door, stupidly unsure of whether he’s allowed to let himself in.
“I don’t know how you’re fine with this,” Susan says when she opens the door.
“We knew he was keeping secrets. We knew that whatever he used to be, it wasn’t anything he was proud of.”
“I thought he worked for Dow Chemical or some other war profiteer.” She sits in the armchair and Patrick sits on the couch. Nathaniel’s absence feels almost glaring, a gap in a tightly packed bookshelf, the silence when the needle lifts off the record.
“And that would have been better?” Patrick asks. “War profiteering?”
“No. I guess not. I thought I knew him. I wish he’d told us months ago.”
Patrick keeps thinking the same thing. There’s a point at which secrecy becomes dishonesty, but Patrick doesn’t know where to draw that line. “Would it have changed anything?”
“I wouldn’t have gotten so attached. What were we thinking, letting a total stranger into our lives? We didn’t know anything about him. Eleanor loves him. I love him. And now what?”
Patrick can see it all crumbling to pieces. He thought he was ready for this. He knew it wouldn’t last, but knowing it doesn’t make it easier. Now, either Susan will move out or Nathaniel will. Even if, somehow, Patrick gets to keep them both, he won’t get to keep them together.
“You’re in love with him?” Susan asks.
“Yeah.”
“I am happy for you, you know.” There’s the tiniest fragment of a smile on her lips. “It’s nice, isn’t it?”
“It’s nice,” he agrees, charmed, despite everything, by the understatement. How many songs has she written, how many songs has she sung, that try to capture the experience of falling in love? And now she calls it nice. But nice is as good a word as any, when there aren’t any better words.
“I keep imagining him sitting at a long table with a bunch of men in the same suit and they’re all cooking up reasons to go to war,” she says.
“Me too,” Patrick admits. On Susan’s coffee table is a cheap notebook that he recognizes as Nathaniel’s. He must have forgotten it here before Susan left for her parents’ house. Patrick opens it to the middle. Nathaniel’s writing in here is so much messier than it is on the notes he leaves for Patrick, some letters more gestures than actual shapes, some words abbreviated in a way that must make sense to Nathaniel. There are single capital letters that appear on nearly every page—E, S, I, H, M—all easyenough to decipher as the people he talks to every day. There’s no P, but Patrick doesn’t need to wonder why: some things aren’t safe even when you put them in code.
He squints and tries to decipher as much as he can, rarely making out more than a few words per page. Eleanor’s first tooth. Subway graffiti. Tofu. The slide guitar. Night games.
“Should you be reading that?” Susan asks.
“I don’t know. Susan, he called it a list of his sins, but look at it.” He holds out the notebook. She hesitates, but takes it.
“How are Eleanor’s little shoes one of his sins?” she asks a moment later, and Patrick can see as realization dawns.
He makes sure she has enough food in the kitchen for some kind of dinner, then goes downstairs. It’s late enough that Nathaniel should have closed up the shop, but their apartment is empty. “Nathaniel?” he calls. But there’s no answer. The shop, too, is empty. The lights are off and the door is locked.
There’s no note on his desk, and when he goes back upstairs there’s nothing waiting for him there, either. Nathaniel’s things are still in his room—well, mostly in Patrick’s room, at this point. His violin is on the dresser. He’d come back for his violin, wouldn’t he?
Patrick checks his bedroom again, like maybe Nathaniel will be there this time, but all he sees is a Walt-shaped dent in the mattress. Where the hell is the dog, anyway? He whistles, but doesn’t hear Walt’s usual put-upon sigh, followed by the scratch of nails on the floor as Walt trudges off to see what Patrick wants now.
Back downstairs, Walt’s leash isn’t on the hook by the door, and only then does Patrick arrive at the conclusion he’d have come to immediately if he’d been thinking clearly: Nathaniel is walking the dog. He puts on the shop lights and unlocks the door. Then, for good measure, he props the door open. He’ssitting at his desk, trying to decide whether a book is worth rebinding, when Nathaniel comes in.
“You’re letting all the cool air out,” Nathaniel says, using his foot to nudge the stack of encyclopedia volumes away from the door. “Go, be free,” he tells Walt, unclipping the leash. The dog scrambles over to Patrick.
