Page 78 of After Hours at Dooryard Books
“I thought you’d left,” Patrick says, scratching Walt’s head. “I thought you were gone.”
“I would have told you first,” Nathaniel says. Not,I won’t leave.
24
The next morning, the phone rings as Patrick’s opening the shop. “The car won’t start,” Mrs. Kaplan says. “And I don’t have anything good to read.”
He leaves the shop in Nathaniel’s hands, gets on the subway, then walks from the station to Mrs. Kaplan’s house. She’s waiting for him at the door and won’t let him even look at the car until he’s had coffee and some babka. The kitchen hasn’t changed at all in the last ten years, or probably in the twenty years before that. Same yellow paint, same black and white linoleum, same milky-green coffee mugs.
“All right,” he says when he couldn’t possibly eat another bite. “Let’s look at that car.”
The battery’s dead, which is always why Mrs. Kaplan’s car won’t start. Why her useless neighbors don’t come over and ring the doorbell when she leaves the headlights on overnight, he’ll never know.
Mrs. Kaplan sits in the driver’s seat and steers, the car in neutral, while Patrick pushes it into the middle of the road.
“Okay, put it in second gear,” Patrick calls out, even though by now Mrs. Kaplan shouldn’t need to be told how to push start a car—she’s done it as many times as he has. “And keep your foot on the clutch. Let go of the brakes.” Patrick pushes the car hard and runs with it. “Let go of the clutch!” he shouts when he can hear the engine running. “Now brake! Put it in park.” Heopens the driver’s side door and Mrs. Kaplan slides across to the passenger side. Patrick drives the car around the block and parks it right where it started. “Let it run for a bit, and it should be fine,” he says.
She turns in her seat to pat his cheek. “You did good.”
“I got the car started. It was nothing.” Nothing he hasn’t done a dozen times before, he doesn’t add.
“I mean with everything. What would I do without you?” she asks.
He wants to tell her that she has it backwards; he’s the one who’s grateful. “You know a million people. You’d do fine without me.”
“But you’re the one who always comes when I call.”
Patrick touches the worn cream leather of the steering wheel. “You taught me how to drive.” He never learned in high school, partly because Susan had been more than happy to drive him around in her father’s baby-blue Cadillac, taking turns at eye-watering speed, but mostly because he didn’t want to ask to borrow his aunt and uncle’s car. Mrs. Kaplan took him out to a department store in Flushing, early in the morning before it opened, and let him drive around the empty parking lot.
The fact that she’d taught him to drive isn’t really the point. His memories of his parents are fragmented and hazy, and he doesn’t want any memories of his aunt and uncle. He didn’t meet Mrs. Kaplan until he was eighteen, but sometimes he thinks she might have raised him.
“Nathaniel called me last week,” she says, and then doesn’t say anything else. Her silence, as always, works on him like a truth serum.
“He told you?”
“He told me more than one thing.” Her voice is heavy with implication.
Patrick runs a finger over the stitching on the steering wheel. “I think he wants me to be mad at him.”
“Aren’t you?”
“Not at Nathaniel. Are you?” he asks.
“Well,” she says, “why would that matter? He knows what he did. Now he has to make it right. Don’t you think he wants to be better?”
“Yes,” he says. “You don’t mind that he and I are—” He breaks off, feeling silly that he’s looking for her approval.
“Mind? You’re good for one another. When I met him he was like a wet cat. Pitiful and screaming mad about it.”
Patrick laughs, at the image and the accuracy.
“Exactly the way you were,” she adds. “It’s good to see you happy.”
“No telling how long it’ll last,” Patrick says.
“How long do you want it to last?”
Patrick shuts his eyes and tips his head back, the only sound the rumble of the engine. “I’m not sure what I want is on the table.”
