His name had been Edward Gray, and he’d been a lawyer. In the days after he died, articles began to run about money missing from accounts and clients who had beefed to the local bar. There were increasingly confused quotes from his daughter, apparently his only surviving family; a spiky indignation in the early days smearing into anger and obvious shame. There was a picture that caught her getting out of a car and looking exhausted and empty, dark lines under her eyes.
He read other things, too. Announcements of weddings and obituaries, a kid getting a scholarship for football. He had a sense of life going by, a stream running while he sat on the bank and watched. He read the classifieds, then closed the paper and went back to the car and drove downtown.
There was a bookstore on State Street, half of a Victorian, and he sat in the car at the curb and looked at the window at a sign: for sale.
The next day he went for the first time to the storage place in Willow Grove and angled the car in front of the door and picked through the keys on his ring, feeling the heat against his back. He found the key to the lock and snapped it open with a metallic ping and clumsily dropped to a knee to pry the door up. He had to put his back into the effort, his legs shaking and blood pulsing at his temples. The door groaned and lifted, and he lowered himself on a cracking knee to look inside.
Empty.
Or not quite. On the floor a pen or something, beyond the hard boundary of sunlight reaching under the open door. He bent closer, reached for it. A needle.
Manny.
RAY DROVE UP Street Road, letting the car take him, not sure what to think or feel. He crossed 263 and almost sideswiped a van that cut him off making a left into the diner, so he pulled into the parking lot of the bowling alley and went inside to think, figuring it was one place he wouldn’t know anybody.
Inside it was bright and loud. He went into the small bar and sat at a chipped Formica table and let a Miller Lite go flat while he watched some kids clustered in one of the lanes. Two boys stood close to each other, knuckle- punching each other’s arms and grimacing while a girl with braces shook her head and called them retards.
He knew he should feel angry, cheated, but that wasn’t in him now. He’d wanted not the money but the freedom it might bring, but he knew in losing it he’d been relieved of a burden, and he’d never have been able to spend it on himself anyway. Part of him wanted to take it off Manny, not to keep it, but to keep Manny from killing himself with it. Yet he knew he wouldn’t do that, either. What ever Ray was doing, wherever he’d end up, he knew Manny wouldn’t be there, that he was as gone as the money, as what ever he’d been feeling when he racked the slide on his Colt and kicked in the door of the dope house in Ottsville. What they were to each other had a shape bordered by dope and guns, being desperate and hopeless and going down swinging, and none of that was in Ray anymore.
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
