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.
He closed early that night, anxious for the time to pass and for Michelle to start. Couldn’t bring himself to stop hoping, playing out different ways it could go. In the moment he’d stood on the sagging wooden porch watching her go up the street, head tucked against the rain, he let himself know he’d taken Theresa’s money, bought the store, put up the sign, all of it hoping she’d walk in off the street. Let himself run a hundred changes in his mind, let himself feel stupid and impatient and something else that might be happiness at just breathing.
He stood on the street, looked back up at the store one last time to make sure the lights were off, and was nearly knocked off his unsteady feet by Edward Gray’s daughter coming down the sidewalk, listing to one side and paddling at the air with one stiff arm. He searched his mind for her name. She held up her hands and spoke with deliberation.
“I’m so sorry.” Adrienne, that was her name. She smelled like sour fruit and was underdressed for the weather in a sweater and scuffed jeans. She said, “A little dark out here to night,” and smiled. Drunk, he realized. Her eyes were shadowed pits in her head.
“My fault,” he said and meant it. “Standing around in the middle of the sidewalk, blocking traffic.”
She patted hair the color of foam on a lifeless pond. “Not at all. Not at all.”
She kept moving along the street, downhill to wherever she lived, he hoped. He watched her go.
HE HAD AN open house in February and invited Manny, who didn’t come, and Ho and Tina, who did. Theresa was there, and Bart, skin the color of mustard and sitting in a wheelchair, though he smiled and held a glass of white wine and snapped pictures with Theresa’s little digital camera. Ray showed Ho the Web site Michelle had put together for the store and her brochures for the children’s parties she wanted to host, letting the kids make books of their own. Ho looked from the computer to Ray and then at Michelle where she sat on the floor, her ankles tucked under her as she guided Ho’s five- year- old, Ly, through an Alexandra Day book where a black dog danced with a smiling infant. Ho shook his head and smiled, and Ray opened his hands.
“What?”
“Nothing, nothing at all.”
“Oh, you know? Don’t start.”
“Did I say a word?”
“I get this enough from Theresa.” He inclined his head and dropped his voice, a hand held out as if to signal stop. “She doesn’t know. Anything.”
“So?”
“So I don’t want to go down that road.”
“Don’t lie.”
“I don’t want to lie. I don’t want to get into anything.”
“You think what, she’s here for six bucks an hour?”
“Fourteen. I can’t dump my life on some kid from Ohio who works in a bookstore. That life? Where I’ve been and what I’ve done?”
“Then don’t.” Ho poured more wine into his glass, waved at his daughters. “But you got this far, man. You going to spend the next fifty years dating massage parlor girls?”
Ray dropped onto the sill of the window behind the counter, massaging his thigh and grimacing, and Ho stood with his back to the room.
“I’m just saying think about what you’re going to say. You don’t have to sign a full confession to tell someone you’ve been in trouble and aren’t anymore. If you think you got to say anything except you own a bookstore in Doylestown.”
Ray looked across at her, and she turned her head and smiled and then looked down, and he felt the floor dropping away and a thudding in his head.
Ho motioned him out to the porch and looked up and down the street, then told him Cyrus was dead.
“The guys from New En gland?”
“No. That’s over.”
“Over?”
“That guy, Scott? He was making this move on his own, took some of the guys from the Outlaws and came down here on his own. With his end of an armed robbery at an Indian casino. That’s what the cash was.”
“How do you know this?”
“A friend showed me some transcripts.”
“Transcripts?”
Ho looked around again and lowered his head. “Federal wiretaps.”
“Jesus.”
“It was everything he had, his own money.”
Ray nodded. It explained the way things played out. He shook his head. “How did it show up on wiretaps?”
“The FBI was on him up there. They scooped up everybody on the New Hampshire end of it.”
“Then who got Cyrus?”
“That wasn’t business.” Ho smiled. “He was screwing around and his old lady caught him.” Ray saw the woman at the abandoned house. Tattoos of the sun and moon on her hands and ice-blue eyes.
Ho turned to go back inside, shivering and pulling in his shoulders.
“Does this mean it’s over?”
Ho shrugged but smiled. “There’s no one left.”
“How do we know?”
Ho looked at him. “The only people you got to worry about chasing you are all up here.” He reached out and tapped Ray’s forehead.
