“Where is this coming from?”
“I see you when there are policemen on the street.”
“You see me?” He wanted to say, I see you, too, but wasn’t sure what it was he saw.
“You get this look. And you move away from the window. One time that cop went next door and you hid in the stockroom.”
“I didn’t hide. I had shit to do.” But he didn’t believe himself, either. He was getting angry, felt something twisting out of his hands, the desire to restrain it somehow propelling it away.
“Yeah, okay. I’ll see you, Ray.”
He grabbed his cane and started after her, but she was through the door and down the street faster than he could cross the room. He stumped out to the top of the stairs, the cold gripping at him. Watched her moving under the lights away up the street toward Main. It began to snow, white flakes sticking to his hair and his shirt like nature trying to erase him from the scene.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
SHE DIDN’T COME back the next day, or the next. He called her over the next three days, stammering vague messages to her voice mail and hanging up. He sat in the store and stared, reading the last quote she had put up over and over. “I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.” Rilke, one of her favorites. He got out Letters to a Young Poet when he was alone in the store and scoured it for traces of her, all the time willing himself to be smarter and more patient. When the store closed he sat in the light from the street and touched the pages and held it up to his face, hoping her scent would have lingered on the book.
STRANGE WEATHER MOVED in. Hot, damp days in which the sun furiously melted the last of the snow and kids built slick gray snowmen in their shirtsleeves. Bart moved into the hospital, and Ray would go there at the end the day, so Theresa could take a break. He’d bring his father crime novels. Elmore Leonard and Donald E. Westlake and John D. MacDonald. Bart loved anything with guys fighting over a briefcase full of money. Faithless women and smoking pistols. At first Ray would drop them on the nightstand and take the old ones, but after a week he noticed they were untouched and started reading them aloud. Bart would close his eyes and fall asleep, and Ray would stick a tongue depressor in the book and leave it on the nightstand.
One night, in the middle of The Hunted, during a long chase across the Negev, Bart put his hand on Ray’s arm and held it there. Ray closed the book and waited, feeling the papery skin and the rocklike bones beneath.
“I always wanted to see the desert.” Bart’s voice was like something rimed with salt, gritty and brittle.
“Me, too.”
“You should go.”
“Maybe.”
“Nah, just go. Take that girl from the store.”
Ray thought about that, and about what to say. “That would be good.”
“I never did nothing in my whole life.”
Ray looked at him, but Bart was dry- eyed, just staring as if struck by the wonder of it.
“Nothing that was worth a damn to another living soul.” Bart patted Ray’s hand. “I can’t tell you what to do. I ain’t got that right anymore.” Then his father smiled, that alien arrangement of muscles that made him unrecognizable. “But, maybe, take a lesson.”
THE NEXT SATURDAY the kids came back, Lynch and the tall kid, who Ray found out was named Stevie. They were excited, dumping the books they’d found out on the counter, pushing them forward, Lynch talking about the ones he’d read, thumbing them open to show Ray passages he liked and that, eerily, he’d obvi-ously memorized just by glancing at them. They shifted the books into piles, claiming finds and smacking the table and saying, pay me, bitch.
The blond girl, Andrea, came up and hovered at the door this time, and Lynch would look over at her as if he were making sure she was still there or checking to see if she was okay. She was tiny, lost in a parka that looked three sizes too large, her yellow hair seeping from under a hood and curling on her red cheeks. The bruise on her face had faded, but she was silent and looked off into the corners of the room, her hands in her pockets.
Ray caught her eye and, trying to look harmless, smiled and pointed back into the store. She dropped her head and moved down the aisles fast, as if she had been slapped.
Lynch watched her go, then called to her. “Hey, he’s got some of those books, Andy.”
Ray counted money out onto the counter. “What books?”
Stevie shook his head. He dropped his head and talked into his coat. “What a fucking loser.”
“What books?”
Lynch smacked Stevie on the elbow. “Aw, man, you know. About babies and being pregnant and that shit.”
Ray lost count. “Dude, what?”
“She’s knocked up.”
Ray picked up the small pile of money, feeling ridiculous. He had been thinking about two kids getting a couple of bucks for junk food and movies. “Jesus, man. Is she…” He shook his head. “I mean, where is she living? Do her parents know? I mean, where the fuck do you two live, anyway?”
Smiling, Stevie snatched the money from Ray. “We’re covered, man.” Lynch went into the back and came back with Andrea, who Ray could see now was pregnant, her small belly pressing against the inside of the parka. She had two books, What to Expect When You’re Expecting and something called Ten Little Fingers with a cartoon of a baby with arms outstretched and an outsized, egglike head that made Ray wince with its fragility.
He gave them the books, gave them more money, couldn’t stop himself from shaking his head every couple of seconds. He finally made them promise to take Andy to Lilly’s, the sandwich shop around the corner, to get her something healthy to eat. On the porch Lynch turned and gave an apologetic shrug while Stevie fanned the air with dollar bills.
THE NEXT SUNDAY morning Ray couldn’t bring himself to drive up and open the store, and instead he put a sport coat on and went to the low brick meeting house on Oakland Avenue. It was still hot, the street steaming and the lawns looking like wilted salad revealed by the melting snow.
He got there late, let himself in as quietly as he could, and sat near the door on an ancient, scarred bench half- covered with pamphlets about Darfur, capital punishment, and something called Peace Camp. It was quiet; the only sounds were passing traffic and the occasional sigh or sneeze. The room itself was plain, painted a sleep- inducing cream color and smelling faintly of wet ash, as if a fire had been put out just before he arrived. There was a mix of ages in the room, but Ray thought everyone had something indefinable in common. Expressed in uncombed hair and wrinkled clothes, maybe. Natural fibers and, he was guessing, nontoxic dyes.
In front of him two black- haired kids fidgeted next to their mother, who wore jeans and a peasant blouse. Ray realized he wore the only jacket in the room. He scanned faces but couldn’t find Michelle in the crowd at first. Finally he spotted her between a large woman in a dress that looked like it was made from pink bedsheets and a small man with a bald head who kept clicking his dentures in his sleep. Michelle’s eyes were closed.
He kept waiting for the service to begin, but it never seemed to. There would be a rustle of movement or an exhalation that he expected to signal the start of a prayer or a song, but it resolved itself into some small readjustment in the humid room. A tiny fan at the window blew a lank, tepid breeze past his face without cooling the air. A woman stood up, two rows away from him. She had short gray hair and a thickset body, and beside her sat Liz, who had sold Theresa the store and whom he hadn’t seen since the closing. The woman who stood said she had sat on her porch and watched a spider build a web, working diligently and skillfully to make this delicately beautiful thing that would last only the day and then have to be rebuilt, and that there was some kind of message in that and she was trying to be open to it. She said her friend had given up something vitally important to her that she had worked a long time to get and very hard to keep, and wasn’t there value in making something intricate and lovely, even if you knew it wasn’t going to last? That there would only be more work at the end of it?
After her question, she just shrugged and sat down. Liz, whom Ray had never seen smile, beamed and squeezed the woman’s hand, her eyes wet. Ray thought for a minute someone in authority would get up and
