The Moment of Everything (23 page)

As I considered the behemoth of Apollo, my eye caught a movement in one of the sculpted potted shrubs that stood at attention at the sides of its courtyard entrance. It was black and furry and sitting in the dirt with its back against the rod of a pruned tree trunk. No, not sitting. Squatting. Pooping. It was a black cat pooping in Apollo’s potted plants. Then I caught the outline of the ear with the bite taken out of it. It was Grendel.

Keeping my eye on the cat, I knocked on the Dragonfly’s window behind me. I didn’t dare turn around, afraid I’d lose sight of Grendel. I just knocked harder until Jason came to the door.

“What!?”

I didn’t turn my head. I didn’t say anything. I just pointed.

Slowly, without saying anything to each other, we made our way across the street. I tried to keep my eye on him, but he was gone by the time we got to the planter.

“He’s got to be here somewhere,” Jason said.

We moved into the courtyard, dodging sale shoppers as we looked under tables and chairs and around planters and display stands. Then just as I walked up to a long planter stuffed with agapanthus, movement caught my eye. And when I peered through the arcing leaves, I saw a black nose twitching under the leaves at the far end.

He pulled his head back inside the bush and I heard the rustling getting farther away. Grendel was moving. I pulled off my sweater ever so gently and followed the noise.

There must have been something familiar in my voice or in my smell that told Grendel he was no longer among strangers, because to my amazement, he started walking toward me. Then I noticed that he was in a low crouch and there was a deep guttural growl coming out of him, and I realized he wasn’t coming toward me. He was hunting me. I scampered away from the agapanthus just in time to avoid his charge. He chased me onto the tile and through a gaggle of middle school girls, and satisfied he’d run me off, he turned around to return to his lair. Only I was ready. I launched myself at him and scooped him up with my sweater. He struggled and it was all I could do to hang on to him. A paw got loose and I got the angry end of it but still I hung on. Grendel belonged with us, whether he liked it or not.

“You got him!”

Jason reached out for his cat, who was still attached to my finger, and for a moment there was this odd Chinese puzzle of Jason tugging on Grendel and Grendel still having his claw sunk into me and me yelling in pain and Jason yelling in joy and Grendel yowling like the world was coming to an end. Finally, the cat let go and I let Jason pull him into his arms.

That fucking cat. Living large over at Apollo while Jason was worried sick about him. While we were left with the disheveled strings of our lives, here that disloyal, traitorous cat was making himself at home across the street.

And then I saw it. Like I had before with the Dragonfly, I saw the top of Apollo lifted off the building so that I could look down on it and see it as no one else could. I could see the shelves brimming with books, not neatly ordered, but torpedoed across the store. I could see me and Jason at the front ringing up our customers, showing people to their sections. I could see Gloria and her husband and her NPR tote bag. I could see the CIA Bathroom sitting in big easy chairs, arguing, reminiscing, giving me a hard time. I could see it as clearly as I could see Grendel in Jason’s arms. I knew then that I was going to love that cat forever.

Jason and I were having a round of Shakespeare Boggle, taking a break from the last bits of packing, when Avi came through the door. Later, Jason would say, “The air suddenly smelled corporate.” And were it not for Jason, I would have had a completely civil and adult greeting with another human being. Instead, as I stood to say “hello,” Jason jumped from his chair and assumed a Grendel-like position of defense. Grendel, for once, lay on his back in a sunny spot on top of a small stack of boxes, from where our human antics seemed to be amusing him.

“What do you want here?” he asked Avi.

Avi ignored his tone and cued up her designer smile. She was wearing an end-of-summer cream suit, with a whisper of the autumn that was nearly on us in her roasted orange blouse. For once, I didn’t feel like the frumpy country cousin standing in front of her even in my holey jeans and Dragonfly T-shirt tied in a knot at my waist. It felt like she was the one who didn’t fit.

“Stay gold, Ponyboy,” I said. “I invited her.”

Avi and I went down the block to the Starbucks where the Overly Tattooed & Pierced had also migrated. We ordered an extra large mocha with whipped cream (me) and Orange Zinger tea (her). As I picked up the orders and she settled in at a table, I saw Jason outside the front window motioning furiously to the Overly Tattooed & Pierced and saying things I couldn’t hear but could guess pretty well.

Finger drawing an invisible line from Starbucks to the Dragonfly:
She just walked into our store!
Arms waving in the direction of our table:
And Maggie just followed her over like a zombie!
Finger pointing from his chest to the Dragonfly:
I’ve got to get back to watch the store.
Pointing to the Overly Tattooed & Pierced, and then bouncing palms down:
You guys stay here and look out for Maggie.

I set Avi’s tea in front of her and sat down at the table. I took a long slurp from my mocha, trying to look casual and wondering where to start.

She kept her eyes on me as she replaced the teacup in the saucer. A smile arced on her lips.

“It’s not too late for you to be a part of the new Apollo Books, Maggie.”

I gazed into the remnants of my mocha, clinging to the straw and the sides of the plastic cup. I wondered if someone there was an old gypsy woman who could read sticky coffee foam like tea leaves. For now, I’d have to depend on me.

“I appreciate you saying that,” I said.

“I’ve been meditating on it and looking for a creative solution. The way I see it, you’re not joining us because there’s something missing from our offer. Something you want that we’re not giving you.”

The hum of voices around us seemed to crescendo and then disappear in a vacuum of sound, leaving a moment of silence like when the ocean pulls a broken wave back into the tide. Before I could spend another moment thinking about it, I blurted out, “How much do you want for the building here in Mountain View?”

She did not bother trying to hide her surprise.

“Why do you want to know?”

“Jason and I want to buy it for the Dragonfly.”

She told me a figure that was way beyond the point at which money stopped being real to me. For me and Jason, money was something you held and handed to people from the till. It puttered—a jalopy made of spare parts—slowly from one person to another, making clinking noises when you dropped bits of it in tip jars. The figures we were talking of were too fast for sound. They were light-years traversed by rocket ships.

I swallowed my nerves and talked to her about how the retail real estate market was still on the low slope and how it would be great publicity for Apollo to give the Dragonfly a deal on the sale. Avi said something about having to discuss it with her partners and needing a property assessment but her words were white noise as my mind scrambled. There was no perfect job, at least not for me. There was no perfect love or even a perfect book. But I had a life I loved at the Dragonfly and I wanted to be tethered to it. I wanted to suffer the bad times and feel joy at the good.

“You’ll be leaving the community without a bookstore,” I said, making my final argument, just as I’d practiced.

“What are you offering?” Avi asked.

I told her a figure 15 percent below what we could pay after pooling together the money from Hugo’s duplex and the small business loan Robert helped us acquire. She countered with another number and finally we agreed on a figure 5 percent below my threshold.

“I’m certain I can sell that to my partners,” she said.

We walked to the sidewalk, and shook hands.

“You could have been great,” she said.

“You too,” I said.

There’s a part of grief that’s unexpected. After the days when you think you’ll never be able to get out of bed again and after walking about feeling like your insides are hollow and your skin is made of paper, you start remembering. You remember not the death and seeing the one you love in a hospital bed with tubes. You remember what he was like before all of that, when he was well and you were whole. It’s that remembering that catches up with you and then you know the person you lost isn’t lost after all, but has become part of you and you’re the better for it.

“What about that time he got all mad because he couldn’t find organic lard?” Jason asked.

We all laughed, sitting around the blanket, the scent of fresh wood from the new bookshelves huddling beneath the aromas of our indoor picnic of samosas, vindaloo chicken, naan, and a rainbow of curried dishes. Jason, pretty much everyone from game night, the CIA Bathroom, and I still smelled of sweat and sawdust.

“It was some Southern thing for you, wasn’t it?” Jason asked me.

“Hush puppies,” I said. “He called the offices of
Southern Living
for the recipe because he wouldn’t look it up online. But he could never bring himself to make them because he couldn’t assure himself the hog lived in an organically cultured manner before giving his life for the cause of deep-frying.”

They’d all come to the new Dragonfly to help make the shelves we’d need for our abundant inventory. Jason and I had been scouring estate sales, abandoned storage units, and anywhere else we could to stock a store five times the size of the previous Dragonfly. It was just too huge. I thought back to that conversation with Avi about how no bookstore needed thirty thousand square feet. So instead of filling it with inventory, we built walls to create study rooms, meeting rooms people could rent, and, of course, a coffee bar and café that we sublet out to a few of the Overly Tattooed & Pierced. We hired staff, including Sasha and her girlfriend with the pixie haircut, who we hoped would fill the store with their friends at night. The new Dragonfly cast out for a future.

Robert gave us a present of two framed pictures. One was of Hugo, standing in front of the old Dragonfly. It must have been right after he bought the store in the eighties. He looked so young. His hairline had only started its departure, his beard was nearly black. The other was of the three of us, Jason and Hugo in the two reading chairs, me on the floor leaning against Hugo’s legs, all of us with our noses in a book. How Hugo would have loved seeing the new Dragonfly. I’m sure he would have felt a sense of victory at having run Apollo Books & Music out of town, and we would never try to disabuse him of that notion. He would have loved the new shelves, the new office. He would have loved this gathering of our family. He would have loved it all.

I think I’d always been scared of what love meant in my life because I was afraid of it controlling me, of what I would have to give up for it. But the truth is, for a love big enough, the sacrifices aren’t sacrifices. They are necessities. The crime is making them for the wrong reasons.

As the others cleaned up from our indoor picnic, I went into the office to get some papers for Robert. Our first mail at the new address had arrived. Along with the bills and the catalogs, there was a book-size package addressed to me. I opened it and pulled out Henry and Catherine’s
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
. Inside was a notecard.

That night, I sat in my papasan chair by the window of the small apartment above the new Dragonfly where I’d moved after we sold Hugo’s duplex. It was almost too cold to have the window open, but I liked hearing the last of the Castro Street visitors going home at night and the smell of the Thai restaurant across the street. After living next door to Hugo for years, the quiet and lack of luscious smells would have made me lonesome.

I opened
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
. I reread all the notes, just as I had the first night I found them. Then I got up and went to my kitchen table with a sheet of paper and a pen. I held the paper steady and pressed ink into it, forming letters, forming words, forming my thoughts.

I didn’t know what Rajhit’s life was like in Amsterdam. I didn’t know if he had found another love or if he still thought of me and our counterfeit affair. He existed around a corner I had not turned. But nonetheless, I wrote to his unknown heart. Because in the end, he was right. I was his Catherine after all.

After the letter was done, I folded it and addressed it to the shop in Amsterdam he’d told me about. Then in the night’s light, I walked to the postal box across from the Dragonfly, opened the door, and dropped in the letter before I could stop myself. After working in software for a decade, I understood the bits and bytes of e-mail, Facebook posts, tweets, and texts, but dropping a piece of paper into a box and it appearing on the other side of the world a few days later? That was true magic.

I wake up to find Maya standing by my bed staring at me. She’s started this habit lately, lifting the key to my place we keep in the office downstairs in the Dragonfly. She’s been excited about starting kindergarten in a couple of weeks, but she’s also been more clingy lately, like we might disappear while she’s off learning her ABCs. Her mom, Aslay, just laughs and says it’s all those children’s books about orphans that Jason reads to her. “She’ll learn,” she says. “We’re all staying put.”

I get up and she brings me the phone when it rings. I sit on my bed and chat with Dizzy, who’s coming to town today and taking me to lunch. We make plans to meet at the Nuevo-Indian restaurant in the space where Finnegans Wake used to be. He’s trying to woo me to come work for his new start-up, which does something with mobile phones that I don’t really understand. He didn’t last a year at Apollo Books & Music. Turns out that rebuilding what he’d done before wasn’t as exciting as the New & Shiny around the corner. Whatever his new company does, Dizzy is the FFS, future feature strategist. It’s the most bullshit made-up title I’ve ever heard of, but Dizzy is excessively proud of it and I pretend I am, too. Sometimes it’s enough just to see the people in your life happy.

By the time I hang up with Dizzy, Maya is pulling me toward the stairs. I tell her to get dressed. We have a big day ahead. After I open the store for the morning crew and tie up a few loose ends, Maya and I need to find her a new outfit and new shoes for the first day of school. Her mom and Jason think cutoffs and holey sneakers are perfectly fine for the big day. Jesus Christ on a cracker.

We head downstairs to the store, where Jason’s sitting at the desk, checking our sales numbers for the last month. The late hours in the summer were good for us, but we’re hoping the Christmas season will be better. Aslay is there, too. She’s much more of a morning person. She’s brought warm scones and fresh orange juice. She works at an organic bakery and is a little too militant about rice flour. But I like her. She and Jason met around last Thanksgiving, a couple of months after we reopened, when she came in looking for books for Maya. The two of them moved into a new apartment a couple of months ago. At twenty-six, Aslay is a few years older than Jason, but in a way that makes him seem older, too. They’re planning a Christmas wedding at the Dragonfly. I want to tell them they’re very young, that they haven’t known each other long enough. I worry a little for all of them. But then, which of us are ever really ready for anything?

Maya stands on her knees in the chair next to Jason. She tells him about a turtle in her dream last night. He tells her about a bear cub who lives in an upside-down umbrella that hangs from the crescent moon. Aslay begs him again to write down these stories that swim around in his brain and he scribbles some lines in a spiral notepad we keep by the desk phone. Then the scones are buttered and my tea is ready and, when I sit down, I know it’s going to be a good day.

When Maya and I walk into the main store, Sasha has already let in the morning crew and gotten the coffee bar going so that the whole place smells like coffee heaven. No burned beans at the Cuppa Joe Café at the Dragonfly. I can even drink it black, but Sasha has a Hammerhead Mocha waiting for me and a juice box for Maya when we arrive. Maya takes her hand to “help” her set out the fresh pastries.

“No doughnuts,” I say. “She’s already had breakfast.”

They both pout and when they think I’m not looking, Sasha makes an exaggerated turn of her head and Maya pops a doughnut hole in her mouth.

“Maya,” I say.

“Not a doughnut. It’s the hole,” she says, and I give her the “I’m not falling for that” look and hopefully that will be the end of it, because I’m getting ready for a meeting in the conference room with the morning staff about the new book trade tracking system Dizzy wrote for us as a side project. We’re his beta testers. If all goes well, he’s going to sell it in the App Store. Good for him. I’m just glad for the newish computers that came with his deal.

I still stick to my guns about a thirty-thousand-square-foot store being way too much space for a neighborhood bookstore. We rent out the conference rooms, offices, and cubicles in the upstairs to the Silicon Valley hopefuls thinking they have the next Facebook in the works on their hard drives. They love being with the books and being with the coffee and pastries more. We charge them just enough so that book sales have to cover only half our mortgage. Book sales may go up and down, but there’s no shortage of dreams of the Next Big Thing in Silicon Valley.

Maya joins me at the checkout counter while I sort through a stack of mail, which is mostly bills. I’m just about through when Maya tugs on my shirt and holds out a postcard to me.

“I like this bicycle,” she says.

I take the card. It has a picture of a bicycle parked in a field of yellow tulips. And I know who sent it before I turn it over.

It took two agonizing months for me to hear back after that first letter I wrote him. But when I saw my name on that envelope below the Dutch stamps, I just held it and ran my fingers over the imprint of the pen on the paper, paper he had touched. It was the first of many we wrote back and forth for the next ten months. No promise, no protestations of love. Just letters. Letters telling of our days. Getting-to-know-you letters. Letters only for us.

I turn over the bicycle postcard, expecting to see more colorful Dutch stamps, but there’s nothing in the right corner but a small rectangle showing the sender where to put the stamp. Below that is just “Maggie.” The card didn’t come in the mail. On the left there’s only “Meet me in Pioneer Park, under your favorite tree, tomorrow at noon.” Rajhit is home. And I must at last face all my questions.

“What is it?” Maya asks, taking the card from me.

“A friend is in town.”

“Dizzy?”

“No, another friend.”

I slide the card into my bag between a notebook and a copy of
My Lord Wicked
. I have a day and two hours to fill before I see him. I look out the open door as the Dragonfly cranks to life. I will have plenty of work to fill the time.

Bookstores are romantic creatures. They seduce you with their wares and break your heart with their troubles. All great readers fantasize about owning one. They think spending a day around all those books will be the great fulfillment of their passion. They don’t yet know about the sorting of what comes in, the tracking of what goes out, the backaches from carrying and shelving, and the little money that comes from any of it. All those readers just think about the wedding without giving much thought to the marriage. Books make for a heavy load, and there’s no getting around it.

I worry about my future in the way I’m told I’m supposed to. Retirement, health care, insurance. Jason and I, as co-owners of the Dragonfly, struggle. When sales are good, we feast like thieves. In the slow times, we skimp by on peanut butter and jelly so we can make payroll for a dozen employees. There’s always a moment, every day, that I wonder if I should have taken Avi up on her offer, if I could now be in a massage chair drinking piña coladas and deciding what books should be front and center in Apollo’s aisles. And when I picture those virginally new books, I know I made the right decision. The books in Apollo are like people without pasts, without tales to tell. The books of the Dragonfly have been through many hands and will move on to others. They smell of human touch and all its possibilities.

As the day moves on and the light lingers, the Dragonfly brims with the purposeful lingering movement of those looking for what they don’t yet know they need. The kind of people who come to the Dragonfly don’t just own books; they need them, crave them, find it impossible to breathe without them. They come because they are in love with the store itself, with its handled wares and their untold tales. They come because they like wondering about the people who owned all these books before. They come because the people whose paths they cross are like the books they find, a bit worn around the edges, just waiting for the right person to open them up and take them home.