LOST WEEKS OF watching television. Sometimes with Bart, sometimes with Theresa. Nature shows. Muscular cats stalking in a rage through long grass. Travel shows, small, neat women walking along brick streets in walled cities in Tuscany, taking dainty bites of mushroom and boar sausage under trees that looked like gauzy green spearheads. Ray got into a rhythm; reading the paper every day, eating little, his stomach cramping and sometimes blood in his shorts at the end of the day.
He woke up in the middle of the night tangled in his sheets and trying to explain himself to someone in uniform. Hot cramps knifed his thigh, and he threw the covers off and stood up, massaging his leg and leaning heavily on the night table. He walked stiff- legged into the bathroom and snapped on the light, taking stock in the mirror. His beard was streaked with white now, and his long face had the angular, distracted features he had seen in photographs of Civil War veterans staring into the middle distance of daguerreotypes, one pinned sleeve empty.
Anyway, he thought, they came home and went to work. Plowed fields and raised families and counted themselves lucky, no doubt, though they walked nightly over the dead bodies of friends and enemies and felt somehow apart from everyone who hadn’t been where they’d been and done what they’d done. Still they got on with it.
He sat down in the living room in his underwear, clicked on the TV, and turned down the volume. He was watching the news without seeing it when he saw a familiar face and turned up the volume. It was an older woman, mousy brown hair. It took him a minute to remember. The house in Fairless Hills. The woman was in handcuffs. There were shots of evidence tape, a policewoman holding a blanket- wrapped bundle. Pictures of the yard-bird Heston that looked like old arrest photos, shots of the police knee deep in fresh holes in the yard. Digging something up.
RAY WENT OUT the front door and blinked, leaning heavily on the cane. The street was empty; the sun was high and hot. Ray stretched and tried to enjoy moving more than the few steps from the bedroom to the kitchen to the living room. He tried to find a rhythm with the cane, popping the bottom out and then leaning into it, but he broke out in a sweat before he reached the sidewalk. September was winding down and it still felt like August. He made his way around to the car and opened the door, burning his hands on the hot metal of the door of Theresa’s beat- up old Dodge. When he dropped into the seat he was panting like a dog and bathed in sweat.
He drove up 611, not knowing where to go. He passed school buses and saw one tree with leaves the red of clotted blood in astand of oaks and maples on Street Road. The air conditioner gave a sigh and stopped with an exhalation of white mist, so Ray cranked the window down and breathed in the smell of road dust and exhaust and fried food from the Wendy’s at 363. He was halfway to Doylestown before he realized that was where he was heading.
At Main and Court he turned right and made a slow loop on side streets, passing the court house, brick row homes converted to law offices, Victorian houses set back from the street. There were people out’men in business suits on cell phones, kids on cell phones, harried- looking moms pushing strollers and talking on cell phones. He realized he was looking more at the young mothers than at the girls preening in front of the Gap and thought of it as a sign of maturity. The street he was on ended, and he turned right and then left and wound up at the end of Pine Street. There the remains of the old county prison had been turned into an art center overlooking the local library. He parked and then tapped his way to the library door, his leg on fire.
Inside was a cool, quiet space filled with light, and the sweat dried on his arms as he moved slowly from shelf to shelf, canting his head and looking at titles. He worked his way through the westerns, finding a collection of Elmore Leonard novels he’d been wanting to read, working on the mechanics of carrying the books he was collecting while still using the cane at least some of the time.
He sat at a table with a stack of newspapers and made his way through them, starting with the day he and Manny went to the farm. There were pictures of fire engines and yellow evidence tape strung from trees, articles about biker clubs like the Pagans and the Angels and the dope business. He found more articles about the shooting and fire out in Kulpsville, and finally he sat and read about the man with white hair who had been shot by the men trying to take him on the street in Doylestown. The town hadn’t seen violence like that in de cades, and the story played over days on the front page. When he thought it had run its course, the articles getting thinner and the police having less to report due to the random nature of the act, there was a different kind of story about the man who had died.
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 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.
LATER HE WAS alone with Michelle, and he moved along the table they had set out, throwing empty plastic wineglasses into a plastic bag. Michelle fiddled at the CD player she had set up, and the gentle electronic music she liked started up. Quiet voices and lush sounds that were like being wrapped in something soft. It wasn’t what he would have chosen, but he was getting used to it, starting even to depend on it. Like her sweet perfume and the quotes she put up on the board near the door every day. Admonitions to be brave and alive. Rilke and Emerson and Rumi. That made him secretly siphon off books and try to parse out the meaning of the poems she loved.
He became aware of her behind him and stopped. He turned and she took the plastic bag from his hand and dropped it on the floor and moved into his arms and they were dancing. He was stiff and moved slightly to the beat, and she rested her head on his shoulder, and after a minute he lost the sense of the music and just swayed with her. He tried out different things in his head. Telling her where he had been and what he had done. Wondering what she needed to know to know him.
She finally said, “What happened?”
“What?”
“In August?” She kept her head tucked against him, her breath warm on his chest. “Was it the accident?”
He had been waiting for this question since they day she had come in about the job but still wasn’t ready for it. “Yes. No.” He shook his head. “I was in trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?” She picked her head up, and suddenly it was much more difficult and there was something guarded in her eyes.
His eyes flicked over her face and he looked down again. “I’ve made some mistakes in my life.”
She stopped moving, and then he did, a beat too late.
“Tell me.” But her face was different, harder, and it was an interrogation and his mind was blank.
The door chimed and they both looked up, Michelle pulling away and moving to the stacks, collecting paper plates left by Ho’s kids. He looked after her, his hands still in the air, then turned to the door to see two kids, thirteen or fourteen or fifteen. One short and blond, the other long, with black hair hanging lank over his eyes. They moved to the counter and dropped a pillowcase on it, spilling hardback books, and Ray pawed through them while the short kid fidgeted and the tall kid stared hard at him. The tall one wore a thin black jacket with duct tape on the elbow, and Ray remembered he’d seen them before, by the side of the road in Warrington. The tall kid had a runny nose, and they both had red cheeks from the cold. The short one was just getting fuzz on his chin and had spots of something purple and sticky-looking on his army coat.
There were some old books that looked like they were worth something. Jack London, The Iron Heel and Call of the Wild. Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. Some others he didn’t recognize. Some of them in plastic covers. First editions or something. He took more out of the pillowcase and found two candlesticks and a bell that looked to be real silver.
The short kid flicked the bell with his finger, miming plea sure at the bright sound. “Gimme a hundred bucks. And you can keep all that shit.”
Ray looked them up and down and smiled.
“Yeah? That ain’t much for all this swag.”
“No, it’s like a deal.”
Ray put sunglasses on the tall kid in his head and laughed. Manny and Ray, a month out of Lima, scoring from empty houses near the Willow Grove mall and trying to dump the stuff in the pawnshops along 611.
The blond kid snapped his fingers under Ray’s nose and pointed. “Fitzgerald, you know him?” He looked into the corner of the room as if something were painted there. “ ‘All good writing is swimming underwater and holding your breath.’ “ He pantomimed laughing, like a dog panting, and looked over his shoulder at his friend, who smiled and nodded as if the blond kid had done a card trick he’d seen before.
The tall one looked at Michelle, who had stopped what she was doing and stood listening. His face changed and he looked hard at Ray. “Don’t fuck with us, man. Just pay us or let us be on our way.”
Ray nodded slowly. “Where did you get this stuff?”
The blond kid snorted, but the tall one reached over and started snapping the books back into the case. “We’re out of here, Lynch.”
Ray held up a hand. “Wait a minute, okay?”
The tall kid moved toward the door, wiping at his nose with his free hand, and Ray snapped the register open and he stopped. The shorter kid stood up and angled his head to see. Ray came out with two twenties and held them out to the kids. Michelle sighed and disappeared into the back of the store. The blond kid, Lynch, pointed at his friend and the pillowcase. For the first time, Ray noticed a bruise on the tall kid’s face, the shape of a hand etched in faint and fading blue.
The blond kid said, “What? This shit is worth like ten times that.”
“I don’t want it.”
“Then what?”
“Take the money.”
The kids looked at each other, then reached for the money. Ray held out another two twenties, but when the kids reached for them, he jerked the bills back and held them high.
“This is to buy books with.”
The kids looked at each other again, the blond one, Lynch, shrugging.
“Buy,” Ray said again. He picked up the day’s paper and dropped it where they could see he had circled half a dozen ads in red. “These are garage sales. Go by these places and buy what-ever books you find. Don’t pay more than a buck a book, and don’t bring me CDs or DVDs or games or any other shit. Just books.”
The tall kid shrugged and wiped at his nose with the back of his hand.
Ray said, “Get receipts.”
He let the blond one take the money and watched it disappear into his coat and handed the tall one the newspaper. “Take that shit back where you found it and go buy me some books. Every book you bring me I’ll pay you another buck. So drive hard bargains.”
Ray watched them walk to the dark street through the front windows, heads together, talking and laughing. He saw a young blond girl come out from behind a column on the porch as if she’d been hiding there. She fell in beside the boys, and Lynch took her arm. When she turned one last time to look at the store, he saw a ring of livid purple around her right eye.
He turned to see Michelle in her coat. Her head was down.
“Okay, see you,” she said.
“Wait.”
“What?”
She looked at him and then away, and he had that feeling again of recognition he had had before on the street in August.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Are you, you know. Coming back?”
“Why is Theresa’s name on the store?”
“I told you I was… in trouble.”
“Are you in trouble now?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Why do you pay me under the table?”
“What’s going on? Isn’t that better for you?” He looked around as if there were someone else he could bring into the conversation.
“Is it? Those kids stole that stuff.”
“Yeah, but’”
“You thought it was funny or cute or something.”
He smiled, saw at once that was the wrong thing. “They’re kids, Michelle.”
“Kids like you?”
“Once, yeah.”
She was shaking her head and moving to the door. “So you’re what? The cool guy who buys stolen stuff and maybe sells you some weed?”
“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.