The Moment of Everything (13 page)

When she was done, she and Hugo were smiling at each other and he was patting her hand. He believed she had written it about him. And whether it was true, she seemed happy to let him think so. They were remembering a different time, if not necessarily a better one, when they were younger and perhaps softer around their edges.

I imagined the future Rajhit, when his parents finally won out and got him married off and back into the corporate world. I imagined him in a suit and with cropped hair at an amber-toned restaurant with his someday wife and in-laws and his mind fading out of the conversation to think about our night together or other nights to come. I was thinking we had at least two months together, tops. Maybe even three. This little game we had going—no contact info, no dates—was brilliant. There was always surprise, always desire. Not daily betrayals that wear away at you and flatten you out. I was going to be the woman he longed for when his mind snuck away from his life, not the one he was sneaking away from. I would never be the betrayed or the other woman. I would be the if-only woman.

Hugo and Miss Portia linked arms, looking a little dazed and a lot happy. They said their good-byes to me while never taking their eyes off each other, and left Apollo, looking as taken with each other as that pixie cut girl and the redhead had on their first meeting at Hugo’s. And I was on my own again, wondering at the equations of motion that propel us all forward and back to each other again.

I looked around at all the people moving around Apollo, books in hand, checking out the stationery and journals as a Nina Simone song played softly on the speaker above.
I want a little sugar in my bowl. I want a little sweetness down in my soul.

I sat on a small footstool near the literary journals, where I was sure to be alone. As Nina sang, I scanned the journals, remembering the literary journal from my own undergrad years. I didn’t write for it, but I managed the website, which was a big deal back then. Every quarter, with the new journal fresh off the press, all the students on staff would devour those stories with names like “The Venus Glove,” “Mandrake,” and “Red River.” They were stories to be read aloud around a table of friends in a Waffle House at two in the morning while eating smothered hash browns and pouring bourbon from a flask into our coffee. I reached out and pulled a stack of journals from the rack, read a few lines, and picked out three of them to buy, even though they each cost more than I made an hour. Just holding them reassembled a version of me I’d forgotten.

Something in my deepest core gaped open. I missed Henry and Catherine. I missed the book. I missed their notes. I had all the pictures on the website, but it wasn’t the same. I missed running my fingers over the imprint of ink on the paper. I missed touching the same pages they had. I hated the thought of it in someone else’s hands, and the realization that I would probably never see it again made me ache.

“Isn’t it illegal for you to be in here?” I looked up to see Rajhit bending down next to me, some rolled-up magazines in his hand.

I looked up at him and saw his smile fade into something else when he saw my face still caught up in the memory of those raw late nights. His eyes lost their mischief and grew softer and serious, and he stooped down to one knee so that he had to look up at me a little where I sat on the stool. He reached over and ran his finger along the tops of the journals I held against me, nearly touching my skin.

“What are you reading?” he asked.

I lay the journals on my lap and he came closer so that he could open the covers and read the story titles. As he let out a long breath, I leaned over and kissed him.

As I started to pull back, he stopped me by sliding his hand over mine, the one holding the journals. He stood, looked around, and nudged me toward him as he backed into the small corner behind the
P
’s. And then he kissed me, not the gentle, playful kisses of our night together. This time, his kisses were daring, as if they could scale mountaintops. He leaned into me so that all I could feel was his body and the books behind me. I pulled him tighter, absorbing him into my skin so it would feel like this always.

“My place?” I whispered in his ear.

He shook his head. “The Dragonfly,” he whispered back.

I was still half asleep at eight the next morning when I unlocked the door to the Dragonfly. I’d been trying to come in early, mostly to deal with the eBay orders before the store opened at ten, but this was the first time I’d actually made it happen. The night before, when I’d arrived home from that late visit to the Dragonfly with Rajhit, I’d found a note on my door from Hugo, asking me to get there early, promising his raspberry scones and his famous little quiches with bacon and red pepper if I did.

“Ah! Maggie,” Hugo said, appearing from the stacks and catching me mid-yawn. “We can begin now.”

When my mouth closed and my eyes opened I saw that Hugo was holding an old dented saucepan in one hand and a wooden spoon in the other, both of which I’d seen on a top of a shelf in the office and assumed were there by accident. But clearly this wasn’t the case, which made me nervous. Behind him was Jason, holding a box of matches and two bound sticks of some kind of grayish green dried plant and looking like someone had just told him we were soon to be invaded by
Twilight
fans.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“We have to touch the books,” Jason said.

“Now there’s more to it than that,” Hugo said, banging the pan with the spoon. “We’re infusing the books with our energy.”

“We have to touch the books,” Jason said again, reaching out and flapping his fingers across a row of mysteries.

“So we touch them with pans and spoons?” I asked.

“No, no,” Hugo said. “The pan and the spoon are to energize the air.”

“Won’t the air get energized with the books?” I asked.

Hugo’s arms dropped to his side and his shoulders sagged. “Well, now you’re just not making any sense.” With that, I just kept my mouth shut and went with it.

For the next half hour or so, Hugo walked through the stacks, beating his pan with his spoon while Jason and I followed him like a couple of altar boys with our sage sticks lit and smoking up the place.

“The thing with used books,” Hugo explained, “is that they bring their pasts with them. They haven’t just popped off a printer’s press and then stacked themselves in a box to be sent to a store. They are abandoned here by people who no longer want them. Orphans in a Dickens novel. They are discarded as people move on with their lives. They’re too heavy to move or they take up too much space. That’s how they end up here. We have to release them of their former lives so they can move on to those who do want them.”

Jason had the same look on his face as Grendel did when I blocked his sun. It seemed that for this one moment, Jason and I were allies.

“They’re books, Hugo,” I said. “People buy them or they don’t. I don’t think the books have much say in it.”

Jason punched my arm and held his finger up to his lips. So much for our allegiance.

Hugo stopped and turned to me, hands on hips, still gripping the handles of the pan and spoon. “You’ve been very interested in numbers lately, so tell me. How many more romance novels have we sold since you cleaned up that section?”

“I don’t have strong data from before,” I said.

“How many more?”

“Thirty percent, more or less.”

Jason took a step back, and I think his mouth fell open a bit before he caught himself and closed it. I tried not to smile. I didn’t want him to think I cared that he was impressed.

“That proves my point,” Hugo said.

“That proves that people buy more when they can find what they’re looking for,” I said.

“But what about what they
aren’t
looking for?” Hugo asked. “It’s the books that need to be discovered that we’re concerned with today. You gave them your energy. People are drawn to them now.” He turned, giving the pan a good smack with the wooden spoon. “This is why we energize the air with the pan. This is why we cleanse it with the sage. And after that, what do we do, Jason?”

“We touch the books,” Jason said, not even bothering to conceal the grumble.

“All of them?” I asked Jason in a whisper, a little worried now about my morning.

“Just the most misfit of the misfits,” he said. “We pick a different section each month.”

“Exactly,” Hugo said, having reached the office and the end of our energizing and cleansing of the stacks. “Now I’m going to warm up the scones and quiches in the toaster oven while you two decide on this month’s section.”

He was barely through the door when I turned to Jason and said, “The Westerns.”

Jason’s eyes grew wide. “There’s a Westerns section?”

I took Jason into the little U-shaped pathway at the end of Romance and one short Drama shelf down from History and showed him the one lonely bookcase of cowboy books. There wasn’t much here, mostly thin old dime-store Zane Greys and Louis L’Amours, with dry-cleaned cowboys on the covers and green tinting on the edges of the pages. Few came in, few went out. They didn’t suit the tastes of a neighborhood that would implode if the free citywide WiFi shut down for fifteen minutes. But I had an affection for these books, with their titles like
Riders of the Purple Sage
and
The Last Trail
, and would borrow one every once in a while, just to dust off the abandonment from them.

“They’re all out of order,” Jason said.

“The whole store is out of order,” I said.

“Except for the Romance section.”

“And Sci-Fi/Fantasy.”

We paused for a minute, looking at the crammed shelves, trying not to acknowledge that we’d just given each other what could be construed as compliments.

“So how does this work?” I asked. “Do we just run our fingers over them?”

Jason shrugged. “At a minimum. Hugo likes it better if you actually take the book off the shelf though, get to know it.”

“We should get a database,” I said. “With an ISBN scanner. We could look up inventory and track it. Tell people what we have in stock and don’t. Then we’d really know the books.”

“Okay, sure,” Jason said. “And then we’d have scanners and security stickers and those things by the door that sound an alarm every time someone farts. We don’t need a friggin’ database to tell us what’s here. I know what’s here.”

“You didn’t even know there was a Westerns section,” I said.

“We don’t need a database. We just need to give a shit.”

And then he was gone. Looked like I was giving a shit all on my own.

The Westerns occupied just one bookcase, but because most of the books were so short, there were a lot of them. Even so, it wouldn’t take me long to show these guys a little love and make Hugo happy.

I’d started clearing out one shelf to make a workspace to start at least organizing the books by author when I heard the wobbly wheel of a cart turn the Poetry corner. Jason tapped down the cart’s wheel brake and unloaded some poster board, markers, and a five-year-old calendar with pictures of the old West on it.

“It came in with a box a couple of weeks ago,” Jason said. “We can use the pictures to makes signs that will let people know we have a Westerns section.”

We worked for an hour or so, while Hugo served us quiche and scones. I couldn’t tell if Hugo was more pleased by the two of us working together with minimal bickering or his belief that we’d taken his theory to heart and were, indeed, touching the books. The thing is, I liked these books. Or rather, I liked the idea of these books, the twenty-five-cent price printed on the cover, the determined faces on the cowboys, the sheer number of the novels Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour produced in their lifetimes.

“I loved these books when I was a kid,” Jason said absently.

There were many things I would have expected Jason to say back in the catacombs of the Dragonfly. That he loved these books as a mini-Jason wouldn’t have even made the top one hundred.

“I used to read them in the school library,” he said. “While I waited for someone to pick me up.”

With the image of a young Jason swinging his feet in his library seat to the gunfire of a Zane Grey, I felt the numbness of my own childhood spread through me. I thought about sneaking books upstairs, reading with a flashlight under the covers and a towel along the bottom of the door to hide any light. I remembered the loneliness of hiding who you are from your parents. It was like coming out when I told my parents about what I wanted to study in school. There were threats to not pay my tuition. Looking back, I almost wish they hadn’t. Maybe if I’d had to work harder for what I wanted, I wouldn’t have walked away from it so easily when the whiff of stock options drifted my way.

“Maggie!” It was Dizzy’s voice.

“We’re back here!” I yelled.

“Back where?”

“Marco!” I called.

Dizzy Marco-Poloed his way back to us.

“Whoa,” he said, looking around. “There’s a shitload of books back here.”

There wasn’t even a bookstore in the town where Dizzy and I grew up, but we would take the books we’d checked out from the library and ride our bikes down to Sweetwater Pond, sit on the edge with a couple of bottles of Coke and a bag of boiled peanuts, and read. Dizzy and me, our whole growing up, we only made sense when we were together.

“Look at this,” he said, taking
The Lonesome Gods
from my hand. “You read it like seventy-eight times.”

“Whoa,” said Jason, looking at me. “How old are you?”

I poked him in the arm.

“There’s only one thing that pissed her mom off more than her holing up for an afternoon reading,” Dizzy said, “and that’s reading something as low-rent as those bodice-rippers and cowboy books.”

“Cut it out,” I muttered.

“We could do it for a book group meeting,” he said.

“Do what?” I asked, putting the book back on the shelf.

“
The Lonesome Gods
. The members take turns hosting, right? You love this book. You should pick this when it’s your turn.”

“I don’t…”

“Come on,” he said. “Louis L’Amour is a dead white guy. He’s a classic American author. That qualifies, doesn’t it? You want to make an impression on Avi? Do something daring. Pick something that’s not in Wikipedia’s entry for best hundred books of all time. Avi’ll eat it up with a spoon.”

“She doesn’t want to,” Jason said.

“Why not?” Dizzy said to me. “You love the book. You just said.”

“Dumbass, you don’t nominate your favorite book to a book club,” Jason said.

“Why not?” Dizzy asked.

“What if they don’t like it?” Jason said.

He was right. One’s favorite book should be protected, safe from the opinions of others, packed away in one’s heart with lilac-scented tissue paper or perhaps copious amounts of Bubble Wrap.

“Okay, okay, whatever,” Dizzy said. “But here’s the deal. I just got a call from Avi. Patricia whoever the fuck isn’t going to be able to host our next meeting. Avi was trying to get in touch with you to see if we’d do it, but you’re in the dungeon of cell coverage. So she called me.”

“She wanted
us
to host it?” I asked.

“Yeah, well, we’re a package deal, right? You and me? Only we can’t do it at my place or yours, but I thought I could rent a back room at a restaurant.”

“We’ll do it here,” I said.

“Here?” Dizzy and Jason both said, turning to me with looks that said “in this dump?” on Dizzy’s face and “in this sacred space?” on Jason’s.

“We can make it work,” I said. “The place needs a good cleaning anyway.”

“Lemony fresh here we come,” Jason groaned.

“Avi will love it,” I said, ignoring him.

“How do you know?” Dizzy asked.

“I just know.”

“What about the catering?” Dizzy asked.

I handed him one of Hugo’s scones and watched him try not to let his eyes roll back in his head.

“We can take care of that, too,” I said. “What’s the book anyway?”

“It’s two weeks away and you don’t know what the book is?” he asked, madly trying to catch scone crumbs pouring from his mouth.

“Do you?” I asked.

“It’s on the website,” he said, pulling out his phone. “I’m not
talking
on the phone,” he said before Jason could object. “
Madame Bovary
?”

“Perfect.” I said. “French food and a tawdry book.”

“Is there a miniseries?” he asked.

“Book!” Jason said, standing on his toes to get in Dizzy’s face. “It’s a book!”

We’d started to walk toward the front of the store, where I was sure we’d find a copy on the summer reading table we’d set up when I saw Dizzy grab a few of the Westerns off a stack sitting on Jason’s cart.

“Can I buy these?” he asked. “Are they ready?”

“Every book in the store is ready,” Jason said, lifting the stack from his hands and grabbing a Max Brand as he led him out of the section. “And this one’s on the house for putting up with her.”

“I’m totally writing about this place on Yelp,” said Dizzy.

Rajhit’s condo was a town house two blocks from Castro Street. According to the flyer in the box below the
FOR SALE
sign, it featured bamboo floors in the ground floor kitchen and living room, three bedrooms, upstairs laundry, a walk-in closet, all stainless steel appliances, a patch of yard in the front, and a small workshop in the back. Inside, it was empty, except for the living room, which housed a futon, a bike repair stand, which was now suspending my bike in the air, and a small graveyard of bike parts on a canvas tarp in the corner. I peered at a picture on the refrigerator of him and his parents, which showed that at one time this place had been filled with furniture that would make my mother drool. But now everything was gone. And Rajhit seemed happy about it. Though we hadn’t discussed the
FOR SALE
sign.

I was sitting on the futon wearing a knee-length sundress I’d bought at a secondhand shop, and reading
A Duke of Her Own
, while Rajhit gave my bike a tune-up. I liked watching him work on bikes, his face full of solicitous concentration as if he were trying to get the machine to tell him its troubles. He measured the chain wear. He listened to it as he turned the pedal. He applied oil as if it were a potion. These tasks weren’t boring to him. They were healing.