Forty dollars. Two weeks of rice and beans with one vegetable a day; one happy hour with a friend, then a slice of pizza plus a cab ride home; her cell-phone bill; the haircut she gets once every three months from the cheapie Asian salon in the East Village that Carter introduced her to because he’s in love with all the stylists; five packs of cigarettes; a year’s supply of sketchbooks and ultrafine Sharpies. A steak dinner with one glass of cabernet. Forty dollars.
Doc emerges from the backroom, waving the check in the air, eyebrows raised like a vaudevillian comic. “You did all right this year, little miss.” He hands it to her. It’s for $305.00. She blushes. She can’t even begin to extrapolate that number, she’ll save the fantasizing for later when she’s alone and wants to savor the day.
“We sold out of the cards,” he says, then starts in on his next plan for her: Valentine’s Day. They’d up the price this time because they could be presents as well as cards, he’s sure he’d be able to get ten bucks a pop for something really special. He has plans for her and her little drawings, he says. Big plans.
“What do I know of love?” she says dramatically, and then she laughs, and he laughs, and there is briefly a moment of hysteria in the store, and then he says, “Exactly,” and she knows she’ll do it, she has twenty ideas at once. About love.
“I like this shirt,” she says. “A lot.”
“Yeah? It’s mine. I mean I made it. I decided, why should you kids have all the fun?”
“It’s beautiful, Doc.”
“You should try it on.”
“I couldn’t….”
“Try it on.”
And so she goes to the backroom, his little hole in the wall with a few boxes of shirts and books and CDs and bookshelves and a spartan twin bed and a hot plate and a sink and a mini-fridge and she stops looking, shuts down after that, because the fridge is too much, it’s so little, and she’s sure there’s nothing in there but a six-pack and a bottle of vodka anyway, maybe some mixers. Madly, she pulls off her sweater and pulls on the T-shirt, and then models it for Doc. He proclaims it perfect, it’s as if he had been thinking of her the entire time, and she must have it, just take it, consider it a Christmas present.
“I have been waiting to do something nice for you since the day that I met you,” he says, and there is an argument, a friendly one, and then finally he agrees to take twenty dollars for it. She pulls a twenty-dollar bill out of her wallet and hands it to him, and he takes it guiltily, but he is pleased, too—this is the first thing of his that he’s sold in a long time.
“I think I’ll wear it all day,” she says. She shoves her sweater in her bag.
“You make me happy,” he says, and he holds her hand for a second, and she lets him, because she still has a little holiday spirit left in her.
“Oh, fuck, I forgot to tell you,” he says. “Carter’s looking for you.” And then, awkwardly, he drops her hand.
7.
SARAH LEE crosses the park and heads west, toward Gareth’s apartment. She is excited to see him more than anyone else today, because he is the nicest man she has ever met, and that includes every hippie in the Pacific Northwest and any man she has ever loved. Also he might be the one to change her life forever. They are trying to make a book together; he is writing it, and she is illustrating it. He is sort of famous and successful already—he is on NPR constantly, and has a children’s book series about a giraffe named Camilla that is widely loved—but he wants to break into the adult market because he feels more like an adult now than he has in years, that’s what he told her. He is married, he has a baby on the way, and he has bought an apartment. He is almost grown.
“I have shed my twenties completely,” he has said. “A layer of useless skin I’d like to forget.”
At Gareth’s house the buzzer doesn’t work. She presses it for a minute straight, and there’s no response. A pile of errant snow, dirty from the streets, forgotten by plows and last weekend’s sunshine, lies near a garbage can, and Sarah Lee packs together a snowball, hurls it at his window, nails it. After a moment, Gareth comes to the window, flakes and water dripping down it, looks at the street and waves at Sarah, then mouths, “I’ll be right down,” and then, just to make sure she understands, points downward.
“Yes, yes.” Sarah nods, and then laughs.
Gareth hustles to the front door, out of breath. He reaches to his cowlick, neatens it, and it flops down again on his forehead. Sarah Lee has often wanted to press it in place herself, but she has resisted. He is not hers to touch.
He rests on the door for a moment, this large man, a boisterous king of a man, whose flesh is simultaneously solid and unyielding like the wall of a castle, and soft and embraceable, something to sink into for comfort. Sarah Lee can’t picture him as a smaller man; she hopes that he stays big forever. It is nice to know in a city of wasted-away youth that a man like Gareth exists.
He pushes the door open with his free hand, in the other there is a baby monitor. He hugs Sarah, and she allows herself the pleasure of it for a moment.
“Sarah Lee, my dear sweet girl,” he says. “I’m so delighted. Company, at last!”