Joey’s words had scared the bejesus out of her, so Pedro’s riff was a calming distraction. Just as she was settling in to hear about another sci-fi system, she peered across the bookstore floor and spotted Lyle dropping down the stairs, sipping from a paper cup of tea.
“Hold that thought!” she said to Pedro. “Lyle!”
By the time Lydia caught up with him, Lyle was already paging through the Sunday Times at a tilty table in the coffee shop.
She plunged into the wooden chair across from him. Lyle pressed his glasses to the bridge of his nose.
“Lydia,” he said calmly, with an affected Brahmin accent: Lid-ee-ahh. “Join me, will you?”
The first time Lydia had seen Lyle, six years back, she’d thought he was an artist of one flavor or another, or at least a New York transplant, because he dressed perfectly for the part: straggling gray hair, half-moon glasses, black peacoat, high-water chinos, plaid shirts buttoned to his neck, and tan-and-white saddle shoes. Easily in his sixties, Lyle was older than most BookFrogs, and Lydia imagined that at some point he may even have led a conventional life. She’d heard through the Bright Ideas grapevine—admittedly, not the most robust source—that he was independently wealthy, and that previous to his existence as a BookFrog, he’d spent a decade at a care facility near Aspen that Plath called “part loony bin, part ski lodge.”
Given the amount of time that Lyle and Joey used to spend together, the fact that Lyle wasn’t with his friend on the night of his hanging was thoroughly bizarre, a statistical anomaly. Equally odd was the fact that Lyle, who spent as much time at Bright Ideas as any other BookFrog, had left the store around the day of Joey’s death and hadn’t been back since. For two weeks, Lydia had paid more attention to his absence than to anyone else’s presence. Every alcove, every aisle, every couch was missing Lyle’s form.
“Lyle, where on earth have you been?” she said, her voice infused with urgency. “What happened to you?”
Lyle looked over the top of his glasses and down the bulb of his nose, somewhere between confused and indignant.
“What happened?” he said. “My best friend killed himself upstairs; that’s what happened. I’ve been cremating him. Cremating Joey. Who did you think was going to take care of the arrangements? The Rotary Club? His suburban parents and his family of weeping siblings? He had no one, Lydia. I was it.”
“Of course,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“You should be.”
She was. Of all the thoughts zigging in Lydia’s mind lately, the one that hadn’t caught her notice was the fate of Joey’s remains. Of course there would be the issue of arrangements. Besides which, it hadn’t occurred to her that reentering the store was probably just too painful for Lyle.
“He really didn’t have anyone?”
“He had me and he had you. Otherwise he was alone in the world,” Lyle said, crossing his legs and leaning back in his chair. “If you want to pay respects, by the way, he’s at the zoo.”
“At the zoo. As in the zoo?”
“Joey liked to walk the zoo on free days. I didn’t know where else to put him. I thought about leaving him on a shelf upstairs, with Flannery or Fante or Rimbaud. But I figured there were rules against leaving bodies in here.”
“Probably.”
“So I put his ashes in a duffel bag and snipped a tiny hole in the bottom and walked the length of the zoo. But I didn’t make the hole big enough so there were these tiny pieces left over in the bag. I shook them into the grass. But then all the geese thought he was bread crumbs and started charging me. Horrifying, Lydia, the way they gobbled him up. A frenzy. Joey would’ve abhorred all the attention.”
“I can see that.”
“I scanned the sky for vultures,” Lyle said, dramatically peering at the splintery beams above. “There were children all over the place. Balloon animals and hot cocoa. And here I am dumping Joey. Joey. If the den mothers only knew.”
“Just tell me why you weren’t with Joey that night,” she said, and only as the words left her mouth did she realize how sad and desperate she sounded. “You were always with him, Lyle, so why not then?”
Lyle stared at her in silence. Without shame, he placed a pill on his tongue and washed it down with a sip of green tea. He dripped the tea bag above the cup and rolled the lump into a napkin and buttoned it into his peacoat to be reused later. He dried his fingertips with a hankie, then folded it back into his shirt pocket.
“Do you ever really watch people in here?” he said. “The way most people browse, it’s as if they’ve stepped into a temple or church. This is not riffling through hangers on the clearance rack or tossing canned corn into the cart. No, this is browsing. It even sounds drowsy: to browse. Heart rates slow. Time disappears. Serious people turn into dreamers again. They play frozen statues on the floor, chew their fingers, pull the flaps of pop-up books.”
“Why are you telling me this, Lyle?”
“Joey loved it here,” he said. “Loved it. This place gave him something sacred. Gave his mind some quiet. This was his Thanksgiving table. His couch-cushion fort. He could get lost in here like nowhere else on earth. I’m telling you this, Lydia, because in all his life, he’d never really had that feeling before, not consistently anyway. Not to overstate it, but this store was the closest thing to a home that Joey ever had.”
“He really had no one?”
“Like I said, he had me and he had you. It’s difficult to imagine how a kid like that had been so horribly cast into the void, but it happened. Joey was one of those bright, troubled boys who never got beyond being a ward of the state. I’m not sure he even knew the details, but apparently from the time he was a baby he’d lived in a big, run-down house on the north side, somewhere off Federal, and he had six or seven siblings of various ages and backgrounds, and the whole group of them had been adopted by this older couple—Guatemalan, I think, or El Salvadoran—who’d never had kids of their own. Mr. and Mrs. Molina.”
Lydia recalled the certificate hanging on Joey’s bathroom wall, the only time she’d ever seen his surname: Joseph Edward Molina.