Lyle squeezed his hand into a fist. It took him a minute to gather himself.
“Joey found me within a week of getting out of prison. The first thing he did was ask me, in that awkward way of his, to buy him a suit. A suit! I thought, Great! I assumed it was for job interviews and parole meetings, but I never once saw him put it on. I was so glad he wasn’t dead in a dumpster somewhere that I gave him a wide berth but made a point of being present. He didn’t talk to me about his time behind bars, but he emerged with a whole new cluster of favorite authors. He seemed to have grown up some. He was more hopeful, to be sure. He spoke to me more than he ever had, which made me think that all that solitude in prison, all that silent self-protection, must have scraped away at him. He even began joining me on my daily walks. I thought I would introduce him to Bright Ideas, but it turned out he’d already discovered it on his own. I thought that if I bought him books he’d stay occupied, and he’d be less likely to drink a bottle of cough syrup or drop cinder blocks on the highway. Or—”
“I know, Lyle.”
“Or hang himself.”
“I know.”
Lydia waited for him to continue, but Lyle just sipped from his tea and shifted around his newspaper, as if trying to shake free those two words: hang himself.
“What happened that night, Lyle?”
Lyle fished inside his peacoat pocket and dumped its contents on the table. An American flag on a toothpick. A half-smoked cigar. A single nudie playing card. A cough drop stuck to its waxy wrapper. He unpeeled the cough drop and popped it into his mouth, then finally looked at Lydia.
“It’s not your fault he died,” she said. “I hope you don’t think that.”
“Joey was horrible to me,” Lyle said.
“This is on the day?”
“He was being such a brute. Meaner to me than anyone since the playground. Meaner to me than the jackass in the park who ripped out my earring and split my earlobe for being a fag. Joey had never been mean like that. I don’t want to remember him like that.”
“Tell me.”
A cough sparked in Lyle’s throat. “For weeks he’d been in the dumps. I kept thinking I’d done something to anger him. I tried to talk to him, but he’d barely give me the time of day. And then came the morning of.”
“What happened?”
“It got bad the morning of. I got tired of the way he was treating me, so I went to his group home, bracing myself for confrontation, and when he came out and started walking toward downtown I walked right at his side, and when he shoved me away I was undeterred. He was often a quiet, dreamy guy, which was fine, but that day he was kind of groaning and muttering, hissing at passersby and cars, and acting—what? Indecipherably. Okay, fine. He was going through something, as we all do sometimes, and I was his friend, so I would stay at his side because that’s what you do. But then when we got here, when we got to Bright Ideas— I don’t really want to tell you this.”
“I found him hanging, Lyle.”
“When we got here,” he said, “Joey was wearing that baggy black sweatshirt he always had on, and he lifted it up and began pulling books out of his shirt, his waist. Five or six books, at least. I thought— Lydia, I thought Joey was stealing books. Only he was taking them out of his clothes and leaving them on couches, on shelves, sort of scattering them about the store like he was returning them. Like he was planting them. I didn’t know what he was up to, but I was furious on so many levels. If he was returning them, that meant that at some point he’d stolen them, right? Which meant he was betraying this place that we loved so much. And betraying me, too, because he knew full well that I’d buy the books for him, that all he had to do was ask. And of course there was the risk of him going back to jail over some stupidity. I got very upset, Lydia. Very upset. I made him come out to the alley behind the store and I laid it all out for him: He was a smart guy. He was beautiful. He had his whole life in front of him— You can imagine all I said. At some point I grabbed on to his shoulders and shook him a little, pleading with him. I offered to write him a check, as if I was his father. I told him I’d pay for him to get started in a little apartment if he wanted to try to get out of his group home. I told him I would help him go to counseling or college or move to a different city, but that I just wanted him to be smart and safe and stop doing things that hurt him. I told him I’d give him anything in the world that was within my power, but that he had to start opening up to me, otherwise how could I? He just stood there, Lydia, and I was so upset I quite literally started hugging him. I begged him, Lydia, to tell me what was happening. It’s so humiliating. It’s so—”
Lyle fought back tears. He forced himself to sit up straight.
“But the worst thing, Lydia? Do you know what he said to me? He called me an old queer and an old faggot. He said that all I really wanted was to suck him off, that his cock was the fountain of youth, that everything I did for him was a way to get some of that brown candy. I have to say, Lydia, that snapped me out of it. He humiliated me. Not just because what he said was untrue—it was so totally untrue—but, I’m ashamed to admit, it was something I worried about. Something he knew I worried about: I knew people looked at the two of us, this spinsterish old man with a bit of money and this poor street kid with hardly a change of clothes. I was aware that people thought I was manipulating him. But it wasn’t like that at all.”
“I know it wasn’t.”
“Anyway, I said some awful things to him in that alley, and maybe he deserved it. I called him street trash. I said that it was no wonder he was alone in the world if this was how he treated the people who loved him. He was such a beautiful kid, but the look I saw him wearing that day—he was so ugly.”
“He wasn’t in his right mind, Lyle.”
“I know,” he said, “but that’s exactly why it’s so awful, what I did. I’m a grown man. I should have taken the high road, but I didn’t. I took the lowest road. I stomped off and left him all alone, exactly as he’d wanted me to.”
“And that was the night—”
“The night he took his life. My dear Lydia, that is why I have not come back to the store.”
Lyle was breathing loudly and staring at an old coffee ring that stained the table. Lydia rested her hand atop his fist.
“Joey wasn’t stealing books,” she said. “He was cutting them up.”
“No. He wouldn’t do that.”
“He would. He did. Come with me.”
It only took a few minutes for Lydia to grab her satchel from the break room and to let the manager know she was taking an early lunch. Then she walked Lyle to a quiet alcove where the education books were shelved. They sat on a couch embroidered with leaves and berries that had been in the store for years and that carried the ghostly imprint of a thousand forgotten readers.