“Let me just wrap this . . .”
She planted a kiss on his temple. This was the man she’d fallen for five years back, the guy who’d rather take apart a television than eat nachos in front of it. David wasn’t perfect, she knew, and she sometimes was annoyed by the computer cords and old hard drives stacked on a shelf in their bedroom, or the splintery skateboard with its box of wheels and bearings that had been under their bed, unused, these past four years, or the autographed Broncos poster that couldn’t be hung near the bathroom because the shower steam could potentially crinkle Elway’s jersey. But despite such minor irritations, David was truly a pure-hearted guy, an upbeat mama’s boy with wavy hair and beautiful eyes who just wanted to split breakfast burritos with Lydia until death. She was glad to have him in her life.
“I didn’t get to the dishes,” he said, “but there’s some food . . .”
As soon as David looked up, he must’ve sensed something was wrong. He stood and clutched her shoulders.
“Lydia, what happened? Oh shit. Was I supposed to pick you up?”
“It’s not that.”
“Then what?”
Her gut was swimming. She leaned against the sink to steady herself and told David all about Joey. Except for the part about the photo. She shared almost everything with David—her bizarro sci-fi dreams, her fears about the future, her shifting rotation of phobias and anxieties—but not the ruins of her childhood. Some things were off-limits, even for the guy she loved.
“Oh, babe,” he said. “I just assumed you went out for drinks after work. I had no idea. I should’ve come down there.”
David was a fervent believer in comfort food, so without registering how late it was, and without asking whether Lydia was even hungry, he pulled a plate of artichoke chicken out of the fridge and warmed it in the microwave, careful to be precise in cook time and power level (3:05 at Reheat 4). Lydia took the opportunity to slip into the bedroom and hide the birthday photo in the depths of her sock drawer. The microwave beeped just as she was finally washing the smell of chocolate and urine from her hands.
On the Bright Ideas loading dock, Lydia listened to the rhythmic beeps of a truck reversing up the alley. She’d been told last night to take the week off, but here she was pacing with the pigeons behind the bookstore—unable to be away, yet unable to go inside.
The rattling sound of nearby jackhammers didn’t help to calm her nerves, but by now she’d grown used to them, just as she’d grown used to the walls of scaffolding and flapping plastic that cloaked this part of town these days. For decades this entire brick district had been a network of underused rail lines and concrete viaducts, honky-tonks and stockyard stomps, and the only residences had been stacked above shit bars with names like Drinks and the Drinking Hole and A Place to Drink. Even the neighborhood’s name—Lower Downtown—had always felt fitting because these blocks marked the low point where the city’s runoff collected: the soup-kitchen-and-skid-row crowd, the salvage and warehouse trucks, the wastewater sloshing from driveway to sewer grate to the trashy foaming currents of the Platte. It felt then like a city should: reeking of its own past. But change was on the way. The viaducts had been ripped out, cobblestones scoured back to life, and buildings that had sat abandoned for decades were being converted into galleries and apartment lofts. Along with a single brewery and a couple of coffee shops, the bookstore had been one of the first new businesses to move in, and over the course of a few years it had gradually expanded through the lower three floors of a onetime lightbulb factory. (Hence the name Bright Ideas, and the retro bulb that defined its front doors and bookmarks.) The store was growing busier by the month and down the street a ballpark—a ballpark!—was even under construction. Lydia sometimes wondered what she would do when this end of town, with its buried cowboys and hobo stories, began to cast the dull hue of any other.
Not that she would ever quit the store. Six years ago, when Lydia had put on a flannel skirt and a loose-hanging blouse and stepped into Bright Ideas for a job interview, the spotty résumé in her hand held little ripples where her sweat had saturated the paper. The manager that day was a reformed radiologist and country music fiddler with a tidy gray beard, and as he steered Lydia toward a couch in the Philosophy section, her nerves began to settle. When he folded her résumé and placed it on the floor near her feet, saying that interviews around here were a little less formal than all that, she let out a gusty sigh and tapped her fingertips together and began to speak of her shoestring travels (Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia), the classes she’d loved in college (World Religions, Renaissance Lit), her many fleeting jobs (orchards and farm stands, hotels and pet shops), and for the first time in a long time she found herself speaking openly with a stranger, and not feeling as if she were splashing through the conversational equivalent of a shark attack. At the end of the interview, in one of the most consequential moments of her life, the manager leaned back and simply said, “Recommend a book to me.” The title she picked was telling—One Hundred Years of Solitude, as her own years of solitude were coming to a close—but even more telling was the tranquillity she felt afterward as she explored the enormous store, sliding books in and out of their slots, sizing up her new comrades.
She felt typically shy that day, avoiding eye contact and wearing her mild smile, but she could tell from the start that Bright Ideas was just the kind of sanctuary she’d been seeking for much of her life. Her fellow booksellers ran the demographic gamut, from a sixty-eight-year-old ex-nun with a brazen taste for erotica to a seventeen-year-old dropout who, despite the Churchillian monocle tattooed over her left eye, had landed second place on last season’s Jeopardy! Teen Tournament. They wore their hair dreaded and Afroed, waist length and shaved clean. Some of the older, loftier lefties looked like models from the 1974 Sears catalog, while others wore bolo ties and sassy dresses and hats that could only be described as Parisian. Even on that first day she knew that these booksellers were happier—or at least more tuned in to what happiness really was—than most, which had always seemed reason enough to stay.
Lydia hopped off the loading docks and rounded the corner into the alley behind the store. She was just gathering the guts to go inside, strategizing ways to get through her shift, when the sound of footsteps touched the air behind her.
“You know it’s not your fault.”
She turned to see Plath walking toward her, dressed in baggy black, fogging the air with a cigarette.
“Do I know that?” Lydia said. “I guess I do.”