Joey licked his fingers to avoid getting the sticky popcorn on the books, and looking at him Tomas felt the kind of affection he might have felt for a fallen son.
That night, after Tomas locked Joey and his new books back inside his cell, the kid seemed more fragile than usual, more shaky, and Tomas found it difficult to walk away and leave him alone on such a lonely Christmas Eve.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Lydia stood beneath the stinging shower, attempting without success to wash away the ungodly hangover pulsing through her eyeballs. When she stepped out of the bathroom—dizzy and hungry, wondering how she was going to make it through a nine-hour shift at work—she found a sympathetic message on her machine from Irene, the counselor from the Vital Records office.
She braced herself as she learned that her application for Joey’s adoption records had been rejected.
“Sorry,” Irene said on the message. “I really did all I could.”
Lydia believed her, but that didn’t change the fact that, where Joey was concerned, she’d hit another dead end.
Lydia was working alone in the Psychology section, tidying up stray titles from tables and couches and spills on the floor, when she received a phone call from Raj.
“I need you to meet me,” he said with urgency. “Can you come now? Lydia?”
Lydia ducked behind the Psych desk. Cluttered around the phone were a ceramic phrenology brain, a giant rubber-band ball, and a bearded GI Joe action figure with a peace sign Sharpie’d over his bare chest.
“Raj? Where are you, anyway?”
“The capitol building,” he said. “Get here as soon as you can. And you’re going to need a car.”
“What’s going on, Raj?”
“Just get here,” he said.
“Is this an emergency? I’m in the middle of my shift.”
“An emergency? Not life-threatening, nothing like that, but I need you, Lydia. Borrow a car. Please. I’ll wait for you on the steps. Trust me. Please.”
Lydia found Plath smoking against a brick wall up the block, reading Poems of Nazim Hikmet. A few butts were scattered around her feet, and their smoky scent conjured an image of the burned papers in the bottom of Joey’s trash can. That felt like eons ago.
“How is it that you can look so exhausted,” Plath said, touching the black ashy shrub of Lydia’s hair, “yet still have that whole Fraggle Rock beauty thing going?”
“Found you.”
“Let me guess: you want to borrow my car again.”
“Is that okay?”
“What’s mine is yours, sister. But what’s with all the field trips? Sidelining as a drug mule?”
“Helping out a friend,” Lydia said.
“That boy?”
“What boy?”
“The hottie with the hair and the smile.”
“Raj?”
“I knew it!” Plath said, slapping her thigh with the book of poems. “You two-timing bird! So? Who is he?”
Lydia stammered. Then, in as few words as possible, she told Plath about Raj, and about their childhood, and about all the afternoons they spent together at his parents’ doughnut shop.
“He’s the heir to a doughnut shop?” Plath said. “Be still, my heart! Which one?”
“Heard of Gas ’n Donuts?”
“Just stop right there, Lydia. The Gas ’n Donuts? That stately pleasure dome over on Colfax?” Plath shook her head and lit another smoke. “I don’t want to get involved, Lydia, but David is fucked.”
Lydia laughed. “I’m not two-timing anyone.”
“Yet,” Plath said, holding up her cigarette. “And there’s something else, as long as we’re talking about your stable of beefcake. Is it true that last night you had a steamy date with Hi Guy? Sounds like trouble. Everything okay?”
“Just trying to figure some things out.”
“Which is why you need the car.” Plath unspooled the Volvo key from her key ring and placed it in Lydia’s palm. “It’s up the block hogging a space. I’d offer to go with you but I know what you’d say: I got this. I’m good. No thanks. I’m fine. But really, Lydia, are you?”
“I don’t know, to be honest.”
“Will you talk to me?” Plath said, frowning. “Please? Just until I finish my smoke. Five minutes.”
“I’m kind of in a hurry.”
“Then let’s get to it. Did you hear that Ernest quit? He said Joey’s ghost ruined the best job in the world.”
“I didn’t hear,” Lydia said, but she wasn’t that surprised by the news. Once a comrade had vanished backstage it was often only a matter of time before they quietly slipped away altogether, to grad school or a publishing career if things were going well, and if not, to jobs whose advertisements had been stapled to telephone poles, slinging nutritional supplements or assembling toys at home. It could wear you down, which was why people like Plath were so admirable. They, like the store, survived.
“I’ll never quit,” Plath said. “Of course they might fire me.”
“Why? For smoking seven cigarettes on a ten-minute break?”
“Touché.”
Lydia looked up the block at the brick belfry and spire of the city’s clock tower.
“What are you doing out here anyway?”
“Lydia,” Plath said after a cold pause, “that is one question you should never have to ask a bookseller. Bright Ideas is not Victoria’s Secret. It takes style to work here. We can’t just run errands during breaks like we’re all accountants. We must smoke on corners and read. We are decor.” She dropped her butt casually to the pile already around her feet. “What’s going on with you, anyway? Really. I’m worried. Ever since Joey’s hanging, you haven’t really been here. Psychologically speaking. Which is fine but, you know, maybe you should talk to someone, go sit in a circle of fold-up chairs in the basement of some church and drink coffee from a Styrofoam cup. Or screw the group and just tell me. Open up some.”
Plath was right. For most of Lydia’s shifts lately, whenever she’d come upon customers standing in front of shelves, holding slips of paper in their hands, she’d veered away from them without offering to help. Maybe she’d finally reached the point of hiding backstage.
“I’m just distracted,” Lydia said. “My heart isn’t in it these days.”
“Your heart? Sweetie, you’ve got too much heart. Do yourself a favor and let it shrivel. Read some Henry Miller. Some Ayn Rand. Some Deepak Chopra. That’ll shitten your outlook. And besides, you are the most natural bookseller I know. You’re the bare-knuckled bookseller—you have the bookseller élan.”
Lydia grunted. “I spend most of my time lately hiding from customers.”
“Aloof is all the rage. When customers see you climb up from under a pile of books they know they are in good hands. The best hands.” Plath peered into her cigarette pack but decided against it. “Listen. I guess I’m telling you that your presence on this planet is requested, okay?”
Lydia looked at Plath and wondered, not for the first time, how much she really knew about Lydia’s life.
“Time’s up,” Lydia said, and rushed up the block to find her friend’s car.