by Gayle Forman
“If only,” I reply. “Can I get you some tea?”
“I’ll get it myself.” But on the way to the kettle, he bangs into the pile of books that are still on the floor after the shelf collapsed. He yelps again. When he finally gets settled into his chair, he spills the tea all over his lap. “I seem to have woken up on the wrong side of the bed,” he says, going upstairs to change. He comes back down with his sweater on backward, but I don’t have the heart to tell him. Nor do I have the heart to tell him what I did last night. Better to wait until he’s on more solid ground.
There are a lot of heavy sighs, a bit of mild groaning. Finally Ira says: “If you don’t mind watching the store, I think I’ll go for a walk to clear my head.”
“Sure. Go for it.” Ira often takes “walks”—which I’m pretty sure is a euphemism for smoking pot—when he gets agitated. He tries to keep it from me, maybe because he thinks I’d judge him for it. If it was anyone else, maybe I would. But Ira I begrudge nothing. And anyway, he’s almost always calmer when he returns.
“When you get back, I want to talk to you,” I add.
“Okay,” he says, reaching for his rain jacket, a bright yellow slicker like the kind I had in elementary school.
Thirty seconds later, he’s back. “What’d you forget?” Ira has always been a bit of the absentminded professor, but these days, he’s constantly misplacing his keys, his glasses, his shoes.
“Some fellow down on the sidewalk asking for you.”
“Send him in.”
“Can’t. He’s in a wheelchair.”
“Chad? What’s he want?”
Ira shrugs. I follow him outside to the sidewalk, where Chad greets me with an elaborate high-five-fist-bump thing that I bungle.
“What are you doing here?” I ask when the handshake finally peters out.
“Is that how you greet your paying customers?”
Chad being a customer did not even occur to me. “Oh, sorry. Did you want a book?”
“Sure, what you got?”
“We’re a bookstore, Chad. We have a vast variety of books.”
“Even comic books?”
“Even those. Do you have a specific one in mind?”
Chad strokes the part of his chin where a beard would be if he had a beard. “Wonder Woman?”
“Any particular issue?”
“Whatever you got.”
“Anything else? Aside from the Wonder Woman?”
“Well, I would like to come and peruse your vast variety of books, only how am I gonna get into your store?” He gestures to the stairs.
“Uh, right. Sorry about that.”
Chad rolls himself forward and backward, leaning back as if to pop a wheelie. The wet leaves squish under his tires. Then, casual as can be, he says, “If you had a ramp, I could come check things out for myself.”
“Yeah. We should probably have a ramp.” I say this absently, politely, and insincerely.
But it’s enough for Chad. “You know, I have a piece of plywood at my house that might work.”
“Uh-huh,” I say, watching Ira walk down Main Street.
“It used to be a skateboarding ramp and now it just sits there, because, you know, I can’t skate anymore.” Chad flutters his eyelashes, pitifully. “You know, because I’m paralyzed.”
“Sorry about that.”
“You could come take a look at it,” Chad continues.
“Uh-huh,” I say again as Ira grows smaller. Soon he will disappear. I should just run after him. Get it over with.
“Use it for a ramp.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Sa-weet,” Chad says. “Let’s go.”
“Go? Go where?”
“To my place. To get the wood. For the ramp.”
“What ramp?”
“The one you just said you’d put in.”
“I don’t think I said that.”
“Sure you did. Just a second ago. Let’s go.”
“Now?”
“You got something else to do?”
I follow Ira’s slicker as he turns onto Alder, out of sight. The weight of what I have set in motion thuds in my stomach. “Come on then,” Chad says.
I look down Main Street. Back at the empty shop. “Let me lock up.” I pause, wondering if I should leave a note because Ira never checks his phone. “How long will this take?”
“Only a few minutes.” And because I don’t yet know Chad, I believe him. So I lock the door and don’t leave a note and follow Chad to his Dodge Ram. It’s jacked so high off the ground that an able-bodied person would need a stepladder to get in, and I’m puzzling how he manages it when he says, “Wanna see something rad?”
“Uh, okay.”
Chad opens the driver’s-side door and pulls out a small box that looks like an old Xbox console. He presses a button, which lowers a platform that he wheels onto. He presses another button and is lifted to the cab. He scoots into the driver’s seat and folds his wheelchair before pressing another button to maneuver a pulley that hooks the chair and lifts it to the truck bed. The entire operation takes about a minute.
“You coming or what?” Chad calls.
I clamber to the passenger side and haul myself into the seat with far less grace. As we head toward his house, he shows me how he controls everything—gas, brakes—from the steering wheel. “The town did a GoFundMe so I could retrofit my truck. Cost five grand. Pretty sweet, right?”
“Yeah, sweet,” I say bitterly.
When we arrive at Chad’s ranch-style house he points me toward the backyard, where, under a tarp, is his old skateboard ramp. He positions himself under the patio awning.
“Are you going to help?” I ask.
“I can’t go over there. It’s too muddy. My chair’ll get stuck. I’ll direct from here. It’ll be a piece of cake.”
It’s not a piece of cake. It’s a plate of barbed wire. Having not thought to bring gloves, I tear up my hands pulling nails out of the plywood plank. Having not thought to bring a jacket, I get soaked to the boxers. At one point, I’m yanking the plank toward the truck when I slide in a patch of mud, landing flat on my ass.
Chad cracks up, naturally. In the echo of his laugher, I hear Sandy’s. And then I hear the whole damn town laughing at me.
Soon, I remind myself as I stand up. Soon I will never have to see any of these fuckers again.
* * *
When we get back to the store, Ira is in full meltdown mode because Chad’s ten minutes multiplied, meaning I have left the store locked and unmanned during business hours and stranded Ira outside without his phone. He’s pacing the porch with that wild-man manic energy, his beard sticking out at all angles like he stuck his finger in a socket. “I’m sorry,” I shout, jumping out of the truck before Chad has pulled to a stop. “I’m sorry.”
“Where did you go? I knocked and knocked and no one answered and I thought . . .” He trails off.
His entire body is trembling. I hold him tight, trying to approximate his weighted blanket. Dried mud cracks in the embrace. “I’m sorry.”
“My bad, Mr. Stein,” Chad calls as he lowers himself from his truck into his chair. “Aaron offered to build a ramp to your store!”
“You did?” Ira asks, solicitous even in his panic.
“We got the wood in the truck and everything,” Chad says, gesturing to the sagging bit of plywood sticking out of the bed. “We just have to pull a bit of railing down. Then maybe bolster it with a few bricks, bracket it in place. Easy-peazy.”
“You didn’t mention the railing,” I tell Chad. “Or the bolstering and bracketing.”
“What’d you think we were gonna do? Just lean the plank against the stairs?”
I don’t say anything because that’s exactly what I thought we were going to do.
“And we’ll
need to take that down.” Chad points to the blue-and-yellow porch swing where Mom used to sit no matter the weather, calling to people. Invariably, they’d come up to chat with her and wind up in the store. Ira used to call her the Siren. “He definitely didn’t mention taking the porch swing down,” I tell Ira. I turn to Chad. “I think we should forget the ramp.”
“But we brought the wood over.”
“So bring it back.”
“Ah, dawg. My mom will kill me. That ramp’s been sitting in our backyard, splintering, making her miserable. So when you suggested a ramp—”
“I didn’t suggest a ramp,” I interrupt.
“I thought how great to repurpose the wood, and make your store wheelchair accessible. Plus, you’d make my mom happy.” He turns to Ira. “The sight of the wood just really bums her out, Mr. Stein. She says it’s like a constant reminder of what I lost.”
Sometimes the porch swing creaks, like Mom’s still on it. But it’s just the wind.
“I can understand that,” Ira says, staring at the swing, tugging nervously at his beard.
“So by putting in a ramp, you’d be doing my mom a solid, repurposing this wood, and making your store welcoming and accessible. It would be, like, a triple mitzvah.”
At this Ira and I gape at each other, neither one of us sure if we heard right. A mitzvah is a Jewish thing that literally means “blessing” but translates as “good deed.” I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anyone here use that word, much less a Best-Life Bro like Chad. In case it has not been made abundantly clear, there are not a lot of Jewish people in our neck of the woods.
I don’t trust Best-Life Bros like Chad, even if they’re in wheelchairs, and down with a bit of Yiddish. I’ve lived in this town long enough to know better. But Ira, the Giving Tree, would never deny a mitzvah, and I will never deny Ira.
And this is how we get a ramp.
Peanuts
We are about two hours into our doomed construction project when the Lumberjacks arrive. In those two hours, I have managed to pry off some spindles, saw a section of railing, and angle the plank against the ledge of the porch. I’ve sent a shivering Ira inside to warm up and am just about to send Chad packing when a few of the guys, making their daily trek from C.J.’s to Jimmy’s, decide to stop in front of our shop.
The oldest codger—his name, I will learn, is Ike Sturgis—approaches. He has a long brown beard that gives Ira’s a run for its money, and is weathered in the way a lot of guys who worked on the mountain are, which makes it impossible to tell just how old he is. He could be forty. He could be ninety.
“What you got going on here?” he asks in a whiskey-barrel voice.
“We’re putting in a ramp,” Chad says.
“A ramp, you say?” He taps the corner of the wood with the edge of his boot. “With this?”
“Must be a temporary plank. For fit,” says another of the Lumberjacks, who’s ruddy-faced and appears to be about six months pregnant with beer. Minus the gut, he looks exactly like this asshole named Caleb who Sandy used to hang out with.
“That’s what I’d assume, Garry,” Ike replies before turning to Chad and me. “’Cause you boys wouldn’t think of using plywood for a ramp, would you?”
“Well, yeah, I mean, we were, right, Aaron?”
Thanks for throwing me under the bus, Chad. “It was his idea.”
“Richie, you wanna explain to these fellows why this plank won’t work?” Ike says.
“Uhh, ’cause it’s plywood,” replies Richie, who can’t be more than a few years older than me, which would make him too young to ever have worked on the mountain or in the mills.
“And rotting plywood at that.” Ike steps hard on the ramp; it cracks. “Ain’t gonna bear much weight.”
“I used to skate on it,” Chad says. “It worked out fine.”
“Different uses,” Ike explains. “You gotta wear-pattern problem. Skateboard’s traveling all over that wood, back and forth. In a chair, wheels going up and down in the same track. More concentrated pressure. Basic physics.”
“Well, I failed physics,” Chad says.
“Me too,” Richie says.
And then the two of them share a bonding high five to commemorate their mutual failure. Our town, ladies and gentlemen, in a nutshell.
Ike shoves a wad of tobacco into his lower lip and spits into an empty bottle of Diet Peach Snapple. “Garry, what happened to the extra pine we used for your loft?”
“Nothing,” replies Garry. “Planks are just sitting in Joe Heath’s place.”
“You think there’s enough for a ramp?”
There’s the sudden shzz sound as Garry whips out his measuring tape. He crouches and squints as he sizes up the distance to the sidewalk. “Couple of twelve-by-twelves. Think so.”
“That weathered old pine really stands the test of time,” Ike says.
“Stained up real nice so you can see the grain,” Garry replies.
“This plywood’s got no business being anywhere but a scrap pile,” Ike says.
Garry agrees.
They talk about the wood a bit longer among themselves, not saying another word to me, or to Chad, who by bringing in this inferior specimen of wood has been knocked down a peg or two. Not quite as far down as me, but nearly. After a few minutes of this, they zip up their measuring tapes and carry on down Main Street.
The substandard plank is still leaning precariously against the railing. And it’s all so pathetic. Like anything that touches our store turns to rot. I was over it before we started on this project, but now I really am. And, soon enough, all this will be Penny’s problem.
Chad clears his throat. I spin around and glare at him for inventing all this trouble today when I have more than enough without his help.
“We done?” I ask him.
He opens his mouth as if to say something, but before he can, I’m heading up the stairs, answering on his behalf. We’re done.
* * *
Inside, Ira has fallen asleep in his chair. I cover him with a blanket and check my email. I have contacted a few bulk book buyers about purchasing the entire collection. A few have written back, asking for an inventory, which we don’t have, but I can estimate. They don’t pay much, dimes on the dollar, but it’ll give us some income, as will the money from the sale of the building. Not a lot, but it’ll be enough to get out of here, away from the rain and the rot, the Lumberjacks and Best-Life Bros. Away from it all.
* * *
Ira’s still asleep when a pickup truck pulls up, its phlegmy engine rattling. I pay it no mind until I hear voices out front. Garry and Richie are hauling two giant planks of wood from the bed of a truck. They’re trailed by Chad—who either left and came back, or never left—and Ike, who’s gripping a toolbox that makes Chad’s look like a jewelry box.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
“What’s going on,” Richie says, as he and Garry start pulling down the plywood ramp that we just built, “is we’re gonna build you a real ramp.”
Real ramp. Chad winces.
“Hold up. We never discussed this,” I say.
“What are you talking about?” Ike says. “We spent a good twenty minutes discussing it.”
“No, you discussed it. With each other.”
Ike taps his nose, which is crooked, like it’s been busted on more than one occasion.
“You never asked me if it was okay,” I tell him. “Or my father.”
“You’d rather have a flimsy piece of plywood than these nice rough-cut boards?” Ike asks.
“I’d rather have none of it!”
“But how’s your friend here gonna get in the store?”
“Chad,” clarifies Chad right as I say, “I hardly know him.”
“How’s Chad, who you hardly know, gonna get in your store?” Ike asks.
The
same way he’s always gotten in. By not coming in.
“We got all the equipment here,” Ike says, scraping his work boot against the pavement.
“But you never asked. And we can’t pay for it.”
“Who said anything about paying for anything?”
Does he think I’m an idiot? Does he think I don’t recognize a Lucy when I see one? The joke’s on you, bub, because I grew up with the worst Lucy of them all.
Lucy, by the way, is from Peanuts. When me and Sandy were kids, we loved those comics. Sandy got a particular thrill out of that running gag where Lucy holds the football for Charlie Brown and every time he runs to kick it, she yanks it away at the last minute and he winds up on his back. He thought it was just so funny that Charlie Brown fell for it, over and over again. This was a sign, I guess, but I was too young or too in awe of my older brother to heed it. Not even a few years later, when Sandy got cooler and then crueler and started doing things like inviting me to come into his room only to pants me while his friend Caleb snapped a picture. Or begging me to hang out with him and watch TV all day Saturday, only to spend Sunday pretending I didn’t exist.
It took me a long time, much longer than it should have, to realize Sandy was Lucy. And I was Charlie Brown. But I’m not as stupid as I once was, so I tell Ike we won’t be needing any of his ramp-building services.
And maybe that would have been the end of it. But then Ira shuffles barefoot onto the porch, blinking awake from his nap. “There you are,” he says dopily before turning toward the sidewalk assemblage and nodding. “Hello, Ike.”
“Ira,” Ike replies tersely.
“What brings you here? Need a book?”
“If it’s all right by you, we’re gonna fix this ramp up proper.”
Ira blinks, twice, still not fully awake. “Oh, sure.” He goes back inside, without even thinking about it. Without even asking me.
Ike smirks, as if that settles it. But it settles nothing. Ira’s not even the legal owner of the store. And in another month, neither will I be.
