by Gayle Forman
“Con is a strong word, wouldn’t you say?”
When Chad cracks a small smile and says, “Swindle?” I know I haven’t lost him.
“Look, Chad, I came here to say sorry. But also because I have an idea. Did you spend all the money you had in the bank?”
“Not all of it.”
“So how much do you have?”
“About six grand.”
I do the math. I can almost make the numbers work. “Can I have it?”
Chad raises an eyebrow. “Hell to the no!”
“Hear me out. I have about a thousand left from selling the records. If we add in six grand of your money, I think it might work. But only if . . .”
“If what?”
“If you really want to be a partner.” I feel shy, like I’m making a promposal, not that I ever did that kind of thing. “Do you want to?”
Chad paces back and forth in his chair. “I mean, it’s crazy, right? I hardly read books.”
“You’ll start.”
“And I don’t know which movies were books first.”
“You’ll learn. And you have more business acumen than Ira and me combined.”
“True, but that’s a low bar.”
“I have a meeting with Penny tomorrow morning. If I go in with your money and mine, that’s seven grand. And I know I can scratch up the rest quick. I think I can make this work. But there’s one catch.”
“Ain’t there always?”
“You wouldn’t be partners with me. I meant it when I said I don’t want the bookstore. But Ira does. And you do. So you’d be partners with him.”
“I love your dad,” he says, scratching his chin. “But if we’re partners, what would you be?”
“What I hope I still am,” I reply. “Your friend.”
* * *
The next morning, I wake up and get ready for my meeting with Penny. As I head off, Ira stands up.
“What are you doing?”
“Coming with, of course.”
“But we’ll have to close the store. During business hours.”
Ira shrugs and locks the door behind us. “Hardly seems to matter anymore.”
My heart is beating so fast as we walk to the hardware store. I practice what I’ll say. Basically, I have to do the opposite of hand-sell. I have to convince her not to buy something.
Chad is waiting at the corner of Main and Alder.
“What are you doing here?” I ask.
“No offense, son, but we’re not letting you face Penny Macklemore alone.” He glances at Ira. “Historically, that has not gone well.”
We continue up Alder. Ike’s truck is parked in front of the hardware store. In itself this isn’t so weird, but the sight of Ike, in a suit, is nearly as jarring as hearing him talk about Viagra. He growls at me. “Just so we’re clear, we’re here for your father and Chad, not for you.”
“Understood,” I say.
“We’re not speaking to you,” Richie says as he emerges from the cab, trailed by Garry.
“I can appreciate that. I’ll do whatever I can to make it right.”
“We’ll see about that,” Garry says.
“You guys, I’m so sorry.”
“You should be,” Richie says.
“You coulda told us,” Garry adds.
“I know. I was scared.”
“Everyone gets scared, Aaron,” Ike says. “Don’t give you license to act like a mother fudger.” He looks at Ira. “Pardon my language.”
“Seems warranted,” Ira says.
We enter the hardware store. Penny is in the back office with her lawyer. “What’s going on here?” she asks when she sees the crowd. “We only need Aaron and me for the closing.” She looks at me. “Because this is a closing. I didn’t receive any other word from you.”
“You’re receiving it now,” I say. “Penny, I don’t want to sell you the store. Well, actually, I do. But they don’t. They want to run it.” I point to Ira and Chad and Ike too. “And so I’d like to take you up on your offer of thirteen thousand dollars to back out of our deal.”
“Thirteen thousand dollars?” Ike bellows.
“You have a cashier’s check?” Penny asks.
“No cashier’s check, but I have this.” I pull out an envelope full of cash from the record collectors. “One thousand dollars.”
“And here’s a check for six thousand,” Chad says.
“You’re still six thousand dollars short.”
“Six thousand dollars short of what?” Ike asks.
“Thirteen thousand dollars,” Penny replies.
“What’s thirteen thousand dollars?” Ike asks again.
I turn to Ike. “Don’t worry about the money.” Then I turn back to Penny. “I can get the rest of the money by the end of the day.” I haven’t talked to Daryl yet but I suspect he’ll be more than happy to take the collection for the bargain-basement price of eight grand.
“How?” Chad and Ira ask at the same time.
“Will someone tell me what the darn-tootin’ is going on?” Ike asks.
I turn to Ira. “I’m selling Sandy’s records to Daryl. I know they’re worth way more than eight thousand dollars. But if Sandy left them to me, it’s up to me to decide what to do with them. And this is what I choose. This is how I can make it right to all of you.”
“Can someone explain to me what’s costing thirteen thousand dollars?” Ike shouts.
“It’s what I have to pay Penny to get out of our deal,” I explain. “And I can do it. If I sell all the records now.”
“But the records are part of our revenue stream,” Chad says. “I put it in the business plan.”
“Why? I told you we weren’t selling them in the store.”
“Yeah, but you say a lot of stupid shit. And anyway, they’re mad valuable. And I talked to Lou and he says he would become our buyer, so we could keep up our supply and revenue stream and he gets to shop for records for a living.”
“Yeah, but Chad, we need to sell the records to get the money to pay off Penny.”
“And we need to sell records to make the store profitable,” Chad says, shaking his head. “That’s a real catch-22.”
“Chad Santos, did you just make a literary reference?”
“I guess I did.”
“Well, then, you have to run a bookstore now.”
Everyone laughs and the mood in the office is festive and for a moment I think I’ve won. I’ve saved the bookstore and gotten out from it.
But then I see Penny, who is smiling too. And I know Penny well enough to know that she doesn’t smile when she loses. She smiles when she wins.
And Penny Macklemore always wins.
“It’s December first,” she says merrily. “And you don’t have the thirteen thousand dollars, so our deal is closing now.”
“But I’ll have it in a few hours . . . Tomorrow at the latest.”
“Too late. The offer is off the table. The deal is closing now,” she repeats. “And if it doesn’t, I’ll sue you, and trust me, that will get very expensive very fast.”
I look at Penny. How did I not see this before? The curled hair. The upturned nose. The small eyes. She’s Lucy, at age seventy.
“Were you ever going to let me out of the deal?” I ask her.
She shrugs. “If you raised the money, sure. But I knew if you somehow did, you’d only dig yourself in deeper because a bookstore is not a growth market. Then the property would flounder again and I’d get it all fixed up, even cheaper, and be ten thousand dollars the richer for my trouble.” She unclasps her pen. “Either way, I get the store. I’ve wanted it for years. And when I want something that badly, I don’t ever give up.”
“It’s your Great White Whale,” Garry says.
“My what?” she asks.
“Oh,” Penny says. “I wouldn’t know anything about that.”
The room goes quiet, so the only sound is of Penny’s pen as she takes possession of the store.
And like that, it’s done.
Stone Soup
It’s quiet. Too quiet. It shouldn’t be this quiet right now. It feels wrong.
I walk through the empty space, my footsteps echoing off the barren shelves: the mahogany one that broke Ike’s heart looks, if not new again, old in the right way. The other shelves are all reinforced, restained, and empty. Lady Gaga glimmers in the morning light.
Sandy’s record bins, the ones he painstakingly built in that fury of foresight, or fear, or whatever it was that drove him, yawn open, their locks removed, the records gone.
I call Chad. “You’re coming, right?”
“Dawg, chill. I said I’d be there and I’ll be there.”
“It’s just we’re running up the clock.”
Chad guffaws. “Running down the clock. Stick to book metaphors, son.”
“Whatever,” I snap back. “Clock’s ticking.”
“I’ll be there,” Chad replies. “We’ll all be there.”
* * *
Ten minutes later Ira walks in. “Sorry,” he says breathlessly. “Tai chi ran long.”
“It’s okay,” I say. “Where’s Bev?”
“Picking some things up. She’ll be by later.” He looks around the empty room, his face a mix of emotions I can’t quite read. “The end of an era.”
“We had a good run, didn’t we?”
“We did.” Ira clasps me on the shoulder as the sputter of Ike’s pickup truck nears. “Ready to do this?”
“Ready as I’ll ever be.”
But neither of us move. We just look around the empty space, which until three months ago had been Joe Heath’s scrap shop. It’s bigger than our bookstore was. Wide-open, accessible, with room for all the shelves we have, plus several more that Ike’s built. It looks so different from how it did when we took possession a few weeks ago. It doesn’t seem possible for things to change so quickly, but sometimes they do. Just ask the dinosaurs.
Ike barges in, spitting tobacco into his Diet Peach Snapple bottle. “You two gonna just stand there all day? These boxes ain’t gonna unpack themselves.”
* * *
Within the hour, everyone’s here: Ike, Garry, and Richie, Garry’s girlfriend, Amanda. The now-inseparable troika of Beana, Bev, and Angela. Lou’s there. And Jax. And of course Chad. He’s christened himself “project director” for the day, because of his mobility challenges, he claims, but we all know that’s a ruse. The new space is wide-open by design, so it can be used for Knit and Lits, Books and Brews, support groups, tai chi classes, yoga, open-mic nights, or whatever else they come up with.
There are plenty of low shelves for Chad to stock. But he likes playing God. “If you consult my very clear blueprints,” Chad is now bellowing, “you will see that the boxes are all numbered and color-coded to match the appropriate shelves so you don’t have to think, just unpack. I measured and everything should fit to the inch.”
“Seriously,” Jax says. “He has like literally measured every book even though I told him a perfect fit is kind of a Sisyphean task, given that the inventory is always going to be shifting.”
“And I know what Sisyphean means.” Chad grins proudly. “I figure if I’m a co-owner of a bookstore, I oughta understand the literary references.”
“It’s not really literary,” I say. “So much as Greek mythology.”
“Ugh. Are you always gonna be like this?” Chad asks.
“Yep!”
“Well, you’re just one of the common paying folk now, so I don’t have to listen to you.”
“Like you ever did.”
“Who’s ready for another espresso drink?” Ike booms from behind Lady Gaga. “I got cappuccinos, lattes, mochas, macchiatos, espressos, Americanos . . . hot or iced. Cow milk, soy milk, or oat milk.” Ike gives Gaga a loving wipe-down. “We got a lot of work to do before the party, so I’m here to power you with caffeine.”
“Where do you want the records?” Lou asks as he and Garry begin to cart in the special crates that Lou insisted we store the vinyl in to keep it from getting warped.
“Don’t ask me,” I reply. “I’m not the boss. Chad, where do you want the records?”
“Where do I want the records?” Chad asks, exasperated. “Check the blueprint. In the record bins. Back by the café.”
“Cool. Like in a department store,” Lou says, nodding, heading toward Sandy’s bins. Ike proclaimed the workmanship solid and the pine standard grade, and therefore the bins did not need to be upgraded. I suspect that Ike would have preferred to rebuild the bins with nicer wood but out of respect to Sandy chose not to.
“I can’t wait to get these records on display,” Lou says. “It’s about time we honored this vinyl.”
Lou unpacks Sandy’s vast collection, the music he loved more than anything, which he left to me. Which led me to the Outhouse, and to Chad. And the Lumberjacks. And even to Hannah.
Maybe Ira was right. The records are my legacy.
* * *
We finish the setup by four o’clock. Which gives everyone about an hour to run home, shower, change, and come right back again in time for the party. There’s not really time for speeches or dallying, but when Ira clears his throat and asks everyone to come outside for a huddle, no one objects. Richie and Garry clamber up two ladders alongside the flat, rampless entrance to the store. Ike nods at Ira.
“Some of you were around when we first opened Bluebird Books more than twenty-five years ago.” Ira looks at Ike. “The store’s been through a lot. The town’s been through a lot. We’ve all been through a lot.” He looks at me. “But here we are.”
“Here we are!” shouts Chad.
Ira gestures for Ike and Chad to join him under the railing, and then for me too. But I stay behind. The store’s not mine anymore. But somehow, giving it up, I gained more than I ever could have imagined.
Ike whistles and Richie and Garry unfurl the new sign. Mom designed it with Amanda, Garry’s girlfriend. It has Mom’s original lettering and Amanda’s illustration of birds flying out of a nest. She painted a similar design on the ceiling of the new space. I look at the sign, old and new, the same and different, like the store, like my family. Ira looks at me. I look at Ira. It’s time.
“I now declare Bluebird Books, Music, Coffee, and Community Center open,” he booms.
* * *
Everyone in town seems to have shown up for the grand opening: Ike’s friends from the mill. Bev and Beana’s newly assembled book group. The middle school principal and a bunch of teachers Angela knows. Lou’s collector pals, all drooling for first dibs. A bunch of small kids are tearing around. Even Penny Macklemore is here, sniffing things out.
“Want me to have her thrown out?” Chad asks. “I’m happy to be the bouncer.”
“Let her stay,” I say. “Everyone deserves a great good place. Even Penny.”
“Also, look how many people are here. Rub her nose in it a bit.”
“And that.”
The crowd is so thick I can hardly see through it, but when Hannah walks in, I feel it immediately even though I haven’t seen her since Thanksgiving. We’ve texted a few times and I hear about her from Jax, who’s always at our place these days. When we closed the old store, Ira decided to rent Joe’s house. There was space for me, but I think we both knew it was time for this bird to leave the nest. As I was starting to look for rentals, Chad showed me a listing of an apartment in a new elevator building, between here and Bellingham, totally accessible. “It’s nice, but I can’t afford that,” I’d told him. He’d grinned at me. “Yeah, but we can.”
Hannah approaches me, awkw
ardly. I’m not sure what the protocol is for greeting an ex who was really only your girlfriend for two nights, but like everything else in my life, I’m trying to figure it out as I go.
“You came?” I ask, settling for a half hug, half arm pat. My heart still does something funny but it’s not like it was before. It’s distant, like a fossil of something that was once alive.
“Damn straight I came,” she says. “A bookstore, café, record store, community space has to have music at its opening.” She looks around. “Is Jax here yet?”
“They’ve been here all day, helping.”
“Helping, you call it?” Hannah gestures to where Jax is canoodling with Chad.
“Anything that keeps Chad happy is helping.”
She chuckles. “We have a special set planned. All songs with book references. Elvis Costello, ‘Everyday I Write the Book.’ Talking Heads, ‘The Book I Read.’”
“Not ‘Clair de Lune.’”
She looks me straight in the face, and there it is, that echo again. Maybe she hears it too. “Not that.”
“I’m sorry, you know. For running to you when I was really running away.”
She smiles, nods. “It’s okay. How’ve things been?”
“I keep thinking about what you said at the meeting, about needing to destroy things in order to create something new. I’m somewhere in that process.”
“You were listening?” I can see this pleases her. “I’m glad. I heard you’re going to college.”
Jax must have told her, which means the two of them talk about me. Which pleases me. “I’m taking a few classes.”
“Anything interesting?”
“A literature course, now that I can read books again. And intro to paleontology.”
“Dinosaurs.” She laughs. “Some things never change.”
Maybe that’s true. Because no matter what Hannah and I are now, I will never stop believing we are inevitable. Not just her and me, but me and Chad. Chad and Jax. Ira and Ike. Maybe we are all inevitable.
