Of course she was married, he told himself. Just goddamned look at her.
—Your daughter? the woman said, nodding toward the corner booth as she filled Tomas’s mug.
Tomas rubbed his beard, embarrassed. He’d been expecting an accent, but other than a certain softness and calm, the woman’s voice was as crisply generic as that of anyone else from the mountain West.
—Lydia, he said. Your son?
—Raj, she said.
—Little Flower?
—Little Flower.
The icy windows dripped.
Raj Patel was a sorrowful kid with a shaggy bowl of black hair and an array of polyester jumpsuits with built-in buckles that, from that day forward, would always remind Tomas of zookeeper outfits. Tomas would soon learn that the boy’s parents, Maya and Rohan Patel, were second-generation Indian Americans who had been running Gas ’n Donuts for over ten years. When they were teenagers in Southern California their relationship and eventual marriage had been carefully coordinated by both sets of parents—the families had been in the States long enough to avoid using the word arranged, though all parties involved knew that was exactly what it was—and ironically, the financial conditions of the marriage were precisely what allowed the young couple to move to Denver, far away from the reach of their families, to buy this deco gas station and replace its repair bays with an unassuming doughnut shop. For all of her immediate warmth, Tomas noticed during their early meetings that Maya’s eye contact was typically brisk, offered in passing as she moved between tasks, and when he met her husband, Rohan, he understood why. Whenever Rohan stepped out of the kitchen, his thick hair bursting against a hairnet, his thick gut bursting against a stained white apron, customers shifted up and down the counter and Tomas felt himself shrink. When he learned that Rohan had once chased an early-morning burglar away from the flower shop next door, and another time had grabbed the old Montgomery Ward .22 rifle the previous owner had left in a storage closet—good for popping rats in the alley, but not much else—and thrown himself into the thick of a carjacking at the stoplight up the block, receiving for his valor a zipper of stitches and a reputation as the neighborhood’s cranky guardian angel, he felt better about letting Lydia hang around his shop.
From the start, Lydia and Raj found great companionship in their after-school routine of walking together from Little Flower to Gas ’n Donuts, where they would frost and sprinkle their own doughnuts, then sit in the corner booth, playing games or drawing with markers or quietly reading with their sneakers bumping beneath the table. After an hour or so, they’d finish their little bottles of OJ with an enthusiastic Cheers!, then complete the triangle of their journey by walking the eight or so blocks to the library to do homework and explore the stacks until their parents were done for the day. Early on, Raj and Lydia had been escorted by a parent on these walks—usually by Maya, who held their hands without realizing the enormous maternal comfort she emanated, especially to the motherless Lydia—but from about third grade on the kids were given permission to walk alone, as long as they promised to stick together and always announce their arrival with an immediate phone call to whichever parent they’d just left behind. Tomas, who had a hard enough time remembering to pack Lydia’s lunch box, not to mention her various vaccinations and school events, particularly appreciated the safety and efficiency of this system. He would sometimes look up from the library window and see the two kids walking arm-in-arm and his gratitude would nearly floor him. He was single and reclusive and growing grayer by the hour, yet never in his life had he ever imagined feeling such a fullness of being.
His daughter was happy. His daughter was his life.
And then, deep in the spidery crawl space below Gas ’n Donuts, between mildewed soil and a crusty concrete foundation, a cross-threaded water pipe that had been dripping into the ground for years gradually eroded far enough to begin to trickle, then to drizzle, then to fully flood the rank earthen space. At its worst, the mud pooling below the shop seemed thick enough to swallow them all.
Lydia and Raj learned about the pooling flood one afternoon when the kitchen door swung open and Mr. Patel came cursing through the shop with a vein visible on his neck like a little snake beneath his skin. He had mud all over his jeans and T-shirt from searching through the goddamned crawl space for the goddamned shut-off valve. Not long ago, she’d cut her hair short, and now, with an unexpected roughness, she rubbed it with her fingertips. Mr. Patel disappeared into the kitchen, and she sighed and followed behind him.
Lydia glanced across the table at Raj, who looked as if he were trying to disappear between the collars of his mellow-yellow jumpsuit. He suggested that they walk over to the library and get going on their schoolwork.
—maybe we should keep an eye on things here for a bit, she said. since your parents are—
—Killing each other behind the walls?
Lydia smiled. Raj tried to smile too but it didn’t work. At one point, Mrs. Patel came running out of the kitchen with a flashlight, locked the register, shut off the gas pumps, flipped around the CLOSED sign, and locked the front door, then ran back into the kitchen with two empty coffee cans. Mr. Patel cursed somewhere below their feet.
Lydia’s dad had snapped at Lydia plenty of times, so she was familiar with a base level of household tension, but being around the Patels when they were fighting was a different experience entirely, one that both frightened and mesmerized her. Their fighting felt like weather, like clouds had been trapped behind that swinging kitchen door and were presently rolling down from the ceiling. Eventually, though, the storm disappeared beneath the sounds of someone rapping the glass of the doughnut shop door. When Raj ran over to unlock it, a lanky man with a blond mustache, wearing jeans and a jean jacket, strolled in slowly, carrying a hefty red toolbox at his side. He flicked a toothpick and looked around, and even from across the room Lydia could see that his eyes were bright and the color of ash.
—Where’s the water? he said in a relaxed voice, as if he were a detective entering a crime scene, asking for the body.
Behind the plumber trailed a girl with a fierce, determined gait, her arms thrown back and chin thrown forward in a way that reminded Lydia of Eloise stomping the halls of the Plaza Hotel. She had irate red hair and a pale freckled face and wore the same red-and-blue plaid uniform dress as Lydia.
Carol O’Toole was her name. The plumber’s daughter.
—Thought it was gonna be all wet in here, she said, clearly disappointed.
Before Mr. O’Toole disappeared with his toolbox into the storm within the kitchen, he pointed to a stool at the counter and Carol sat down, facing the display case of doughnuts and the bank of coffeepots and stacks of little plates.
As soon as Raj locked up the door and slid across from Lydia again, Lydia kicked him beneath the table: Carol O’Toole. Carol O’Toole! They both looked at her linty lollipop of red hair. Carol leaned forward and pulled a fork out of the utensil bin and began cleaning out her fingernails with one of its tines, wholly indifferent to her classmates’ presence.
Carol was in the other fourth-grade class at Little Flower and her exploits were legendary. Lydia did not need to remind Raj that during the middle of the science fair last spring, for example, Carol had flushed four apples down the toilet, flooding the bathroom and part of the hallway, then had the guts to claim that her hypothesis had been validated. A few months before that, Carol had shown up at the Halloween party wearing a red dress with a fake knife sticking out of her chest, pronouncing to everyone that she was Annie, only stabbed. And just a few weeks ago in catechism class, one of the kinder nuns had lauded Carol for how original she was in her sinfulness, as if God had yet to announce the commandments that she was breaking every day. Needless to say, Lydia was impressed.
—You’re in the other fourth grade at Little Flower, Carol said, pointing at Lydia with the fork.
—yeah.
—So are you, she said, pointing at Raj.
—Yep.
<
br /> She pointed at the ribbed glass containers of sugar and nondairy creamer that were tucked next to the napkins where the Formica table met the wall.
—Grab the creamer, she said.
With the grown-ups back in the kitchen, shining lights into the crawl space and sighing over the costs of this plumbing eruption, Raj and Lydia followed Carol out the side door and into the alley behind the shop. Carol looked around for a minute, then told Raj to take the jar of powdery creamer and climb up the access ladder built into the back of the brick motel across the way. Lydia and Raj had dared each other to climb that ladder before, but both had always chickened out. Not today. Today, under Carol’s squinting authority, chickening out was not an option. Raj tightened the buckled belt on his jumpsuit and took the creamer and climbed.
—Go up about ten feet, Carol said.
He hesitated, hugging the rungs.
—Or get down here and I’ll do it. It’s probably your nap time anyway.
Raj climbed. When he neared the top, Carol positioned herself beneath the ladder, then directed him to unscrew the jar’s flippy lid and slowly pour the powder down onto the flame.
—What flame?
—This flame, she said. Then she took a book of matches out of her pocket and struck one and twisted her wrist until the whole pack lit with a fiery flash that she held at the end of her fingertips.
—Go. Go! Go!
With a horrified grimace, Raj began awkwardly sprinkling the nondairy creamer from on high and it looked to Lydia like a falling white curtain, threatening to close them off from the rest of the world, and when it reached the matches a massive flower of flame began blooming in the air, feeding off the falling powder and igniting the creamer curtain and climbing with a sparkling whoosh toward the bottle in Raj’s hands. Carol snapped back just as the roll of flames slapped at her face and hair, and Lydia jumped away without looking and landed in the soggy pothole behind her. Within a few seconds the entire flame had dissolved, burning up most of the creamer and filling the air with sticky black specks. Carol tossed the matches to the ground, and Raj panicked and dropped the container from the ladder’s height so it shattered into a jagged pile of glass on the asphalt.
The three of them looked at each other. The air was thick with the muddy pungency of burned hair.
—Heckinay, Carol said.
She smiled and Lydia followed her lead, but Raj looked terrified on the ladder, like a sailor clinging to a mast. Almost immediately the doughnut shop’s back door opened and Mrs. Patel came out to dump her bucket, wearing a pink spiraling sari and long yellow kitchen gloves. When she saw Raj up on the ladder across the alley and the shattered creamer container below him, she quietly peered back into the doughnut shop to make sure she was alone.
—Pick up the glass, she said in a harsh and hushed voice, before your father comes out and sees you. Then you go to the library. Now.
Lydia and Raj picked up the shards and carried them in their palms to the dumpster. Carol pretended to help but really she just knelt next to the mess and made a show of trying not to laugh. Lydia’s left sneaker was soaked and gray from the watery pothole, and Raj kept touching his hair and eyebrows to see how badly they’d been singed. As the two of them hustled out of the alley toward the street, Lydia turned back to wave good-bye to their schoolmate Carol, but Carol had already moved on.
CHAPTER FIVE
Lydia was contemplating the birthday party photo when she gazed between the splintered columns of the store’s ground floor and saw a woman standing near the entrance, looking around as if lost in a forest. She was short and wide, wore red stretch pants and a Skate City! T-shirt, and carried a cane that was bottomed by a tennis ball. The moment she caught sight of Lydia behind the register she huffed loudly and began heading her way.
The woman placed a beaded cigarette case on the counter, lifted her glasses from a lanyard around her neck, and pulled a yellow Post-it note out of her bra. As she squinted into the note, Lydia saw that the part splitting the center of the woman’s gray hair was nearly an inch wide. A sad landing strip, shiny under the bookstore lights.
“You’re looking for something?” Lydia asked in her kindest voice.
“I think,” the woman gasped, “I’m looking. For you.”
“Come again?”
“Does that say Lydia?” the woman asked.
Lydia looked at the note. LYDIA, it said, written in dull pencil.
“It does.”
“And you’re Lydia?”
Lydia looked at the woman and considered lying.
“Can I recommend something to read?”
“Are you. Or aren’t you. Lydia?”
“I am.”
The woman paused for a moment and studied her with dissatisfaction. “Look at that ever-lovin’ hair,” she said. “You got bus tokens?”
“Bus tokens? No, ma’am. I use a pass.”
“Good. That’s cheaper. Take the Fifteen up Colfax. You might want to write this down. Because I’m not coming back. Take the Fifteen up Colfax. Past Smiley’s Laundromat. Get off at the James Dean mural. Walk straight down across Thirteenth. Big brick house near the corner. Bad grass and falling fence. I’m on the ground.” She squinted suspiciously before adding, “Joey didn’t say you’d be such a pill.”
“Joey?”
“Then again,” she added, “Joey didn’t say much at all, did he? See you after work.”
The woman scooped up her cigarettes and planted her cane and went out the door without a browse.
The door in front of Lydia was painted red and covered in scratches. Based on the bank of mailboxes by the entry and the circle of chairs on the porch—arranged around a parlor ashtray that was resting on a stack of phone books—this musty old Queen Anne home had been carved up and converted into a dozen or so small units. Joey had apparently lived in one.
Lydia and David’s apartment was six or eight blocks away, and she found it somewhat meaningful that Joey had also ended up living in Capitol Hill. The whole neighborhood was a hodgepodge of different styles and eras and people, all packed close to downtown on cramped streets with fantastic trees. It could be a bit rough and more turbulent than she sometimes liked, especially late on weekend nights, but Lydia loved how walking down a single block she might see a row of subdued Foursquare homes, a sixties-era high-rise, a simple brick deco apartment building, a Queen Anne pseudo-mansion like this one, plus a cross-section of Denver’s rich and poor, gay and straight, black and brown and white. It was one of the few places she’d ever lived where she felt as if she were moving while standing still. She wondered if Joey had felt that too.
Before she decided to knock, the door opened and within seconds, without eye contact, the balding woman from the bookstore was escorting her up the staircase.
“Up we go,” the woman said.
“Where are we going?”
“Up.”
The staircase stretched through the center of the old home. The woman still wore her red stretch pants but her cane was missing and her chapped grip clung to Lydia’s elbow as they climbed the stairs. In distant quadrants of the house she could hear doors opening and closing, a toilet flushing, men coughing. She still had no idea why she was here—Joey?—but the woman’s sense of purpose stifled any desire to ask.
When they reached the landing, the woman stopped and hunched forward, hands on her knees.
“Give me a second,” she said, struggling to catch her breath.
“If you wanted to tell me something,” Lydia said, aiming to be friendly, “you could have phoned the store. I’m almost always there. Saved yourself the trip, you know?”
“I wanted to see you first. Have a gander. Then if I trusted your looks I was going to let you in. If you seemed high-and-mighty, all of it was going into the trash.”
“All of what?”
“The stuff. In his apartment. Someone else has been assigned his place, moving in on Friday, so today’s the day it’s gotta go. Keep what you want. I’ll h
ave the rest thrown out.”
“I think you have the wrong Lydia.”
“Got it all right here,” she said, pulling the yellow Post-it out of her bra. “Lydia. From the bookstore. Joey told me there was only one Lydia. Was he wrong?”
“I’m her,” Lydia said, feeling her skin go hot and tighten around her eyes. “So this is where he lived?”
“You really don’t know why you’re here?” As the woman blinked, a growth on her lower lid seemed to scrape her eye. “Then why’d he give me your name? You his auntie or big sister? Because you’re too old to be his lover, I hope.”
“I think I was just his bookseller.”
“Whatever that means,” the woman said. “Either way he wanted it all passed to you. An inheritance, you could call it, though honestly there isn’t much. The shithead probably burned half of it.”
“Burned it?”
“You’ll see,” the woman said. She climbed the remaining steps and steered Lydia into the dimly lit third-floor hallway. Lydia toed a gray smudge on the carpet and decided it was a onetime raisin.
“Can I ask when Joey arranged this?”
“Long before he died, if that’s what you’re getting at. But what you really want to know is why. Part of my job is to ask all the boys what I should do with their stuff if they ever get sent back to the pokey. Joey said, Lydia. From the bookstore.”
“To the pokey?” Lydia said. “What kind of a place is this?”
Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore Page 4
