“Won’t you come away with me?”
He got the words out, but she was already twenty feet away. Out of earshot. Especially since he’d muttered the words under his breath. The kid reading a paperback in the Mystery/Thriller section heard him.
“She was pretty,” the kid said.
“Still is. She’s not dead.” Joe pulled a slim volume from the box of books he’d bought off her on behalf of the Hey Penny Bookstore. The box radiated heat from having just been outside on the hot summer day. The cover of the pamphlet in his hand featured red type surrounding a black-and-white photo of John F. Kennedy on a stretcher, a sheet pulled back to expose the remaining half of his head. The box was filled with Kennedy stuff. The Warren Report. “A Life In Pictures.” Hardcore conspiracy tracts.
Joe didn’t mean to snap at the kid. The kid was all right. Hung out every day, reading till dusk. He’d work his way through an author’s entire oeuvre before moving on. Now it was Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. Before that it had been Arthur Conan Doyle. He asked the kid, “Do you think I’d have a shot? With her, I mean?”
The kid scrunched up his nose, considering the question. “You know I’m ten years old, right?”
Just then Ronald, the store’s owner and Joe’s uncle, slid through the propped-open emergency exit. “Am I paying to air-condition the street?” he demanded.
“Don’t know. Doesn’t seem to be working, does it?” Joe asked. He was stacking her books on the counter in front of him. As cool as he could, he smelled one to see if any of her lingered there. Nope. Just the smell of dust and old people. But he thought he could detect a trace of her scent on the warm cardboard box.
His brain pounded and his heart pumped. She was more beautiful than any other girl who had come into the store in the four years he’d worked there. Maybe she was a fashion model. He didn’t get the feeling she was, though. Her hair stuck up, but like she’d slept on it, not like she’d put stuff in it. She excited Joe in a way that made him wish he led a fascinating life, that he had more ambition.
He knew she’d be back. She’d been coming in every few days for a couple of months, always with a stack of books to sell. Joe hadn’t screwed up the courage to say anything to her. If this were a story in a book, she’d come back. And this time he would say it so she could hear him: “Won’t you come away with me?”
The question had come to him last night while he drifted off to sleep. A car alarm went off somewhere down the street. As the honking persisted, these words came to Joe in the spaces in between: “Won’t you come away with me?” It was the right question. And he meant it too. He’d go. Not like to Venezuela to live forever, but maybe Hot Springs, Arkansas or Nuevo Laredo. Hell, maybe Venezuela. Nothing to keep him here. Here was nowhere. Here was destined to be part of his past. Stacks of books stinking of old smoke. Dead readers. Dead pets. Dust. Mostly dust. He was a young man still.
Ronald put his big hand on Joe’s shoulder and Joe jumped. Ronald had an ex-hippie ponytail but was built like a football-player. “What’d you give her?”
“Twenty-six dollars,” Joe answered.
“Jesus. Pretty fucking generous.”
Joe pulled out some of the more yellowed and creepy-looking items and explained, “I thought these might fetch a pretty good price on eBay.”
Ronald grunted. “Just ’cause she gives you a boner doesn’t mean I should go broke.”
When Joe got home, his roommate Fred was on the computer.
“Jack’s Burger House burgers are in the oven keeping warm,” Fred called out. Burgers were all he ate. Cheeseburgers. “Fries, too.” And french fries. He was a connoisseur of these items, encyclopedic in his knowledge of the city’s hamburger/french fry selection.
“Cool. Thanks for waiting.”
They ate cheeseburgers and smoked pot out of a bong. A hockey game played on the television. Joe listened to Fred complain about how one of his two girlfriends had been at the house all afternoon crying. She thought Fred paid too much attention to the other girlfriend.
“I don’t even know if it’s worth it anymore. I mean the sex is awesome, obviously, but two chicks, man? With two chicks worth of problems? All the time?” Fred talked with his mouth full. “But the sex is bad-ass. I mean, half the time I don’t have to do anything except kick back and watch.”
“I know,” Joe said. “My bedroom wall is a tarp, remember?”
Not exactly an engineering masterpiece, Joe’s bedroom wall was an 10-by-15 foot sheet of paint-speckled plastic stapled to the ceiling. He cut a slit down the middle for a door. The tarp converted what had been the downstairs/living room portion of the garage apartment into a semi-private environment. Joe constantly reminded himself that this was a temporary setup, and his life would evolve into something better. That this was his cocoon and that he would emerge, butterfly-like, someday.
That night, both of Fred’s girlfriends came over. Apparently they made up.
Part Two
Joe propped open the emergency exit to generate a breeze through the store. He was reading a book about Ireland. The book described the Irish Sea as lonely. Joe liked that. He thought about taking up cigarettes in order to kill off some of his olfactory powers. The smell of old books was so specific and affecting. Joe could hardly inhale without experiencing claustrophobia. He wondered if he was going crazy, going under.
“Won’t you come unbury me?” he whispered to himself. He tried to determine the provenance of this line and remembered repeating it to himself as he drifted off to sleep the night before.
This time the 10-year-old bibliophile in the Mystery/Thriller section didn’t hear him, but someone Up There must have, for the front door opened and she walked towards him with a paper grocery sack clutched to her chest. She set it down on the counter and stared at him for a moment. He remembered the old “Laverne & Shirley” gag where Carmine or Frank DeFazio would say something along the lines of, “Only an idiot would go out in weather like this.” And Lenny and Squiggy would burst in, all leather and pomade, and Squiggy would call out “Hello” in a pinched, nasal punch-line of a voice. Joe had asked the universe for rescuing and… “Hello.”
He stared back at her. Her hair wasn’t sticking up as chaotically as it had the day before. She’d put barrettes in it to keep it off her forehead. She had little freckles on her face that reminded Joe of sparse constellations. Her hands, resting on the rolled top of the grocery sack, were pale with long tapered fingers. Joe remembered reading somewhere that tapered fingers signified royal lineage. Her nose was maybe a little too big for her face. He wanted to kiss its bridge and feel her cheekbone resting in his eye-socket.
She started to say something, reconsidered and pushed the bag towards him. Joe unrolled the top and removed a stack of Travis McGee paperbacks by John D. MacDonald.
“These are great,” Joe told her, meaning it. “I love how Travis McGee lives on a houseboat.”
“I know. ‘Slip F-18,’ ‘Bahia Mar.’ I read them all.” She picked up “A Purple Place For Dying” and opened it to the title page. “They’re autographed.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. My grandmother was obsessed with him. She tracked him down in the eighties before he died.”
“Why are you selling them? Never mind. That’s rude.”
“That’s okay. She doesn’t want them anymore.” Her strength ebbed. Her fingers wound into each other and her eyes welled up and fell down towards the books. “Fuck,” she whispered. “I’m such an asshole.”
Her shoulders heaved. She let loose a small wail and suddenly she was crying. The 10-year-old kid edged down the aisle and disappeared around an end-cap. Instinctively, Joe reached over the counter and took her hand. It was warm. Her long fingers squeezed him.
“Hey, it’s all right. It’s gonna be all right.” He lowered his face into her line of vision and made eye contact with her.
She laughed once through her tears and said, “I’m sorry. You’re right. I haven’t slept at all. I’ve been up all night for weeks reading my grandmother’s books.” She straightened as if remembering something, pulled her hand from Joe’s, wiped the tears from her freckled cheeks and asked, “So, can you buy these?”
Joe winced. “Yeah, I mean, sure. The thing is, these are actually worth some money and I can’t really do it until my boss shows up. And, frankly, he’s a dick. He’s not gonna give you even close to what they’re worth. You should sell them yourself on eBay. You’d get a lot more.”
“Yeah… I don’t have a computer. I’m not good at all that stuff.”
“I could help you.” Joe realized that maybe he seemed creepy. He wiped his forehead with his sleeve and said, “Look, you seem nice. If you want, we could meet up at the library or an Internet coffee shop or something and I could show you how to do it. Sell stuff on the Internet.”
“How long would it take?”
“Just an hour or so.”
“No, I mean the turnaround on selling them on the Internet.”
“Gosh. A couple of weeks.”
The slamming of the emergency exit door startled Joe. He wheeled around to see Ronald. His boss had apparently overheard a significant portion of the exchange because he was charging towards the sales counter. He looked pissed.
“Joe, you and I are going to have a serious talk,” Ronald said. He turned to address the customer. “I’m sorry, ma’am. How can I help you?”
She looked from Ronald to Joe and stammered something incomprehensible.
Ronald pulled a book from her bag, opened it to the title page and said, “Autographed? Nice. I’d be willing to give you, say, seven dollars a book.”
Joe snorted.
She scrunched up her face and said, “You know what? I can’t sell these. Not right now anyway.” She put the books back in the bag.
The way the afternoon sunlight concentrates itself on her right cheek, Joe thought, it must be in love with her as well.
Joe said, “Ronald, you’re a dick.”
Ronald said, “Joe, you’re fired.”
“Gosh, Uncle Ronnie, that’s too bad. That means you’re going to have to pay my unemployment.”
On his way to the front door, Joe called out to the 10-year-old kid lurking in the corner, “Get outside and soak up a little sunshine. It’s only a matter of time before we all croak, right?”
Next to Joe, the girl pulled a paperback out of her grocery sack and tossed it to the kid. His eyes grew wide and he hollered thank you as Joe and the girl breezed out of the Hey Penny Bookstore.
Part Three
Joe offered to carry her bag of books. They walked slowly past the shops of the strip mall. Joe could feel her eyes on him.
“Regarding the question you asked as I was leaving the other day: Where did you have in mind?” she asked.
“Excuse me?” Joe needed a second to process this.
“‘Won’t you come away with me?’ I have excellent hearing. Ever since I had an ear infection when I was seven. It’s not always such a great thing. I can hear couples fighting in adjacent houses.”
“Oh. So you heard me?”
“You were talking to me, right?”
“I’m a mess.”
She laughed. “So, where did you have in mind?”
They walked to the park. She told Joe that her name was Anna. They laid down on the grass and held hands.
“Nagy-mama isn’t nagy-mama anymore.” She said, pronouncing it so that “Nagy” sounded like “nyugh.”
“Is that what you call your grandma?”
“It’s Hungarian for grandmother. She came over here when she was about my age. Fleeing the Communists. She went from the aristocracy to a tomato-canning factory in the blink of an eye. She never got bitter about it. Her husband did, but she didn’t.”
“You loved her a lot.”
“I still do.”
“Where is she?”
“Sunnydale Retirement Community. It’s a fucking morgue is what it is. She’s got Alzheimer’s. A couple of months ago, they found her wandering around by Fair Park. She’d walked so far that her feet were bloody and she didn’t know where she was. Or who she was, really.”
“Ouch.” They were quiet a little while.
Anna cried again, big tears this time. Joe kissed them away as they rolled down over her freckles.
The sun set over the humming electrical relay station. Anna didn’t have a car, so Joe gave her a ride to Nagy-mama’s house. Anna moved in when they put Nagy-mama in the old-folks’ home. The house was a small, red brick affair surrounded by huge, new, zero-clearance-lot behemoths. Joe pulled his car into the driveway in the shade of a pine tree that sprawled the width of the front yard. Joe thought the tree must have been three hundred years old.
The house was spare and grandmotherly. Bookshelves lined the walls. They were mostly full, but Joe could tell that significant chunks had been removed. Anna explained that she had been selling off her grandmother’s collection.
“She won’t ever be able to read again. My parents don’t care. I feel bad about it, but I don’t have an income. I made a deal with myself that I wouldn’t sell any of her books until I’d read it.” Anna made a face at Joe. “I know that’s crazy, but I felt like it was important.”
There was a globe on an end table. Joe spun it and said, “Wherever my finger lands is where I’m gonna move.” Anna laughed. Joe squeezed his eyes shut and put his finger down. “Prague.” He let his finger slide off the globe and fall with a thud on the table. “Who am I kidding?” Joe said. “I’ve got inertia like a fucking disease.” This made Anna laugh.
She made chili while he put together a salad. They ate on the back porch next to a garage that leaned at a 40-degree angle.
“Basically, my mom and dad are just waiting for her to die. They’ve got a realtor who’s already got a buyer lined up. The buyer’s hired an architect who’s drawn up plans. This house will be razed a week after she dies, which won’t be long now.”
“You don’t think she could hang on for a while?”
Anna shook her head. “There are all sorts of complications, issues, medical bullshit. Do you know what usually happens with Alzheimer’s people? They get starved to death. How fucked is that?” Anna shook her head and smiled at Joe. “I’m sorry. I’m not much of a first date, am I?”
“I like how sad you get. I feel like a fucking zombie myself half the time.”
She kissed him then.
They spent the night in a creaky old bed in a house that wouldn’t be there next spring. They kept their clothes on, but when they woke, they were wrapped up in each other. Bound together by need and design.
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Part Four
The next day, they drove to the Sunnydale Retirement Community. On the way, Anna told him how Nagy-mama was convinced that her Alzheimer’s was the result of extended exposure to the rubber cement she’d used every day as secretary to the president of a savings and loan.
“It wasn’t even like she was gluing industrial-grade shit,” Anna said. “It was slips of paper into a book. The boss just made her use rubber cement for some reason.”
The Alzheimer’s wing smelled like crisis, Joe thought, an urgent smell of everything going wrong. The nurses seemed to be hiding. Nagy-mama woke up when they entered her room. She smiled and blinked.
A woman’s voice called through the curtain, “You better not be having another party, you. Always with the noise and the parties, you.”
Nagy-mama’s watery eyes settled on Anna then softened with vague recognition. “Oh, it’s you, honey.” Her voice, barely a whisper, sweetened the air in the room. Anna gave her grandmother’s cheek a gentle kiss.
Nagy-mama noticed Joe and squinted. “Travis McGee,” she said, which made Joe crack up.
“I wish,” he said.
“Nagy-mama, this is Joe. He’s my boyfriend.” Anna reached out and touched Joe’s shoulder. Nagy-mama started to say something, but couldn’t make the words. Anna spoke instead. “I brought you a present.” Anna reached into her large purse and extracted a plastic sandwich bag containing a pine cone covered with bird seed. “It’s from the tree in your front yard. I put some peanut butter in it and rolled it in bird seed just like you taught me when I was little.”
She smiled at Nagy-mama and handed her the gift. “I thought we could hang it outside your window and you could watch the birds.”
Nagy-mama took it and squeezed it. It made a slight crunch. “Bird? Butter?” She looked at Anna, lost.
The woman on the other side of the curtain called out, “Lights out time. Party’s over time.”
For the third time in two days, tears flowed down Anna’s freckled cheeks. “I love you so much, Nagy-mama. This isn’t fair. This is not how it’s supposed to be.”
As Nagy-mama reached out and squeezed Anna’s forearm, a stern look came across her features. “Stop crying. You need to pull yourself together. I am not dead, girl. Stop crying.”
Anna appeared to almost smile. She hiccuped and let a sharp breath escape her lips. “I’m sorry. You’re right. What was I thinking?” She turned to Joe. “Would you mind waiting down by the car? I think we need a minute alone is all.”
“Certainly.”
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Part Five
A few nurses loitered on the edge of the parking lot, smoking. Joe thought about asking them for a cigarette, thought again about taking up smoking. Probably one of them had a flask. He could have used a taste of something. He sat on the trunk of his car, turned his face up to the sky, and thought about how quickly things change.
Joe used his cell-phone to call his mom. When she answered, he immediately regretted having called. He could hear his father in the background yelling something about Uncle Ronald and respect. Joe told his mom that that everything was falling apart, but in a good way. He didn’t expect her to understand, but he asked her to trust him. Joe’s father grabbed the phone and said, “You know what I call this, Joe? Pilot error, Joe.”
“Guess what, Dad” — Joe tried to keep his voice calm — “I’m stepping on the gas and letting go of the wheel. How do you like them apples?” Joe snapped his phone shut. He had rehearsed this speech a million times in his mind. Spoken aloud, it sounded stilted and immature. Joe felt profound disappointment.
A white shuttle bus pulled into the parking lot. The double doors lurched open and a big, mustachioed man in scrubs appeared in the doorway. Before climbing out, he turned back to face the passengers, who appeared to be residents of the Sunnydale R.C. He called out, “Y’all stay here. I gotta go take a leak. I’ll be right back.” He sprinted in through the automatic front doors of the facility.
Joe watched the old folks sit and fidget. Then, suddenly, one of them headed for the open front door. The little old man wore a fedora and moved slowly, holding onto the headrests of the seats he passed. He reached the front and moved sideways down the first big step, holding the railing. Joe watched as seven or eight fellow passengers followed suit, standing and hobbling down the center aisle. As the first old man reached the bottom step, he lost his grip and went headfirst to the pavement. Joe rushed over to help.
The smoking nurses had disappeared.
The old man blinked and moaned as Joe arrived. A small patch of blood on the old man’s temple made his stomach turn. An old woman stepped off the bus and all her weight landed on the injured man’s left shin. He cried out. Joe caught the old woman just before she collapsed on top of the old man. She whimpered in Joe’s arms as he laid her on the pavement. The others kept coming.
“Wait, wait,” Joe cried. He stood and tried to block the bus’ doorway.
As he held the doorframe and tried to stem the tide, he heard Anna’s voice call his name from somewhere up above. He looked over his shoulder and there she was, tying the pine-cone to the tree branch outside Nagy-mama’s window.
The mustachioed nurse ran up and surveyed the scene. He got right in Joe’s face. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Your job, dick.”
The nurse put his hand on Joe’s shoulder. This was weirdly soothing for a moment, but then it caused Joe to lose his grip. A small gang of old people fell out of the bus and landed on top of Joe and the nurse. Lying in the middle of this pile of humanity, Joe looked up and saw Anna waving and smiling at him.
