The Moment of Everything (22 page)

But it was silent beyond the door. So I kicked it, hard. Pain darted up my leg.

“Crap!” I yelled at either Jason or the door. I wasn’t sure which.

The door jerked open, and he stared up at me. Then he scooted past me and headed back toward the front of the store.

“He’s gone!” he screamed over his shoulder.

“He’s gone? You think I don’t know that? I held him while he died. Where the hell were you!? Huh? Where the hell were you? I sat there and watched him die. Where were you?”

“I’m not talking about…” He turned to me, his breathing heavy. “I’m not talking about Hugo.”

“What?” How could he be talking about anyone else? How could he not be consumed with this?

“Grendel, you asshole.” Like an idiot, I looked around as if the cat would just appear. “He’s been gone for two weeks, and you haven’t even noticed.”

The cat. Hugo was dead, and Jason was thinking about the cat. Whatever thread of sanity I’d been able to keep intact over the last week snapped. I felt that quivery release in my chest when you first know you’re falling and can’t stop and the chill from knowing that you don’t care. A hard landing was better than holding on this long.

“I want you out,” I said.

“Out of what?”

“Out of the Dragonfly. Robert will send you your severance.”

“You can’t do that,” he said.

“The Dragonfly is mine now,” I said. “I can do what I want.”

Someone was tapping on the door, asking to be let in. The door was unlocked but we still had the sign set to
N-O-P-E
. Jason and I, our attention drawn from each other, turned to see Gloria, standing at the door in green Keds and a
Too many books, too little time
sweatshirt, waving at us and pointing to the inside of the store, asking to be let in. Jason picked up the nearest book to him and threw it at the door. She tapped her watch and pointed at the posted hours. This time, I threw a book at her. Then Jason and I laid out a barrage of flying paperbacks along the front window after her as she scurried down the sidewalk past my mother. When it was over, Jason sat in the new chair, holding on to the armrests like the chair was getting ready for liftoff.

“What’s going on here?” Mama said, coming in the door, a cup of coffee in each hand and her purse swinging from her arm.

“We were fine without you,” Jason said to me. “Everything would have been fine without you.”

“Children, don’t,” Mama said, setting the coffee down. “Quarreling isn’t going to fix anything.”

I looked at Jason. She was right. I couldn’t fix this.

“Dae-Jung says you’re taking that job,” he said.

“What job?” Mama moved to my side, looking at me expectantly. “What kind of job? In an office? Will you have a secretary?”

“He says that Dizzy told him Avi got the idea to buy Apollo because of you,” Jason continued. “He says that that’s why the building is being sold. That’s why we’re losing our lease. That’s why the Dragonfly is closing. Because of you.”

“Is that what he’s saying?” I asked.

“That’s what I’m saying,” Jason said.

His face was red and his whole body tight. I could feel his anger from ten feet away.

“Am I really fired?” he asked.

“Fired?” my mother said. “Who said anything about anyone getting fired? Of course you’re not fired.”

“A lot can happen while you’re out getting coffee, Mama.”

“Am I?” he asked.

“Geez,” I said. “No, of course not. I have no idea what words are coming out of my mouth anymore.”

That seemed to defuse him, and he leaned back in his chair. It was the first time I’d ever seen him sit in a chair properly instead of drooping over the sides with his legs swinging. The chair looked much too big for his small body. He shifted and reached down into the seat, pulling at something he’d sat on. He held up a broken Waverley novel,
Kenilworth
. I joined him on the stage, sitting cross-legged on the floor by the chair. He handed me the book.

“Hugo died,” Jason said.

“Yeah, he did.”

“Grendel’s gone.”

“I see that now.”

“She’s going to break up with me,” he said. “She’s just waiting for the memorial. Like that’s the end of it and she won’t be a bad person. Like everything will be okay after the memorial. I assume we’re doing something like that.”

“It’s a thing people do.”

I didn’t try to argue with him, tell him lies to make him feel better. It wouldn’t have worked anyway. If it did, I’d have told myself a few.

“Just one more,” Robert said, turning the paper to face me on the window table in Cuppa Joe, careful to avoid the wet ring left by my mug of tea. I nibbled on a sweetened rice biscuit as I pretended to look over the document. Robert sipped his plain green tea. He had advised me to wait on the paperwork. There was time. But I wanted it over. Final, with nothing hovering over me. Hugo left the store to Jason and me equally. But my partnership had thrown off the balance. Robert, with the help of a lawyer, was fixing it. I remember how adult I felt when I signed the papers for the store with Hugo. Now I just felt old.

I’d come here by myself, telling Mama she’d be bored by all this paperwork. It was true, but I also needed to get away from her. After Jason’s outburst about the Apollo job, she found the offer package in my apartment and from that moment on, she hadn’t been able to stop bugging me about it. She’d never been excited about any of my software jobs. She couldn’t get her brain wrapped around what I did there. But this? This had potential. This had status. This had money attached. This she could understand.

I looked up from my paper-signing to find Robert watching me instead of my pen. He’d been hovering around the Dragonfly for the last week. And he wasn’t the only one. Jason hadn’t seemed to leave, and I’d found a sleeping bag in the office. It was almost as if he were trying to catch Grendel or Hugo lurking about.

“I’m fine,” I said.

“We need to talk about the memorial service.”

“Not yet,” I said.

“I know it’s hard, but people expect it,” Robert said.

He was right. We’d already had lots of requests at the store. It was getting harder to put people off. I was getting to the point where I wanted one, to share the grief, to risk not being brave. But I remembered what Jason said about Nimue waiting to dump him until after the service.

“Not yet,” I said.

The last few days had been a blur as I tried to retrieve a whiff of normal when nothing was normal anymore. In the movies, they show this time in a montage of scenes with a syrupy pop ballad in the background, images of people finding items left behind by the ones they lost. It’s all over in the space of a couple of minutes, time-warped recovery, because everyone would walk out if it were anything else. No one wants to pay money to experience that kind of pain.

“He wouldn’t want you to be sad,” Robert said.

“Well, he’s dead so he doesn’t get a say anymore.” I was sorry as soon as I said it, but I hurt too bad to take it back. “How long did you know?”

“Know what?”

“Know that he was sick. He was sick a while, wasn’t he? He stopped smoking. He stopped smoking everything. The shorter hours at the store. Seeing old friends like Portia. He saw this coming.”

Robert nodded. “Heart disease. He told me a couple of years ago. He knew he was on borrowed time. He was just going to coast until the end. With the financials being what they were, he thought he and the Dragonfly would go out about the same time. Then you and Jason started to make a go of the store. He started looking at it more as a legacy, something to leave you. That’s when we changed his will to leave it to you both.”

“How’s Charlene?” I asked, trying to talk about something else. The subject of Hugo was just too hard.

“She prays for you. We both do.”

“I don’t believe in that. Neither did Hugo.”

“Doesn’t matter. We pray for you anyway.”

He let his hand linger on my shoulder before he left, and I didn’t watch him go.

It was a warm night and Mrs. Callahn had opened the tall windows in front of the store to let in the breeze from the bay. But it was past closing now and she slid the windows shut and locked them.

I’d never been alone in Cuppa Joe before. Having lost her lease as well, Mrs. Callahn was starting to pack up. The shop seemed empty and pathetic without other people. It was just a big tan room that smelled of coffee, stark and barren. No pictures on the walls. No plants. Just mismatched furniture and a long coffee bar. I felt like I was there for the first time.

“What are you going to do now?” Mrs. Callahn asked. “Out of business again.”

“We’ll see. Jason may keep it going. I’m not sure I have the heart for it.”

She sat in the chair across from me and sipped a coffee in a tall glass that made it look like a Guinness. I wondered how she slept at night.

“What about you?” I asked. “You moving Cuppa Joe?”

She shook her head. “Eighteen years is long enough. Time to move on. Start over. You should do the same.” She pointed at my open backpack and
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
sitting near the top. “What are you going to do about that?”

I didn’t understand. What was there to do? Did she know about Rajhit?

“Such foolishness,” she said, sliding the book from my backpack. “Such foolish, foolish hope.” She laid the book on the table, not opening it. She laid her hand flat and pressed her palm against the cover. I was no longer in the room for her. “‘Sunday is the first day of summer. Meet me in Pioneer Park, by the fountain, noon.’ So foolish.”

Sunday is the first day of summer. Meet me in Pioneer Park, by the fountain, noon.
She knew about that note. Only three people knew about that note. Me, Rajhit, and—

“You’re Catherine.”

We stared at each other. I could see her face twisting into fabrications, things she could say that would make me believe otherwise, but I knew the truth and there was no getting around it.

She shoved the book across the table at me. “This never happened. You left right after Robert did, and this never happened.”

I held the book against me and tried to think of all the things I’d wanted to say to Catherine if I ever found her, but I was coming up blank. All I could do was dumbly repeat, “You’re Catherine.”

She stood and turned away from me, going behind the counter, folding dish towels.

“Leave,” she said.

“I’m not going to tell anyone,” I said. “I wouldn’t do that.”

She didn’t look at me, just kept folding. But I wasn’t going anywhere.

“I know who Henry is,” I said.

She stopped.

“Do you want to know?” I asked.

She shook her head. Her eyes closed and her face grew solid as if she were trying to call up a force field around her.

I stood and walked slowly to the counter, not wanting her to bolt. “I’ve been wondering about you all this time, ever since I found out that the notes weren’t from 1961.”

“You should not have published them anyway,” she said. “That was wrong. Very wrong.”

“You’re right about that,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

Her head bent so I couldn’t see her face, but I did see two tears drop to the counter.

“We should not have been fighting,” she said.

“Who?” I asked.

“Hugo and me. He said we should put eggshells right on the soil of tomato plants. I told him no. It needs to compost first. But he insisted. He took me back to the gardening section in the Dragonfly to show me a book. He pointed to a book back there, but then Jason called him. ‘Read this,’ he said. ‘I need you to read this.’ He pointed to a book. And after he was gone, I looked at the book I thought he’d pointed to.”

And then I knew. Hugo. She thought Henry was Hugo. He’d gone by that name for a while in college. What was it? Something about a girl liking it more than Hugo, thinking Hugo sounded like a communist. He knew Mrs. Callahn in school. Henry. She thought Hugo was Henry. And if she thought he was Henry…then the notes…

“You were in love with Hugo,” I said. “You thought Henry in the notes was Hugo writing to you.”

And with that, her eyes, soft with sorrow, met mine.

“But Henry kept talking about not knowing you,” I said. “You’ve known Hugo for forty years.”

“I thought it was some kind of romantic game, leaving those notes for me, using a different name. I thought he needed this to erase all our history, so we could see each other with new eyes.”

I moved a little closer, tried to guide her back to the chair, but she remained standing, as if her feet had grown roots into the floor.

“The first day of summer,” she said. “I watched him from across the street. I did not want to be the first to arrive. So I watched. When he left, I was going to wait five minutes and then go. But he never left. He just sat in his chair and read. Noon came. Then twelve thirty. One. He stood and stretched and came here for lunch. I came back and made him a grilled cheese sandwich.”

I pictured her, sitting over at Apollo, watching him in the window. An hour she waited. Each minute going by, another breath of hope gone. And then to come back and make him lunch, with him never knowing what she’d just been through.

“I had all of these words in me that I never said, not to anyone. I wanted men to respect me, even fear me a little. They come and they go. I wanted more of my life than to be someone’s wife. I liked being alone. But I did not like being lonely. Hugo was always kind. I started to think maybe his kindness meant something more. And then I found the notes. We started writing.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say. I was sorry, for everything I’d done, for love she would never have, even for meddling in the world of the Dragonfly. I did this.

I turned to go, stopping at the table to pick up the papers Robert had left and my backpack.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
sat on the table. I walked to the door without it. I had become accustomed to letting things go.

Jason sat cross-legged in one of the reading chairs, wrinkling the legs of the new khakis he’d bought. They were too big for him and bunched at his waist under a brown leather belt. I should have asked Mama to help him pick some out. He held a paper plate full of potluck lasagna, though he hadn’t been eating a lot since the breakup with Nimue, who had not waited until after the memorial service after all. She had come to the service, though, trying to convince everyone she was a concerned ex-girlfriend. While everyone else wore the color of flowers that Hugo loved, she appeared in melodramatic black, complete with a veil, like she was attending a state funeral instead of an informal memorial, in a dress that hung just short of her panty line. I had to fight the impulse to drop hot food into her bare lap. Instead, I let my mother do it.

“So that’s it,” Jason said. “No more Dragonfly.”

“I didn’t say that. I said I’d be willing to sell you my half of the business or be a silent partner. Whichever works better for you.”

He set the plate on the stage and looked out the window over the flower arrangement of carnations the Chamber of Commerce had sent.

“So you’re going to work for Apollo?”

“No. I’m not sure what I’m going to do. But whatever it is, I’m probably going to do it someplace other than here.”

Hugo had left the duplex to Jason and me as well as the store. We’d already decided to sell it, which would give me enough money to live on for a long time. I indulged in a fantasy that I’d leave my key and a note and slither away. Get a backpack and a bus pass. Find a nice small town. Work as a waitress just for kicks. Be that mysterious girl with a past that everyone in town wonders about. Maybe the sheriff would fall in love with me, regardless of what he assumed to be my troubled past. “Only have as much stuff as you can pack in fifteen minutes, in case you need to get out of town in a hurry,” Hugo told me once. I was starting to see the wisdom in that advice.

“I’ll stay long enough to finish packing and find a new location,” I said. “Even help you hire minions. You always wanted minions.”

He laid the paper plate on the floor beside his chair. I almost protested, thinking Grendel would get at it. But I stopped myself in time. It had been four weeks and still no sign of the cat. Jason had been strangely quiet about it since that day he first told me the cat was missing. Actually, he’d been quiet about everything—Nimue, Grendel, Hugo. He seemed so adrift, shuffling around the Dragonfly like an old man who had lost his way home.

I thought he would be angry with me when I told him I was leaving. I thought he would yell and get all red and call me a quitter and a traitor. I was counting on it. I’d created the argument we would have in my head. I imagined how I would stay still, calm and stoic, and say things like, “I understand that you’re angry and you have every right to be.”

“You were here only because of Hugo.”

“That’s not true.”

“Whatever.”

I turned my head. Not being able to look at people I cared about was becoming too common. My mind dashed ahead to what might be next for me. A new job somewhere, a new life, new people who I would someday not be able to look at. I’d always thought of the hard times in my life as being like a book. The problem is resolved and then you move on. But it wasn’t like that. The hard times didn’t just end. The borders weren’t that clear. They blend into the good times and link arms with more bad times. And our losses become bricks of silence around us.

“You’ll be fine,” I said.

“Stop acting like what you do doesn’t matter to anybody, like this affects only you.”

I reached around him and pulled him into a hug. I felt his arms tighten around me and heard him swallow hard. Then he pushed me away and, stopping to pick up his backpack, headed toward the door.

“You don’t get to do that,” he said. “Be all ‘you’re the best’ so you get to leave feeling all good about everything. You don’t get off that easy.”

He slammed the door so hard that I didn’t think the bell would ever stop ringing. And now I was alone with my mother.

“You’re well rid of this place,” Mama said, moving closer to me. “It’s a burden you don’t need, Margaret Victoria. Just put all this behind you.”

I’m sure in her head, her voice sounded motherly, reassuring. If I’d been smart, I’d have kept my mouth shut. But as is always so true when I’m around my mother, I was in no way smart.

“It’s more of a home to me than any place I’ve ever been.”

I closed my eyes and regretted the words as soon as they were out of my mouth. Not because they weren’t true, but because they were hurtful.

“Well, it’s good to know how you really feel about me and your daddy,” she said, her back straightening.

“I’m staying here,” I said.

“But you just said…”

“I don’t mean here at the Dragonfly. It’s over.”

“Then I see no reason why you don’t just come home.”

I looked up toward the front window at Hugo’s empty chair, and I tried to think of what he would say at this moment. I focused on my next breath and waited for words from Hugo’s mystical universe to fill my head. But they didn’t show up.

“Really?” I said. “You see no reason why I wouldn’t want to return to that house and live with you and Daddy?”

“I just want what’s best for you,” she said.

“No, I don’t think so,” I said. “You just want me to suffer like you do.”

For a long unbreakable moment, our eyes met. I smelled Chanel No. 5 and dust and then it was there. The crayon scent of her lipstick, just like the day when I found out about my father. I saw her face as it was then, hard and blank, like armor, and my cheek burned with phantom pain.

“I have no doubt you love him,” I said. “You love him more than the world he provides you. You love him more than you love me. More than yourself. But I also know your greatest love betrays you over and over again, and you do nothing about it.”

I don’t remember the look on my mother’s face or if she slammed the door on the way out. The next thing I knew, I was on my knees, left with my own words in my head. A lifetime of silence was broken in a few seconds. Everything was gone now.

I looked around the store, and finally, my mother’s version of the Dragonfly had started to fade from my eyes. I remembered the store swollen with people on a recent Saturday night. I remembered a group of boys—eleven, maybe twelve years old—pudgy cheeks, feet they hadn’t grown into and thoughts only beginning to understand the importance of girls, scuffling about in the Graphic Novels section. They huddled over one book, pointing, laughing, one shoving the other on the shoulder. They raced to the counter to pay for the book by counting out coins and crumbled dollars from an Altoids tin. A woman in a floral dress holding a rhinestone leash attached to a Pomeranian browsed through Pets with the latest Patricia Cornwell in the crook of her arm. And then there was Hugo, his reading glasses on the tip of his nose, a novel in his lap. I walked over to a reading chair. I could still smell the faintest hint of his tobacco, and it was then that the tears came. At the time I thought we were keeping the Dragonfly alive. Now I realized we were keeping Hugo alive. But it wasn’t enough.

I heard a tapping on the door and, wiping my eyes, got up expecting to see someone coming back to pick up a casserole dish. But I saw Rajhit. He was standing just outside the door, leaning his head on his arm against the glass. He looked at me, and his eyes were as weary as mine.

He stepped back away from the door as I unlocked it. For a moment, we stood there looking at each other in the open doorway, the evening pedestrians of Mountain View passing behind him on their way to dinner or drinks or to shop at Apollo.

I held out my hand to him and he took it. And then his arms were around me. Tears came after that. Hugo. The Dragonfly. Us. Then I took his hand and led him back into the stacks.

We sat in the Gardening section, me on my Kik-Step stool, Rajhit on the floor with his legs stretched across the aisle. In the dim quiet, everything around us looked forgotten.

“I didn’t know if you’d want me at the memorial,” he said. “I thought it might be too difficult. And with your mother here.”

“Everything is more difficult with my mother here,” I said. “You didn’t have to stay away. You loved him, too.”

He pulled his knees toward him and wrapped his arms around them. His hair was a bit longer. He’d bought new flip-flops, navy canvas with a Nike swoop on the sole.

“Thanks for picking her up from the airport,” I said. “I should have gotten in touch to tell you that much earlier.”

He shook his head. “You had a lot to deal with.”

“Yeah, my mother is a handful.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know.”

I leaned my head against the books beside me and tried not to look at him. I just wanted to feel him with me—no touching, no kisses, no sex—just be with him.

“I came to the hospital,” he said. “When you weren’t there. I spent time with him. I wanted you to know that.”

It felt as if he were on the other side of a river and the stepping stones would appear if I just knew the right words. But I sat mute, feeling my sharp edges.

“I’m going to Amsterdam,” he said. “The bike shop I’ve been talking to offered me an apprenticeship.”

“How long will you be gone?”

He shrugged. “Don’t know. My place sold. I’ve got some money to live on for a while. Thought I’d travel a bit.”

“Eat. Pray. Fix Bikes.”

“Something like that.”

We got up and walked to the front of the store. With each step I changed my mind about whether I should tell him or not. But when we reached the front, I was standing on the side of telling.

“I found her,” I said. “Catherine. I know who she is.”

He shook his head and pressed his fingers lightly around mine.

“You are my Catherine.” And then he was gone.

When the cab honked its horn outside of my apartment the next morning, it broke the heavy silence Mama and I were using to wage war.

She stood when she heard the horn and walked to the front door, leaving her luggage sitting in the middle of my living room. I picked up the bags and followed her.

Outside the sun was warm and golden, but with a promise of colder weather. Fall was coming. My Dragonfly summer was over.

I handed Mama’s bags one by one to the cabbie, who placed them in the trunk and walked to the driver’s door while my mother looked at him disdainfully, shocked he hadn’t come around to open her door. I reached for the handle of the back passenger’s side for my mother, but I didn’t open it. In a few seconds, my mother would be gone. And I was ready for some space. It’s just that I didn’t want her to go like this.

We stood looking at each other.

“You don’t have to go back yet,” I said.

Her face didn’t change, but her head cocked slightly to the side.

“You could stay…Well, not here obviously, but somewhere. I hear the Fairmont in San Jose is nice. Or San Francisco. I’m just saying that you don’t have to go back.”

I watched as Mama fought the smile that pulled at the corner of her mouth. She leaned toward me, tipped my chin up with her index finger, and pressed her lips against my cheek. Lilac, lipstick, Chanel No. 5. Then she whispered in my ear.

“
You
are my greatest love.”

And with that, she reached for the door, opened it herself, and slipped into the backseat. The air around me still smelled of lilac as I stood in the street, a few golden sweet-gum leaves falling around me, and watched her ride away.

“When does the truck come?” Jason asked.

“When we tell them we’re ready.”

We were putting the books into storage, at least until we found an acceptable buyer, which was proving harder than I’d thought. Jason and I both agreed that we weren’t going to let our books go to any of those online sellers who sell a book for a penny on eBay or Amazon and then make their money from the shipping. They didn’t care about the books. They didn’t care about the people who bought the books.

Sitting on the Kik-Step stool, I reached down and traced the dark rectangles in the carpet below me, the outline where shelves had been. Twenty years of browsers through the Dragonfly had created threadbare pathways that looked like chalk outlines of dead bodies in a Raymond Chandler novel. If my parents told me my childhood home was gone forever in the winds of a tornado, I wouldn’t feel as bad as I did right then.

“I need air,” I told Jason, who didn’t hear me because he was already engrossed in one of the books from his stack.

I poured the last half of my beer into one of Hugo’s tea mugs and stepped outside onto the sidewalk. I leaned back against the glass window of the Dragonfly and took a good look at Apollo. I hadn’t spoken to Avi since I turned down her offer. Dizzy had moved up to Portland before the memorial. None of us had tried that hard to hide our disappointment with the other.

Apollo—the kingdom I’d abdicated—was moving on. Big signs in the windows announced that the store was moving to another location, and everything was on sale. Before Dae-Jung left for Portland with Dizzy (who’d asked him after all), he told me about Apollo’s plan to move its branches into smaller stores so they would have a more neighborhoody feel to them. So we were packing. Apollo was packing. Mountain View would be left without a bookstore.