The Moment of Everything (8 page)

“See what I mean?” Jason said as he yawned and stretched.

“It’s not the same thing,” I said, picking up
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
. I wanted to say, “Henry and Catherine fell in love.” But I didn’t. The phrase felt uncomfortably trite. It was something my parents said all the time, telling tales of their college sweetheart years to dinner guests on a current of laughter. As a child I was awed by their fairy-tale story and believed them when they promised it would happen to me as well. I expected it and feared the moment when I’d meet my love and my life would click into place and all would be decided. I felt a heaviness around my heart just thinking about it now.

I was about to walk away from Jason when I noticed the small wooden recipe box that Hugo kept by the leather sales ledger. Inside the box, I knew I’d find tattered index cards with the names of all the Dragonfly’s customers with book trade credit. Some of those cards had been in there probably as long as there had been a Dragonfly. Maybe someone in that box knew something about the book. Maybe it was worth a few phone calls.

“Hey, give that back,” Jason said, grabbing the box out of my hands and holding it tightly against his T-shirt, right in front of the print of a bicycle proclaiming,
TWO WHEELS. ONE DARK LORD
.

“That’s confidential information!”

“What confidential information?” I reached for the box, but he turned his torso away from me and all I got was a fistful of black T-shirt. “We’re not talking state secrets.”

Jason pushed by me, tucking the card box in the crook of his arm like he was sprinting for the goal line.

“Let her take a look. It won’t hurt anything,” Hugo said. “Right, Robert?”

“Do I look like a man who wants to get involved in whatever it is you people are talking about?” Robert asked without looking up, his fingers dancing over his calculator.

“Jeez,” Jason said. “If we had another 9/11 and the FBI came in here wanting to look through our files to see who’d bought
Martha Stewart’s Guide to Home Bomb-Making
, you’d tell them to go to hell. But
she’s
got a free pass?”

“It’s hardly the same thing,” I said. “You don’t keep records of what books people buy.”

“Bollocks,” Jason said. “It is the same thing.”

“He has a point, Maggie,” Hugo said.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“It would be different if you worked here,” Hugo said. “Actually—” he walked over the cash register, pulled out a twenty, and handed it to me.

“What’s this?”

“It’s your wages for the last two hours,” Hugo said.

Robert stood and reached across the counter to snag the twenty from my hand and put it back in the cash register. “She’ll get a proper check just like Jason does.” He riffled through his papers and handed me a blank timecard.

I stared at it. A timecard? I hadn’t filled out one of these since my work-study job in college. “But I haven’t done anything but nag you about this book. You’re going to pay me for that?”

“Jason nags me all day, and I pay him.”

“You’re seriously going to do this?” Jason asked.

“Seems I already have.” Hugo leaned back against the counter, stirring his tea. “Solves all kinds of problems. You’re always complaining about Maggie doing things in the store without actually working here. And now she’s an employee. She can look through the customer files without any ethical quandaries.”

I’m not sure who was more disturbed by this proposal, me or Jason. I looked over at him, his breaths coming out in short puffs, the fingers of his pinched hands wiggling like they were playing scales on an invisible keyboard. He was already feeling bits of his fiefdom slipping away. And me? What was I going to do here? I was already having a hard enough time finding a job between romance novels. When was I going to find time to do any work?

“Look, you’re around all the time anyway,” Hugo said. “I’d say you’ve completed our training program. Next thing you know you’ll be on the fast track to serious screwing around like Jason.” He wrapped his arm around my shoulders and squeezed me against him as if he understood what a consolation prize my life had become. “Nobody panic. It’s just until Maggie finds a new job.”

Jason looked back and forth between Hugo and me in disbelief. He walked up to Hugo, lifted the spoon out of his mug, sucked on it like a lollipop, then plunked it back in the tea. Then he slammed the recipe box on the counter and disappeared into the stacks.

“That boy’s not wrapped too tight,” Robert said.

“He’ll come around,” Hugo said, looking forlornly at his mug. He paced back and forth in front of the counter, unsure of what to do with the germ-infected thing.

“I won’t take handouts,” I said, “If you’re paying me, I mean to work.”

“That’ll be a change around here,” Robert said.

“Fine. Do whatever you think ten dollars an hour requires,” Hugo said. “I trust your judgment. Just don’t sit on the floor. Jason’s bare feet have been there.”

With two hours of work already under my belt, I treated myself to a coffee break. Next door at Cuppa Joe, a lanky teenager pulled himself away from the Overly Tattooed & Pierced around the outside tables to come inside and take my order.

I knew the chalkboard menu at Cuppa Joe by heart. The four-dollar drink names were straight out of a witch’s book of spells.

“Savage Hammerhead Mocha?” the kid asked.

I never gave my usual order a second thought. I’d given up just about everything from my working life except this. But at $10 an hour before taxes, how long was I working for a Savage Hammerhead Mocha?

“Small coffee with room.”

“Nifty,” he said, looking at the cash register as if he couldn’t decide which one of the poles on a car battery to attach the jumper cable. Squeezing his eyes halfway shut and rubbing one hand over his shaved head, he poked at the keys and looked relieved when it rang up the right amount. I didn’t blame him. Mrs. Callahn, the owner of Cuppa Joe, was beyond particular about how things ran in her shop. While Hugo’s management style was a laughing brook, Mrs. Callahn’s was a full-force fire hose.

I handed over a buck fifty plus a quarter to the tip jar, which was papered over with cartoons enticing you to give money to the underpaid. The kid handed me my coffee, which I milked up before settling in with the recipe box at the large round table in the middle of Cuppa Joe. Around me, at the smaller tables, several coders on laptops sat with headphones to save them from music that sounded like grumpy mating wildebeests. A group of medical residents pored over big three-ring binders, ignoring the two clean-cut khaki-clad guys next to them discussing “new paradigms.” In the corner, a middle-aged couple was fighting. Not yelling fighting. Leaning in and whispering fighting, which is actually worse.

A familiar pickup pulled up to the curb. Years ago, it must have been white, but now the orange rust stains gave it the look of a wild Pinto. Mrs. Callahn had arrived, her truck stacked with bags of beans from an organic supplier up in the Santa Cruz Mountains that only she seemed to have ever heard of. Petite and willowy with a marine buzz cut, she wore an orange broomstick skirt with a tank top, denim vest, and turquoise earrings large enough to eat dinner off of. Mrs. Callahn always looked like she should be running the gift shop of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum instead of a coffee shop in Silicon Valley. As with most Japanese women, I had a hard time telling how old she was, but Hugo knew her in college when he helped organize peace marches in the early seventies, so I figured she was about his age. There were rumors of an unhappy marriage deep in her past. It was said that her ex-husband had offered her $50,000 to take back her maiden name, and that she’d turned him down. As much as Mrs. Callahn might have struggled to keep Cuppa Joe going, she was rich in spite and resentment.

Mrs. Callahn maneuvered the Overly Tattooed & Pierced off their chairs and had them carry the dozen fifty-pound canvas bags into Cuppa Joe, following after them like an elephant herder.

Stopping at my table, she reached for my glass mug and held it up to the window light.

“Wrong! Very, very wrong! Not dark enough!”

“Mrs. Callahn…,” the kid said.

“No excuse. The Hammerhead should be darker. You know better. This is no good.”

The kid blinked three times, then ran into the storage room to hide.

“It’s not a Savage Hammerhead,” I said. “Just drip coffee today.”

Mrs. Callahn arched one eyebrow, thin as a whip. With no apology, she set my coffee back on the table and sat down next to me.

“Why so much milk?” she asked. “It’s good coffee. You cannot taste it with so much milk.”

Everyone knew Mrs. Callahn burned her beans. Most of her customers swore they liked it that way, but they were lying to themselves like the people who say they run marathons to relax. Hugo claimed the coffee at Cuppa Joe scared off the toxins and was the best colonic in Silicon Valley. Jason asked for it in an IV during gaming all-nighters. But I came here because at Cuppa Joe you didn’t have to learn a whole other language to order your coffee. Small, medium, large. That’s it. And there weren’t any mugs for sale or teddy bears or greeting cards on recycled paper with microchips so that cartoon penguins could sing “Happy Birthday” to you. Cuppa Joe was all about the coffee, no matter how foul. You could probably grind up the table I was sitting at and get a decent pot out of it. But honestly, the woman burned her beans, and I needed milk to get it down and that was the truth of it. But if Mrs. Callahn wanted to live in her own little fantasyland where Microsoft Windows ran like lightning and she served great-tasting coffee, far be it from me to ruin it for her. So I gave her the classic, one-size-fits-all answer that got me out of just about anything.

“It’s a Southern thing.”

Her face relaxed into understanding that I was a woman reared by java heathens and deserving of her sympathy.

“What are you doing with Hugo’s box?” she asked.

I told her about getting accidentally employed at the Dragonfly.

“No more hotshot jobs then?” she asked.

“The Dragonfly is temporary.”

“Temporary has a way of becoming comfortable, and comfortable becomes permanent.”

“It’s not going to be that way,” I said. “It’s a stopgap solution.”

“Keep talking like that,” she said. “It will keep you out of the Dragonfly.”

I opened my backpack to put the box back in, when I saw her eyes light on
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
. As I watched, too shocked to stop her, she reached into my backpack for the book and laid it on the table.

“It’s not very pretty,” I said, feeling like I was small-talking a hostage taker. “Hugo’s going to show me how to put it back together. There are these notes in the margins. See? I want to preserve it.”

She tapped the cloth cover. “Forget about these people. All of these fireworks end up like that.” She nodded toward the fighting couple in the corner. “Get a real job. No one is going to take care of you but you.”

She got up and left without a
good-bye
or
hope to see you soon
. I would have taken it personally, except she did this to everyone. So it was kind of comforting, just like the lumpy seat of the green reading chair in the Dragonfly.

Even though Mrs. Callahn was a bit scary, I appreciated the order she commanded. As she returned to her rightful place at the espresso machine, the kid came out of the storeroom and the music switched to a cool jazz. I stared down at
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
and thought of the Dragonfly and the burden of books that lay ahead of me, thinking of the story of Psyche, who was forced to sort a mountain of poppy, wheat, and millet seed in a single night before she could return to her true love. Ants came to her rescue. I wondered if I could rent some.

“I just don’t understand all this bookstore business,” Mama said.

It was nearly midnight in South Carolina, and I could picture my mother in one of the Quaker rocking chairs on her front porch, a jelly jar in her hand. The sparkling clean brick-heavy crystal tumblers she kept on the wet bar were for company. A jelly jar was for drinking vodka alone. She would have turned the outdoor light off. She’d say it was to keep the bugs away and the temperature down. But it was also so the neighbors couldn’t see her. In the dark she’d rock and sip vodka from that jelly jar until she was stirred up enough to call somebody.

“I’m just helping out a friend,” I said.

“Some friend,” she said.

I poured two fingers of bourbon into a blue Solo cup and went outside to sit under the umbrella in the backyard. The fog had made it over the Santa Cruz Mountains that separated the valley from the coast, and I could smell the tomato plants Hugo was nursing in large terra-cotta pots on the patio.

“Where’s Daddy?” I asked. I tugged down the sleeves of my sweatshirt. The wet air felt cold, even though it was nice.

“Surgery,” she said, as if it were the name of a country where men went when they didn’t want to be found.

I pulled my knees to my chest. Even through my jeans, I could still find the hard line of a scar on my right knee. One Friday afternoon in eleventh grade, I’d ridden my bike to my father’s office to swipe some office supplies for a science project that was due Monday and which I hadn’t started yet. The office was dark, which was no surprise—Daddy always cleared everyone out early on Fridays. But I knew that he kept the spare key in the soil of the hanging fern in front of the window in his private office. I stood on my tiptoes on the edge of a knee-high brick planter overflowing with the petunias my mother planted every year. I could feel the edge of the key sticking up in the soil hidden by the canopying blossoms. As I slid the key from its hiding place in the dirt, my eyes fell into my father’s darkened office.

My father had taught me about adrenaline, how it shocks you into a fight-or-flight response. But the jolt I felt in my heart when I saw the movement in his window didn’t do either one. It made me clumsy, and I fell off the edge of the brick planter and onto the stone walkway, cutting open my knee. I pulled myself up against the planter and stared at the crimson rising out of the tear in my jeans. Behind me, I heard murmurs and some rustling about. When I stood, the blinds were closed in the window. It didn’t matter. I knew what I’d seen. My father between the legs of Mrs. Celia Collins, whose ACL seemed to have healed nicely.