Devil House(39)

“Yeah?” he said, sensing that something was different but not wanting to seem nosy.

Hawley looked up from his ledger. “Yeah,” he said, turning to Derrick and looking him in the eyes. “And I think I’m kind of short here generally.”

“Short?”

“I think I’m going to do something else,” Hawley said. “I read about how you can open an office and do phone sales. No monthly overhead except for rent and the phone bill, clock out by five every night. No more booths.”

“No!” said Derrick, reflexively; he didn’t know what else to say. It was weird to feel sentimental about his time in the arid, creepy darkness of the store. But it was nice to have a job with downtime for reading; he knew sketching in his notebook was a luxury few other jobs would offer. He dreaded the prospect of job interviews, having to dress up for them and answer questions: “Why do you want this job? Do you see yourself staying with it?” The people asking these questions—at restaurants, at convenience stores—were barely older than he was. Most of them still had wispy facial hair. It was embarrassing. The store job was perfect, in its way.

Hawley laughed. “Derrick, it’s just a dirty bookstore,” he said. “Places like this come and go. Every job you get after this one will be better than this one.”

Derrick considered this for a moment in silence. He tried, but he couldn’t find a counterargument. “Well, no more booths, then,” he said finally; he ventured half a smile, trying to guess at his boss’s feelings.

“I’m sorry,” said Hawley. “There’s just not any money in it, you know. Been doing this three or four years now on my end. It starts to get to you.”

“I hear that,” Derrick said, but he could tell there was something else. He wanted to know; he wondered if he could help. But he decided to wait it out.

“Besides,” Hawley said, and then he paused for a moment; what he wanted to say was more a feeling than a thought, but he felt like he might miss the chance to do Derrick a small favor if he held it back. “If you look around—I’m not in any position to judge anybody, but just for myself, you know, when I go home and think about this place, sometimes I remember how when I was a kid it was a diner. You know? Or even when it was a normal newsstand.”

“Yeah?” Derrick wasn’t sure where Hawley was going with this idea.

“Well, and then I think about”—he extended his arm from his chest, like a master of ceremonies introducing a beauty contestant—“all this.”

It was in Derrick’s heart to disagree: “All this,” to him, looked like money in the bank and the right to say you answered to no one. What was more, the people who came in here weren’t going to suddenly get religion if they showed up one day to find the place closed; they’d just go get the same thing six or seven exits farther down the highway. Why not keep taking the money, if it was just there for the taking?

He understood the bit about some weird tension between the interior of the store and the world outside—stepping into the sunlight after being inside too long was always a little like returning to Earth from space, or passing through a portal between conflicting realities. But that feeling, for him, never followed him all the way home. He hadn’t considered how it might be different for Hawley, who worked here seven days a week, and who stayed until midnight on weeknights and then even later on weekends, changing twenties for whoever came to a place like this that late.

“Guess I can see what you mean,” he said. “If this was a business you loved, it would be different.”

“It would be different.”

“Still, like, I don’t know,” he said. “It’ll be weird when it’s gone. I get a lot of reading done in here when it’s slow.”

The screen door in front of the front door was opening; it triggered an electronic doorbell. “We’ll talk more. It won’t be right away,” Hawley said, turning. He nodded to the customer as he came in, a man in a baseball cap who looked nervous, but he offered no verbal greeting and didn’t look directly at him. Etiquette. Wait for the customer to say hi first. It’s not exactly a rule in stores like this, but it’s a good idea.

HAD THEY WANTED GOLD

Derrick left his shift after a couple of hours; he was always home by dinner. He wasn’t attuned to currents in town gossip, but he wondered if there weren’t a few people getting ready to register their displeasure with the fate of Valley News; small towns are always looking for something to make a big deal about. As far as he could tell, though, Hawley had managed to duck the radar since making the switch.

Still, he wondered if his father knew. Plenty of men who didn’t look that different from his dad came and went daily. Every teenager who gets a job knows the leverage it suddenly affords them with their parents: even the most loving mother and father in the world are a little glad, after seventeen or eighteen years of raising a child, to have the house to themselves in the afternoon for an hour or two.

He crossed two creeks on the way home: he did this on purpose. He knew the line that cut the straightest distance between the doomed bookstore by the freeway and his family’s duplex, nested tightly among several dozen other identical ready-mades, but it pained him. There was nothing to see, and it made his life feel boring. Taking a few extra turns allowed his mind to wander, and allowing his mind to wander was one of Derrick’s best-loved luxuries.