The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry(4)

The boss replies: Don’t fret. Only a little account, and Island does the bulk of its ordering in anticipation of the summer when the tourists are there. The guy who runs the place is weird, and Harvey always had better luck selling the spring/summer list. You will, too.

AT SIX O’CLOCK, A.J. tells Molly Klock to leave. “How’s the new Munro?” he asks.

She groans. “Why does everyone keep asking me that today?” She is only referring to Amelia, but Molly likes to speak in extremes.

“I suppose because you’re reading it.”

Molly groans again. “Okay. The people are, I dunno, too human sometimes.”

“I think that’s rather the point with Munro,” he says.

“Dunno. Prefer the old stuff. See you on Monday.”

Something will have to be done about Molly, A.J. thinks as he flips the sign to closed. Aside from liking to read, Molly is truly a terrible bookseller. But she’s only a part-timer, and it’s such a bother to train someone new, and at least she doesn’t steal. Nic had hired her so she must have seen something in the surly Miss Klock. Maybe next summer A.J. will work up the energy to fire Molly.

A.J. kicks the remaining customers out (he is most annoyed by an organic chemistry study group who have bought nothing but have been camped out in magazines since four—he’s pretty sure one of them clogged up the toilet, too), then deals with the receipts, a task as depressing as it sounds. Finally, he goes upstairs to the attic apartment where he lives. He pops a carton of frozen vindaloo into the microwave. Nine minutes, per the box’s instructions. As he’s standing there, he thinks of the girl from Knightley. She had looked like a time traveler from 1990s Seattle with her anchor-printed galoshes and her floral grandma dress and her fuzzy beige sweater and her shoulder-length hair that looked like it had been cut in the kitchen by her boyfriend. Girlfriend? Boyfriend, he decides. He thinks of Courtney Love when she was married to Kurt Cobain. The tough rose mouth says No one can hurt me, but the soft blue eyes say Yes you can and you probably will. And he had made that big dandelion of a girl cry. Well done, A.J.

The scent of vindaloo is growing stronger, but seven and a half minutes remain on the clock.

He wants a task. Something physical but not strenuous.

He goes into the basement to collapse book boxes with his box cutter. Knife. Flatten. Stack. Knife. Flatten. Stack.

A.J. regrets his behavior with the rep. It hadn’t been her fault. Someone should have told him that Harvey Rhodes had died.

Knife. Flatten. Stack.

Someone probably had told him. A.J. only skims his e-mail, never answers his phone. Had there been a funeral? Not that A.J. would have attended anyway. He had barely known Harvey Rhodes. Obviously.

Knife. Flatten. Stack.

And yet . . . He had spent hours with the man over the last half-dozen years. They had only ever discussed books but what, in this life, is more personal than books?

Knife. Flatten. Stack.

And how rare is it to find someone who shares your tastes? The one real fight they’d ever had was over David Foster Wallace. It was around the time of Wallace’s suicide. A.J. had found the reverent tone of the eulogies to be insufferable. The man had written a decent (if indulgent and overlong) novel, a few modestly insightful essays, and not much else.

“Infinite Jest is a masterpiece,” Harvey had said.

“Infinite Jest is an endurance contest. You manage to get through it and you have no choice but to say you like it. Otherwise, you have to deal with the fact that you just wasted weeks of your life,” A.J. had countered. “Style, no substance, my friend.”

Harvey’s face had reddened as he leaned over the desk. “You say that about any writer who was born in the same decade as you!”

Knife. Flatten. Stack. Tie.

By the time he gets back upstairs, the vindaloo is cold again. If he reheats it in that plastic dish, he’ll probably end up with cancer.

He takes the plastic tray to the table. The first bite is burning. The second bite is frozen. Papa Bear’s vindaloo and Baby Bear’s vindaloo. He throws the tray against the wall. How little he had meant to Harvey and how much Harvey had meant to him.

The difficulty of living alone is that any mess he makes he is forced to clean up himself.

No, the real difficulty of living alone is that no one cares if you are upset. No one cares why a thirty-nine-year-old man has thrown a plastic tub of vindaloo across a room like a toddler. He pours himself a glass of merlot. He spreads a tablecloth on the table. He walks into the living room. He unlocks a climate-controlled glass case and removes Tamerlane from it. Back in the kitchen, he sets Tamerlane across the table from him, props it against the chair where Nic used to sit.

“Cheers, you piece of crap,” he says to the slim volume.

He finishes the glass. He pours himself another, and after he finishes that he promises himself that he’s going to read a book. Maybe an old favorite like Old School by Tobias Wolff, though his time would certainly be better spent on something new. What had that dopey rep been going on about? The Late Bloomer—ugh. He had meant what he said. There is nothing worse than cutesy memoirs about widowers. Especially if one is a widower as A.J. has been for the last twenty-one months. The rep had been new—not her fault that she didn’t know about his boring personal tragedy. God, he misses Nic. Her voice and her neck and even her armpits. They had been stubbly as a cat’s tongue and, at the end of the day, smelled like milk just before it curdles.