All the Beautiful Lies(29)

“Okay. That would be good. Kennewick Inn’s looking for a hostess, but I thought I’d try here first.”

“Should I call you?”

“Sure,” she said, and Harry handed her a pen. She turned over an Ackerson’s bookmark and wrote her phone number. “Thank you. I knew it was a long shot, and I don’t expect anything, so—”

“I’ll find out and let you know.”

“Okay. I’m going to browse around a little.”

“You should.”

She wandered off into an aisle where Harry couldn’t see her. It was such a strange interaction that for a moment Harry stood, just going over the conversation in his mind. Something she had said had struck him as particularly odd. For a moment, he couldn’t place it but then it came to him. She’d asked, “Are you working here now, in the store?” How had she known he’d just started working there? Then Harry remembered the funeral, the minister saying something about how proud Bill was of his son, who had recently graduated from college. That must have been it.

John came out from the back room. “Just cracked the last box,” he said. “Finally found the Wodehouse editions. There are some firsts. American ones, but still, not an entire loss.”

Harry’s weariness must have shown on his face, because John said, “Go home. You’ve done more than enough here today.”

The bell sounded as the door opened. It was Grace leaving.

“Did you see the woman I was talking with?” Harry asked.

“When? Just now?”

“Yeah. She just left.”

“No. Why?”

Harry told John how she’d been looking for work. He found himself hoping John would say that an extra hire would be good for the store, but he just shook his head. “I don’t think so, do you? We can handle it, especially when Alice decides she wants to come back in and help.”



Harry walked slowly home from the store. He wasn’t sure he was up for another intimate dinner with Alice, and was relieved to see an unfamiliar car—a dark blue Jetta—parked next to his Civic in the driveway. The license plate read, CSHORE7. He thought maybe it was Alice’s friend Chrissie, who almost certainly would have a vanity plate. Harry went up to the front door, which was decorated with stained glass, and was about to enter when he peered, instead, through the one unstained piece of glass in the design. He could see partially into the kitchen, where an older woman was standing, her back to the door, but Harry could see that she was still wearing a raincoat and had a bright red scarf wrapped around her head. She was in profile, her lips moving as though she was talking rapidly. She wasn’t immediately recognizable. Harry stood for a moment, frozen on the front stoop, trying to decide if it was possible to enter the house and go straight up to his room. Maybe if he opened the door as quietly as possible. But, no, the strange woman was only twenty feet away in the kitchen. Harry would have to be introduced.

Instead of entering the house, Harry went around to the backyard, where there was an old, dilapidated barn on the property that had been one of the reasons Bill had originally been interested in the house. It was a small barn, unpainted, the wood weathered to the point where there were inch-wide cracks between the planks, but the roof was solid. Bill’s plan had been to restore it completely and eventually use it as storage for even more books. That had never happened, of course. Bill’s true passion had been the acquisition of books. Finding places to put them was a chore that he only got around to out of desperation.

The barn’s wide front doors were open, and Harry walked across the muddy yard and stepped inside, letting his eyes adjust to the dark, cool interior. He could hear the flutter of starlings high up in the rafters. In one corner was an old lathe, left by the previous residents. Harry remembered his father taking a look at it, telling him that maybe he’d take up furniture making and that way he could make his own shelves. “Can you imagine this place filled with books?” he’d said.

But except for the lathe, plus an assortment of lawn furniture and old dining room chairs, the barn was empty. Harry sneezed. The air in the barn, even with the wide doors flung open, was dusty and still, the floors pocked with bird shit. He wanted to get out of there, but instead of exiting the way he had come, he traversed the barn and stepped through the regular-sized back door.

Not ready to go back to the house, Harry sat on the doorjamb. There was a view out over the marsh that abutted the property. Harry felt a sudden and revolting sense of pure grief. It swept through him like an attack of nausea, an absolute knowledge that he was all alone and life was meaningless and devoid of joy. His heart fluttered, and for a moment Harry wondered if he was dying, as though his sudden awareness was bringing on some kind of attack. But then he felt a prick on his arm, and rubbed at it. He looked down and saw that he’d killed a mosquito, leaving behind a smear of blood.

His heart slowed, the terrible thoughts dissipating as rapidly as they had come. Still, he remembered a very stoned conversation he’d had in his dorm room a few months ago. He was with a junior named Tyler whom Harry had met through the cinema club. They’d been listening to a Sparklehorse album, and Tyler had suddenly started to talk about how short our time on the planet was, and how, in the blink of an eye, we would be dead, and everyone who ever knew us would be dead, and that was it. He’d spoken as though he was the first person ever to have had, or voiced, those thoughts. Fortunately, Paul had dropped by, changed the music to a Henry Mancini compilation, and forced Tyler to drink a cocktail. Harry thought of that conversation now, thought of how the deaths of both of his parents had erased a whole portion of his own life that existed solely as their memories. He was half gone, already, more than half gone.