by Gayle Forman
“I do!” I jump to the front of the line, wedging myself next to Penny, grabbing a piece. “Penny, come talk to me before you leave about that, uh, paint thinner.”
“Paint thinner?” Ike asks.
“Penny had a deal on some paint thinner at the hardware shop.”
“Didn’t see anything about it,” Ike says.
“It’s not advertised,” I say.
“Hmm,” Ike considers. “We’re at least two weeks away from painting.”
“Two weeks?” Penny asks. “That puts you into December?” She says this mildly, without even looking at me.
“She’s right,” Ira says. “We should be open by Black Friday.”
“Finishing up by then’s gonna be a stretch,” Ike says. “Particularly because I won’t get much work done next week when I’ll be in Walla Walla visiting my daughter. Though we could push to open before Christmas.”
“Catch the holiday rush,” Garry says.
We haven’t had a holiday rush in years, but that doesn’t stop Ira from nodding.
“None of this is set in stone,” I repeat to Penny. “Why don’t we talk about it outside?”
“Have your cake first,” Angela says, thrusting a slice at Penny and one at me.
“I think I will,” Penny says, accepting the famous crumb cake. “Aaron, I’ll be with you in a minute.”
Back on the porch, Hannah’s looking a bit peeved. “Everything okay in there?”
“I’m not an addict!” I blurt out, as I thrust the cake toward Hannah.
“What?”
The cake sits there in midair. “I’m not in the program. I’m not an addict.”
Hannah’s face bunches up in confusion. It would be adorable were it not for the source of the confusion. “But you don’t drink. You said you can’t go into bars.”
“I can’t go into bars because I’m underage. And I don’t drink because I don’t. I’ve never had a drink or smoked pot or anything.”
“But you had all those recovery books in your basement.”
“Because of my brother . . .” I trail off. “He was the addict.”
“The brother who died?” Hannah asks.
“Yeah,” I say, the taste of rotting strawberries making me want to gag.
“I am so sorry,” Hannah says.
“It’s okay. It was just a misunderstanding.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about your brother?”
“It’s not my favorite topic of conversation.” I look at her. “Why didn’t you tell me about your addiction?”
“My sponsor’s been asking me the same question. I don’t really know.” She shakes her head. “It’s not like it’s a secret, but I think I was just enjoying myself, enjoying you; it felt easy, almost like we already knew each other and could skip over all the processing and just be.” She knocks herself on the head. “Stupid, Hannah.”
“No! Not stupid.” I grab her hands. “I mean, I’m not an addict but I also felt that connection. From the moment I saw you reading. Like I knew you. Like this was gonna happen.” I zig my hand back and forth between us. “Like it had already happened.”
Hannah is nodding, like she felt it too, and for a second I feel hope. It will be okay. It doesn’t matter that she’s an addict. I mean, she said she’s been sober a year. Sandy never made it past his three-month chip. A year means you’re practically one of the brochure success stories. She’s nothing like Sandy. I never could fall in love with someone like my brother.
“None of this matters,” I tell her. “I don’t care if you’re an addict. What matters is who you are, not who you were.”
“Who I was is part of who I am, Aaron.”
“I’m not saying it right . . .” But before I can say it right, Penny walks out.
“Aaron,” she calls. “Shall we discuss that . . . paint thinner?”
“Paint thinner?” Hannah asks.
I stand up. “Last time. I swear.” I follow Penny to the bottom of the porch and beckon her around the corner. “You didn’t tell Ira, did you?”
“Now, why would I do that? We had an agreement.” She stares at me hard. “We still have an agreement.”
“And I have until the end of the month to get you thirteen thousand dollars. You don’t need to come in and check on me.”
“I’m not here to check in on you. I’m fine however this goes. If you raise the cash, I’ll have a nice dividend. And if you don’t, I’ll have a renovated space. It’s a win-win for me.” She pauses to consider. “Maybe I’ll start a coffee bar of my own. I don’t much care for those drinks, but other people seem to. I bet I could put quite a dent into Cindy Jean’s business.”
“Why would you want to do that? You eat at C.J.’s every day.”
“But I don’t own C.J.’s.” She narrows her eyes at me. “Don’t look at me like that. It’s just business.” She turns back to the store. “Anyhow, from what I hear, you might get your way after all.”
“What did you hear?”
“That your friend in the wheelchair emptied out his savings account.”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“From Rita Fitzgibbons.”
“Who?”
“She’s the bank manager. She said your friend made a substantial withdrawal and I assumed it’s for all that.” She gestures into the store. “Wouldn’t be how I’d invest my money, but if it weren’t for other people’s foolish business decisions, I’d be out of a job.”
“No, Chad didn’t pull that money for the store; it’s for the deposit on his proced—” I stop myself. This is none of Penny’s damn business. “So you didn’t come to check in on us?”
“Oh, Aaron, I know every move every person makes in this town, whether or not I stop into your store.” She smiles. “I stopped in for cake. I love all sweet things. Cake. Pie. Real estate acquisitions.” She gives her fingers a dainty lick. “I’ll see you December first.”
Once Penny leaves, I bound back to Hannah. “Look, Aaron, I can see this isn’t a good time.”
“It is. I swear. You have my full attention. Now, where were we?”
“You were saying you don’t care that I’m an addict and I was saying you should care.”
“I didn’t mean it like that. What I meant is . . .” I stop to gather my thoughts so I don’t mess this up again. In the silence, my phone starts ringing. It’s Bart. Shit.
“Do you need to get that?” she asks coolly.
“I’m sorry. I really should.” I pick up. Bart says he’s ready.
“This will take five minutes. Less than five,” I promise her. “Then we can get out of here, go somewhere a little less hectic.”
“Maybe we should do this later.”
“No!” My voice pitches up. I will not lose Hannah. “Everything’s fine! Just give me five more minutes.”
I race down to Bart. I charge him a flat twenty dollars apiece, even though some must be more valuable. We hide the records under the porch swing and carry them up the stairs, through the store.
“Goodbye, old friend,” Ira says to the swing in a raspy voice.
I open the door for Bart and call out to Hannah, “I’m all yours now.”
A slice of Angela Silvestri’s crumb cake sits on the railing. But Hannah? She’s gone.
Moneyball
A few hours later, Chad shows up, his mood as ebullient as mine is morose. “Oh, man. I had the best afternoon. Jax found this hiking trail that’s wheelchair accessible. I haven’t been hiking in years, and damn, my arms ache. Then we had lunch. They bake bread. And it was still warm, and we had that with some venison jerky and marionberry jam. Best meal I ever had. One of the best afternoons I’ve ever had.” He finally notices me. “And how was your day?”
“How was my day?” Where to begin. Ike mastered Gaga and now the Lumberjacks are full
steam ahead on café plans, even though I have ten days to raise eleven thousand dollars and my best option is Lou’s boss, but Lou won’t answer my texts. Oh, and I probably blew it with Hannah. “My day was shit.”
“I thought you were seeing Hannah today.”
“I was. I did.”
“Did something happen?”
“She thought I was in the program.”
“What program?”
“The program.” I lower my voice to a whisper though I’m not sure why. “For addicts.”
“Oh, you mean Narcotics Anonymous.”
NA? I was hoping she was more garden-variety AA-type addict.
“Does it matter?” Chad asks.
“Sandy was in NA.”
“Yeah. And so is Jax. And about a hundred other people I know. I mean, it’s a good thing.”
No. A good thing would be if they never started using in the first place. Everyone talks about how it’s not addicts’ fault, it’s a sickness, hereditary, like diabetes. But this is such a crock. Your eye color, your height, those are hereditary. Addiction is a choice, a choice Sandy made over and over again. Hey, here’s an easy way not to become an addict. Don’t take drugs!
“And being in recovery means they’re getting better,” Chad adds. “If you’re in NA, you’re not using.”
I think of Sandy. Not always the case. In fact, almost never the case.
“Aaron, the fact that Hannah Crew is even slightly into you is like a miracle. Don’t blow it on a technicality.”
As usual, Chad’s right. “I think I already blew it.”
“So unblow it.”
“How? What do I do?”
He opens his arms wide, as if greeting the world. “Whatever it takes.”
* * *
What it takes, Hannah tells me when I call her up to apologize, is for me to go with her. To an NA meeting.
“A meeting?” I ask, trying to sound open-minded.
“I’m the lead speaker.” Her voice is steely and unreadable. “It seems like an opportune time to put all our cards on the table.”
“Aren’t NA meetings typically more of a second-date-type thing?” I joke to mask how little I want to do this. When Sandy was sober, he’d go to two, sometimes three meetings a day, spewing quotes from the Big Book like a zealot, which would have been obnoxious enough if he didn’t keep relapsing. Or if after he relapsed a few times he had the humility to at least stop proselytizing. But he didn’t.
“I don’t think anything about us so far is typical,” Hannah says, her voice warming. “And if this is gonna be my first sober relationship, I wanna do it right.”
“So we’re gonna be in a relationship, are we?”
“Slow your roll, boy,” she says, but I can hear the smile in her voice. “We can decide what we are after the meeting.”
* * *
The next morning, I do a sneak attack on Lou, calling him early, from the landline.
“Hello,” he says in a sleepy voice.
“Lou, it’s Aaron.”
“Hey.” I hear him yawn. “Didn’t recognize the number.”
“Calling on our landline.”
“People still have those?”
“You worship vinyl, so don’t judge.”
“Fair point.” He pauses. “How’d it go with Bart?”
“Good, but not good enough.”
“Okay, how short are you? I’ll send some other guys.”
“I don’t want other guys. I want one guy. Your boss.”
The line goes so quiet I think the call dropped. But then Lou whimpers a no.
“What do you have against him?”
“He’s the worst kind of vulture, swooping in to buy whatever he’s heard is cool, thereby sucking all the cool out of it. He got rich turning artists’ lofts in South Seattle into condos. Then he got richer corporatizing the weed dispensaries. And now he’s into vinyl. He’ll ruin it.”
“How can he ruin vinyl?”
“Trust me. He can.” Lou pauses. “You ever read that book Moneyball?”
In this case, I only saw the movie, not that I’ll cop to that. “Refresh my memory.”
“It’s about these guys who learn to use stats to build a perfect baseball team. And they do. They assemble a team with way less money. It sounds all great and underdoggy, but then everyone starts playing moneyball. And in doing so, they took what was an art and turned it into a formula. And they ruined it. Baseball’s so much more tedious now, like watching robots play. There’s no magic to it.” Lou sighs. “Daryl’s a moneyballer. He doesn’t sell stuff, he monetizes it.” Lou’s voice breaks a little. “He doesn’t even like music.”
“Neither do I.”
“So you keep saying,” he shoots back. “But you’ve kept those records pristine, man. You’ve honored them.”
“But that wasn’t me. That was my brother.”
“Well, then you’ve honored him.”
If Lou only knew. “I’m sorry, but this is how it has to be. I’m out of options and out of time.”
The line goes silent so long I think Lou hung up on me. But then he says: “You know what I don’t get?”
“What don’t you get?”
“Why is it that guys like Daryl always seem to win and guys like us always seem to lose?”
I’ve spent the past few years asking myself that. “I don’t know, Lou,” I say. “I honestly don’t know.”
* * *
I call Daryl Feldman’s office at nine o’clock. The assistant says he’s booked until after the holiday. I call every hour until finally she relents. “He just had a cancellation,” she tells me. “Can you get here by five?”
His office is in Seattle, a two-hour drive with no traffic, and there’s always traffic. I’m meeting Hannah—an hour’s drive from Seattle—at seven. It’s now three. If I leave now and everything goes right, I can make it work.
Of course, being me, everything does not go right. The Volvo refuses to budge past sixty even on the downhill, and it needs gas, and I can’t find a parking spot and wind up pulling into one of those garages that charge by the second. I sprint to Daryl’s office, pushing open the door at ten past five.
“Am I too late?” I gasp to the assistant.
“He’s just wrapping up a call.”
Twenty minutes later, he’s still wrapping up a call. “Do you know how long he’ll be?” I ask.
“Any minute now.”
“It’s just I have to be somewhere at seven.”
“We can reschedule if you want.” She peers at her computer. “He’s out most of next week for the holiday, but we can do the following Monday—no, scratch that, Tuesday.”
The following Tuesday is too late. “I’ll wait.” I text Hannah that I’m running behind.
I had built Daryl Feldman into a slick Wall Street mogul, Gordon Gekko with a soul patch, but when, at 5:46, I’m ushered into his office, I’m greeted by a short, dumpy guy, the kind of person Ira would call a schlub.
“So sorry to keep you waiting,” he says, gesturing for me to sit down. “You want a coffee? Or beer? It’s almost six.”
“Uh, maybe a water.”
“Sure! Ella, bring us some waters, the LaCroix Pamplemousses.” He says LaCroix with a French pronunciation. Ella brings in the waters. Before she pours his, he plucks out an ice cube. “Two cubes, Ella.”
“Sorry. Sometimes they stick.”
She leaves and Daryl’s eyes follow her. “She can’t figure out how to separate the ice cubes, but that ass.” He takes a gulp of his water. “I hear from Lou that you have some primo vinyl to sell.”
“I do. Two thousand two hundred and sixteen pieces.” I pull out the laminated indexes and slide them over. “They’re listed by genre, pressing, condition. Some are boxed sets. A few imports. Some very rare bo
otlegs. Some sell for hundreds of dollars. I looked up the Iggy Pop and it’s—”
“How many again?”
“Two thousand two hundred and sixteen.”
He pulls out an adding machine and does some calculations. As the tape whirs I imagine what number will spit out. Maybe it’ll be more than thirteen thousand dollars. Maybe it’ll get me out from the Penny deal and leave us a cushion to spend on the store. Pay Ike and the guys with more than coffee.
He rips off the tape and hands it to me. I blink. $4,432. “This is your offer?”
“I do two bucks a pop.”
Never mind the fact that he needed an adding machine to multiply 2 times 2,216, but four grand? “You can’t be serious.”
“I’m never not serious about business,” he says.
“You must know from Lou that they’re worth way more than this.”
He sighs. “Hell, it’s Thanksgiving, so I’ll round up to forty-five hundred.”
“But you don’t even know what I’m selling.”
He shrugs. “I pay per piece.”
“But some of these records are really valuable.”
“And some will be worthless. I’ve found it all evens out in the end.”
“Trust me.” I push the index toward him. “Nothing in this collection is worthless. If you just look at the inventory. Lou practically hyperventilated when he saw it.”
“Bet he did. Asked for an advance on his paycheck to buy more. But that’s why Lou’s Lou and I’m me.” He takes a long, self-satisfied slurp of water. “Look, I’ve been doing this for a while now. I have overhead and shipping costs and I have to hire guys to do fulfillment for online orders. And do you have any idea how much of a pain it is to ship records? You need these special mailers, and special cardboard inserts. And if a record’s at all warped, the buyers want a refund.”
“If a record warps, the sound is off!”
He shrugs. “So they say. Whatever. Who needs records when you can play any song you want on your phone for free?”