Save Me from Dangerous Men--A Novel

by S. A. Lelchuk

She took the card carefully, as though it was made of the most delicate glass, and slid it into the tight pocket of her jeans. “I’ll think about it.” She had torn the napkin into a blizzard of tiny pieces that covered the counter.

  I impulsively put my hand over hers and gave it a light squeeze. “A lot of the women there have had bad days, too. Think it over.”

  * * *

  Down the block from the coffee shop there was a small city park. A boy in a red jacket went back and forth on a swing while two little girls played hopscotch. Motes of colorful chalk dusted up from the asphalt and swirled in the afternoon sun. Overhead traffic rumbled from freeways that looped up in gray circles. The Bay Bridge stretched toward San Francisco.

  “Your husband is having an affair,” I said. There wasn’t really a good way to start.

  She put her hands to her mouth. “Oh my God. You’re sure?”

  I thought about the man and woman in the window. “I’m sure.”

  “I can’t believe it.” She ran a hand through her hair. “You think you must be crazy. You hope you’re crazy. I mean, I did all the crazy things people do. I made a secret copy of his office keys, as though I was going to break in and catch them on his desk. I checked his clothes for I don’t even know what—lipstick stains or stray earrings. I hired you.” She laughed. The kind of laugh someone might make when realizing they had just spent five hours accidentally driving north instead of south. “But then … you learn you’re not crazy. And somehow it’s worse.” She set the coffee down on the ground. “He’s a lawyer, always doing this top-secret work for all these stupid tech firms, treating it like national security. Always running around or shutting himself up in his office until late at night. And now I don’t even know if he’s been lying about all of that the whole time…”

  “I understand.” I felt badly for her. People who had affairs embarked on all the usual deceit, never really thinking that it could start to make their spouses feel like they were in Gogol’s Diary of a Madman. “You didn’t do anything unusual,” I added. “You had a right to know.”

  “Who is she, anyway?”

  I took a second to answer. It was no good blurting out everything at once. I’d learned that early on from a case. After being told that her husband was sleeping with his secretary, a client had walked into the office, by all accounts calm as could be, chatting and smiling, before hitting the unlucky secretary over the head with a three-hole punch. The police had found her at home in bed an hour later, drinking rosé and watching Grey’s Anatomy reruns. She had been charged with aggravated battery and narrowly avoided a felony.

  So now I was cautious about giving out too much information too quickly.

  “A personal trainer,” I finally said. “From his gym.”

  Her eyes flashed with anger. “That son of a bitch! I got that out-of-shape prick a personal training package so he wouldn’t die of a heart attack at sixty-five like his father. And he goes and screws her?”

  I put my hand over hers, reminded yet again that it was impossible to know which words would provoke which emotions. “I know. It’s not nice hearing it.” This was part of the job. It was impossible to only be a messenger. Not after delivering news that often changed the trajectory of a life. Therapist, friends, family—eventually my clients would reach out to people. But initially? It was just me.

  Brenda stood up and tried to take off her jacket. The belt knot got stuck and she cursed and threw the jacket onto the sidewalk. Her arms were toned and firm. Her voice was neither. “I’m going to get that son of a bitch. He’s not going to believe what hit him. You can prove it?”

  There was a loud metallic grinding as a BART train passed. The tracks ran mostly underground but here they rose overhead briefly before plunging down under the Bay to connect Oakland to San Francisco. I waited until the noise faded. “I have photographs.”

  “I want to see them.”

  “I’ll have them to you in the next day or two.”

  “I want to see them now!”

  “Soon. I promise.” I thought again about the hole-punch woman. I intentionally kept a gap between delivering news and pictures. Photographs could be incendiary.

  She was pacing; short, pent-up steps. One of the hopscotch girls watched curiously. “We’re going to find him right now, him and his whore, and we’re going to teach them a lesson.”

  “Why don’t you sit down?” I suggested.

  “I’m not in a sitting mood,” Brenda snapped. “I’ve heard stories about you, Nikki. My niece referred you, remember? The one who works at the Brighter Futures shelter. I need you to teach my husband a lesson. I don’t care how much it costs, I’ll pay. Isn’t that what you do?”

  “You’re upset. I understand. But I can’t do that.”

  “I need—”

  “Brenda. Listen.” She heard the difference edged in my tone and quieted. “I’m not in the lesson-teaching business,” I continued more gently. “Save the drama for the soaps. It doesn’t end well, talk like that. What you need right now is a stiff drink, a hot shower, and a good divorce lawyer.”

  “But, as one woman to another, Nikki … you have to help me.”

  “That wouldn’t help you. Honest. You’d be trading a bit of short-term satisfaction for all kinds of long-term problems. It’s better this way, believe me.”

  Brenda slowly bent down and picked up her coat. The hopscotch girls were gone and the swing was empty. Her cotton candy–colored manicure had started to flake away, leaving bits of bare nail, and there were dark circles under her eyes. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get angry.” She rubbed her hands across her head, massaging her temple. “I haven’t been sleeping well.”

  “Angry is normal. I get it.”

  “I guess.” She sounded exhausted. “I should head back home.”

  I squeezed her hand. “You’ll get through this.”

  Five minutes later I was headed toward Berkeley. I had a few things to wrap up at the bookstore and then was thinking about a movie and Chinese food. Saturday afternoons were supposed to be quiet.

  Supposed to be.

  I had yet to meet Gregg Gunn.

  9

  “Hi, Jess. How’s business?”

  “Hey, Nikki! It’s been busy, all the Cal kids settling into fall term. Can’t believe we’re almost through September already.”

  The Brimstone Magpie was a used bookstore on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. I’d been lucky and bought the shabby two-story building just before East Bay prices really skyrocketed. Now, no way I could have afforded it. Until the next big quake, Bay Area real estate seemed to only be heading up. At the time, I’d thought the building would be a good way to collect steady money from a long-term tenant. The large street-level space was filled by a trendy bakery with a five-year lease and plans to expand. Then came the recession, and suddenly nobody was jumping to buy six-dollar lemongrass shots or gluten-free birthday cakes anymore. The bakery folded fast.

  With the bakery gone and no other prospective tenants in sight, I’d started using the empty space for storing books. I acquired too many books and was constantly getting more. I couldn’t help it. I loved books. Boxes and boxes from garage or library sales, the free books put up in Craigslist ads, along with walking into every bookstore I passed. So eventually I had put up a few shelves, then a few more. An armchair so I could sit with a cup of coffee and read. I paid for the damn space, I’d figured. Might as well enjoy it. And then one rainy winter day a woman holding a dripping umbrella hurried in and asked how much was the copy of Bleak House that she’d seen from the street. I’d never sold a book before. I told her to give me whatever she wanted. She checked her purse and asked if five dollars was okay. I said why not. She paid. My first sale. More people came in, both locals and the university crowd. I started leaving a pot of coffee on the counter. Bought a few more chairs. Put up a few more shelves. At some point, I realized I’d better get a cash register.

  The timing was oddly lucky. After Borders folded along with
many of the independent bookshops, people started realizing that bookstores weren’t exactly guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. All over the East Bay there was a concerted effort to buy local. I started selling more books. I didn’t really worry about cash flow or balance sheets. I just liked the idea that people could walk in and read. People started arriving with books to sell, more came in from estate sales, book drives, all over. I talked to local libraries and put up signs. So many books piled up that I had to rent storage space in Oakland to hold the stacks I hadn’t had time to sort. I hired a couple of part-timers who came and went before eventually realizing that I needed a full-time manager. I ran an ad and Jess answered it on the second day. She was my age, a raven-haired Los Angeles native who’d walked in wearing cobalt Prada glasses, a miniskirt, and high black boots. During what passed for the job interview she had announced herself as a lesbian with a degree in architecture that she’d never used, a fondness for single malt scotch and rescue animals, and a distaste for cheap coffee, social media, and Lakers fans. She also told me that she expected equity after the first year, zero micromanaging, and permission to bring her cat to work.

  I’d hired her on the spot. One of the best decisions of my life.

  We got along. She knew when to let me be. Didn’t come running in every two seconds with some breathless question about restocking. Pretty soon she was running the place far more efficiently than I ever had, dealing with accounting and insurance and a hundred other details I never would have thought about. Business picked up. Customers liked the coffee, the armchairs, the casual vibe. And Jess’s tendency to expel anyone who answered their cell phone while in the store. Sales increased. A year passed and I made her a partner. It wasn’t just the sales bump, or that we got along.

  Jess understood that I sometimes did other work. She understood that sometimes a woman would come by the store needing something other than a book.

  Jess was okay with that. We shared certain views.

  “Any good weekend plans?” she asked, turning from a high stack of newly arrived paperbacks that she had been sorting.

  “Catch a movie tonight, I think.” Remembering, I laughed. “And apparently I have a date on Monday. Don’t ask me how the hell that happened.”

  Jess grinned. “How the hell did that happen?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Why do I tell you anything?”

  “You on Match, Nikki? Or Tinder? Going for some casual love?”

  “Ugh. Please.” I went over to the espresso machine, a Lavazza. A big brass Italian model that was the pride of our shop. We officially offered an espresso to customers who made a purchase, but usually just ended up giving out a lot of free coffee without bothering to toe the line. “Want one?”

  “Always.”

  I made two, bending down to scratch Bartleby, the bookstore’s resident cat. He was a gray, yellow-eyed cat, and he meowed as I scratched between his ears, his fur warm from the morning sun. True to her word, Jess brought him into the store every day, where he prowled amongst the shelves and took naps of tremendous length, often, for obscure cat reasons, directly atop the register. Maybe he liked to keep track of things more than he let on.

  We stood by the counter and sipped our espressos. Customers leisurely browsed the shelves or sat, reading quietly. Sunlight from the windows stretched a slice of brightness against the floor. Jess had a Billie Holiday album playing and the beautiful, vulnerable voice drifted through the store, backed by unhurried big band instrumentals. I took pleasure in the languid pace of the bookstore, the slow movements, the soft voices, the smells of fresh coffee and aged paper, the people who circulated comfortably between the high stacks with gentle semi-purpose, like fish in an aquarium. My bookstore was a place of calm for me—a calm all the more meaningful given how much chaos and unpredictability and pain was out there, outside the doors. Much of my childhood had been anything but calm, so much so that for years I had given up any hope of finding it for myself. Maybe the bookstore had started accidentally, but as I brought in the boxes of books and filled the shelves, I must have known, deep down, that what I was truly doing was building the refuge I had always been so desperate for, and so unsure of ever finding.

  “So? Who is he?” Jess wanted to know.

  I shook my head. “I knew I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “Too late now.”

  “Fine. He’s a grad student.”

  “Got yourself a Berkeley boy! Business? Law? You gonna marry rich and retire?”

  “English, sadly. I think I’ll keep my day job.”

  “So what’s the plan for the first date?”

  “Have him to dinner.”

  Jess laughed. “You’re one of a kind. A strange guy coming to dinner on the first date.”

  “Right,” I said. “‘Because he’s gonna slip something in my drink or tie me up. I think I’ll survive, but if you don’t hear from me, tell the cops to check the English Department for clues.”

  “Or,” she winked, “they should check the bedroom…”

  “My God. You never stop.” I saw an older, white-haired man in the fiction section, looking lost. He was dressed impeccably in polished cordovan loafers, a blazer, and a polka-dot blue tie. “Help you find something?” I asked, walking over.

  He turned with a relieved look. He had a pleasant face and sharp eyes. “My grandson’s birthday. I’m afraid I’ve fallen out of touch with whatever twelve-year-old boys read these days. But I was sternly warned by his mother that he has every Rowling and Tolkien book in existence.”

  “What’s your grandson like?” I asked.

  “Very active. Boy Scouts, loves wilderness, adventure—anything outdoors.”

  I thought for a second, then started moving up and down the shelves, pulling books. “Jack London, the gold standard. Lived down the street from here, too. White Fang, Call of the Wild. Wildness to domestication and the inevitable reverse.” I moved down a few letters and grabbed another. “Gary Paulsen, Hatchet. Can’t go wrong. Classic wilderness survival.” Another title caught my eye and I pulled it. “The White Company. Knights and battles.”

  He looked at the book. “Arthur Conan Doyle … Sherlock Holmes?”

  “This one’s different. He’ll like it. Trust me.” I was already headed down the shelves and grabbed another. “Robert Louis Stevenson. I’m sure he’s read Treasure Island, but try Kidnapped.” I lingered in the Ss, scanning titles. “Ernest Thompson Seton. Helped found the Boy Scouts, actually. Lives of the Hunted.” I handed the man the last paperback. The cover was frayed and the pages were heavily marked up. I saw him notice. “Don’t worry. Your grandson is going to be happy.”

  “You know your books,” the man commented as I rang him up.

  “Goes with the territory. If I worked as a florist I bet I could tell you all about peonies.”

  His eyes crinkled. “Somehow I don’t see you with peonies.”

  I put the books in a paper bag and dropped a couple of bookmarks in with the receipt. “Hope he enjoys. Tell him happy birthday from me.”

  I rang up a few other customers while I finished off my espresso. Across the store I heard voices raised in argument. The ZEBRAS were in, occupying their usual corner. The ZEBRAS were the Zealous East Bay Ratiocinating Amateur Sleuths, a group of East Bay residents who convened a few times a week. Their stated purpose—as their business cards happily stated—was the “Solving of Crimes, Reading of Mysteries, and Nitpicking of Everything,” but they leaned decidedly toward the latter parts. As far as I knew, they’d never solved anything more than whose turn it was to pay for lunch, and they were usually a month behind on that. What the ZEBRAS were best at was having spirited literary debates over endless amounts of coffee and deli takeout.

  “Don’t forget, by the way,” Jess said. “Book group this week.”

  I nodded. “I invited someone new, actually. Her name is Zoe. Who knows if she’ll show up, but keep an eye out for her just in case.”

  Jess gave me a look.

&nbs
p; I shrugged. “Maybe. She looked like some company would do her good, anyway.” I enjoyed the book club, made up of women I met through my other work. Everyone from English professors to women who had never made it through a copy of People until they started coming. They were my favorite. I loved seeing them get so excited about something they’d always been told was a waste of time. When a woman realized there were situations, lessons, knowledge in books that applied to her own life more than she’d ever imagined.

  “All right,” I said. “Back to the joys of paperwork.”

  Jess’s voice followed me. “Nikki?”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s good that you’re dating again. After what happened with Bryan, I was starting to wonder if you’d end up in a nunnery.”

  “Yeah, well, we’ll see. That’s still a definite option.” I started toward a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY but was stopped by another voice. I had been spotted by the ZEBRAS.

  “Nikki, we need you to settle something.” The request was from Zach, a bearded Cal biology postdoc in his usual uniform of tortoiseshell glasses and army green cargo shorts. He waved his bagel at me to underline the importance of the approaching question.

  “I’m busy, Zach.”

  “Come on, it will just take a second.”

  I turned toward the group, doing my best to pretend to look irritable. “Fine. What?”

  “You’re on a cruise ship and people are getting knocked off one by one. You suspect the killer is on board. Who do you want in the cabin next to you: Hercule Poirot or Auguste Dupin?”

  I considered. “Poirot. He’s got more of a track record. Besides, Death on the Nile proves he wouldn’t get seasick.”

  “Not bad, but let’s go double or nothing,” said Laney Garber, silver bangles on her wrists clinking. She was a Berkeley native, owned an art gallery near campus, and was the only woman I’d ever met who regularly smoked a pipe. Whenever she was in the store, the fragrance of apple tobacco accompanied her. Much to her displeasure I didn’t let her smoke in the shop, but the pipe sat next to her even now, a beautiful hand-carved meerschaum that seemed to eye me resentfully for its lack of freedom. “Your great-aunt left you a fortune in rare gems but your loafing, good-for-nothing brother-in-law swiped it all and headed for San Francisco. You can’t go to the cops because they’re all crooked as hell. What’s Philip Marlowe’s street address?”