The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry

by Gabrielle Zevin

  Don’t you have any other publishers to read? Amelia texts him.

  A.J. thinks a long time about his reply. None with sales reps I like as well as you is his first draft, but he decides this is too presumptuous for a girl with an American hero fiancé. He redrafts. It’s a compelling list for Knightley, I guess.

  A.J. orders so many Knightley titles that even Amelia’s boss notices. “I’ve never seen a little account like Island take so many of our books,” the boss says. “New owner?”

  “Same guy,” Amelia says. “But he’s different from when I first met him.”

  “Well, you must have really done a number on him. That guy doesn’t take what he can’t sell,” the boss says. “Harvey never came close to these kinds of orders with Island.”

  Finally, A.J. gets to the last title. It’s a charming memoir about motherhood, scrapbooking, and the writing life, written by a Canadian poet that A.J. has always liked. The book is only 150 pages, but it takes A.J. two weeks to get through it. He can’t seem to read a chapter without falling asleep or being distracted by Maya. When he finishes it, he finds himself unable to craft a response. The writing is elegant enough, and he thinks the women who frequent his store could respond to it. The problem, of course, is that once he replies to Amelia, he’ll be done with the Knightley winter catalog, and he’ll have no reason to contact Amelia until the summer list hits. He likes her, and he thinks it’s possible that she might like him, despite that horrendous first meeting. But . . . A. J. Fikry is not the kind of man who thinks it’s okay to try to steal another man’s fiancée. He doesn’t believe in “the one.” There are zillions of people in the world; no one is that special. Besides which, he barely knows Amelia Loman. What if, say, he did manage to steal her and it turned out they weren’t compatible in bed?

  Amelia texts him, What’s happening? Didn’t you like?

  Not for me, unfortunately, A.J. replies. Looking forward to seeing what’s on Knightley’s summer list. Yours, A.J.

  The response strikes Amelia as overly businesslike, dismissive. She thinks about picking up the phone but doesn’t. She texts back, While you’re waiting, you should definitely watch TRUE BLOOD. True Blood is Amelia’s favorite television show. It had gotten to be a kind of joke with them that A.J. would like vampires if only he would watch True Blood. Amelia fancies herself a Sookie Stackhouse type.

  Not gonna happen, Amy, A.J. writes. See you in March.

  March is four and a half months away. By then, A.J. feels sure his little crush will have gone away or at least resolved itself into a more tolerable dormancy.

  March is four and a half months away.

  Maya asks him what’s wrong, and he tells her that he’s sad because he’s not going to see his friend for a while.

  “Amelia?” Maya asks.

  “How do you know about her?”

  Maya rolls her eyes, and A.J. wonders when and where she learned that gesture.

  Lambiase hosts his Chief’s Choice Book Club at the store that night (selection: L.A. Confidential), and after that, as is their tradition, he and A.J. share a bottle.

  “I think I’ve met someone,” A.J. says after a glass has mellowed him.

  “Good news,” Lambiase says.

  “The problem is, she’s affianced to someone else.”

  “Bad timing,” Lambiase proclaims. “I’ve been a police officer for twenty years now and I’ll tell you, pretty much every bad thing in life is a result of bad timing, and every good thing is the result of good timing.”

  “That seems terribly reductive.”

  “Think about it. If Tamerlane hadn’t gotten stolen, you wouldn’t have left the door unlocked, and Marian Wallace wouldn’t have left the baby in the store. Good timing is what that was.”

  “True. But I met Amelia four years ago,” A.J. argues. “I just didn’t bother to notice her until a couple of months ago.”

  “Still bad timing. Your wife had died. And then you had Maya.”

  “It’s not much consolation,” A.J. says.

  “But hey, it’s good to know your heart still works, right? Want me to set you up with someone?”

  A.J. shakes his head.

  “Come on,” Lambiase insists. “I know everyone in town.”

  “Unfortunately, it’s a very small town.”

  As a warm-up, Lambiase sets up A.J. with his cousin. The cousin has blond hair with black roots, overly plucked eyebrows, a heart-shaped face, and a high-pitched voice like Michael Jackson. She wears a low-cut top and a push-up bra, which creates a small, sad shelf for her name necklace to rest. Her name is Maria. In the middle of mozzarella sticks, they run out of conversation.

  “What’s your favorite book?” A.J. attempts to draw her out.

  She chews on her mozzarella stick and clutches her Maria necklace like it’s a rosary. “This is some kind of a test, right?”

  “No, there’s no wrong answer,” A.J. says. “I’m curious.”

  She drinks her wine.

  “Or you could say the book that had the greatest influence on your life. I’m trying to get to know you a little.”

  She takes another sip.

  “Or how about the last thing you read?”

  “The last thing I read . . . ” She furrows her brow. “The last thing I read was this menu.”

  “And the last thing I read was your necklace,” he says. “Maria.”

  The meal is perfectly cordial after that. He never will find out what Maria reads.

  Next, Margene from the store sets him up with her neighbor, a lively female firefighter named Rosie. Rosie has black hair with a blue streak, exceptional arm muscles, a great big laugh, and short nails she paints red with little orange flames. Rosie is a former college hurdles champion, and she likes to read sports history and particularly athletes’ memoirs.

  On their third date, she’s in the middle of describing a dramatic section from Jose Canseco’s Juiced when A.J. interrupts her, “You know they’re all ghostwritten?”

  Rosie says she knows and she doesn’t care. “These high-performance individuals have been busy training and practicing. When did they have time to learn to write books?”

  “But these books . . . My point is, they’re essentially lies.”

  Rosie cocks her head toward A.J. and taps her flame nails on the table. “You’re a snob, you know that? Makes you miss out on a lot.”

  “I’ve been told that before.”

  “All of life’s in a sports memoir,” she says. “You practice hard and you succeed, but eventually your body gives out and it’s over.”

  “Sounds like a latter-period Philip Roth novel,” he says.

  Rosie crosses her arm. “That’s one of those things you say to sound smart, right?” she says. “But, really, you’re trying to make someone else feel stupid.”

  That night in bed, after sex that feels more like wrestling, Rosie rolls away from him and says, “I’m not sure I want to see you again.”

  “I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings before,” he says as he puts his pants back on. “The memoirs thing.”

  She waves her hand. “Don’t worry about it. You can’t help the way you are.”

  He suspects she is right. He is a snob, not suited for relationships. He will raise his daughter, run his store, read his books, and that, he decides, will be more than enough.

  AT ISMAY’S INSISTENCE, it is determined that Maya should take dance. “You don’t want her to be deprived, do you?” Ismay says.

  “Of course not,” A.J. says.

  “Well,” Ismay says, “dance is important, not just physically but socially, too. You don’t want her to end up stunted.”

  “I don’t know. The idea of enrolling a little girl in dance. Isn’t that kind of an old-fashioned and sexist notion?”

  A.J. is unsure whether Maya will be suited to dance. Even at six, she is cerebral—always with a book and content at home or at the store. “She’s not stunted,” he says. “She reads chapter books now.”

&nbs
p; “Not intellectually, obviously,” Ismay insists. “But she seems to prefer your company to anyone else’s, certainly anyone her own age, and that probably isn’t healthy.”

  “Why isn’t it healthy?” Now A.J.’s spine is tingling unpleasantly.

  “She’s going to end up just like you,” Ismay says.

  “And what would be wrong with that?”

  Ismay gives him a look as if the answer should be obvious. “Look, A.J., you two are your own little world. You never date—”

  “I do date.”

  “You never travel—”

  A.J. interrupts. “We aren’t talking about me.”

  “Stop being so argumentative. You asked me to be godmother, and I’m telling you to enroll your daughter in dance. I’ll pay for it, so don’t you fight me anymore.”

  There is one dance studio on Alice Island and one class for girls ages five and six. The owner/teacher is Madame Olenska. She is in her sixties and though she is not overweight, her skin hangs, suggesting that her bones have shrunken over the years. Her always bejeweled fingers seem to have one joint too many. The children are both fascinated and frightened by her. A.J. feels the same way. The first time he drops off Maya, Madame Olenska says, “Mr. Fikry, you are first man to set foot in this dance studio in twenty years. We must take advantage of you.”

  In her Russian accent, this seems like a sexual invitation of some kind, but mainly what she requires is manual labor. For the holiday recital, he paints and constructs a large wooden crate to look like a child’s block, hot-glue guns googly eyes, bells, and flowers, and fashions sparkly pipe cleaners into whiskers and antennae. (He suspects he will never get the glitter out from under his nails.)

  He spends much of his free time that winter with Madame Olenska, and he learns a lot about her. For instance, Madame Olenska’s star pupil is her daughter who dances in a Broadway show and whom Madame Olenska hasn’t spoken to in a decade. She wags her triple-jointed finger at him. “Don’t let that happen to you.” She looks dramatically out the window, then slowly turns back to A.J. “You will buy ad in program for bookstore, yes.” It is not a question. Island Books becomes the sole sponsor of The Nutcracker, Rudolph and Friends, and a holiday coupon for the store appears on the back page of the program. A.J. goes even further, providing a gift basket of dance-themed books to be raffled off with proceeds going to the Boston Ballet.

  From the raffle table, A.J. watches the show, exhausted and slightly fluish. As the acts are arranged according to skill, Maya’s group is on first. She is an enthusiastic if not overly graceful mouse. She scurries with abandon. She wrinkles her nose in a recognizably mousy way. She wags her pipe-cleaner tail, which had been painstakingly coiled by him. He knows a career in dance is not in her future.

  Ismay, who mans the table with him, hands him a Kleenex.

  “Cold,” he says.

  “Sure it is,” Ismay says.

  At the end of the night, Madame Olenska says, “Thank you, Mr. Fikry. You are good man.”

  “Maybe I’ve got a good kid.” He still needs to claim his mouse from the dressing room.

  “Yes,” she says. “But this is not enough. You must find yourself good woman.”

  “I like my life,” A.J. says.

  “You think child is enough, but child grows old. You think work is enough, but work is not warm body.” He suspects Madame Olenska has already tossed back a few Stolis.

  “Happy holidays, Madame Olenska.”

  Walking home with Maya, he is contemplating the teacher’s words. He has been alone for nearly six years. Grief is hard to bear, but being alone he has never much minded. Besides, he doesn’t want any old warm body. He wants Amelia Loman with her big heart and bad clothes. Someone like her, at least.

  Snow is beginning to fall, and the flakes catch in Maya’s whiskers. He wants to take a picture, but he doesn’t want to do the thing where you stop to take a picture. “Whiskers become you,” A.J. tells her.

  The compliment to her whiskers sets off a stream of observations about the recital, but A.J. is distracted. “Maya,” he says, “do you know how old I am?”

  “Yes,” she says. “Twenty-two.”

  “I’m quite a bit older than that.”

  “Eighty-nine?”

  “I’m . . .” He holds up both his palms four times, and then three fingers.

  “Forty-three?”

  “Good job. I’m forty-three, and in these years I’ve learned that it’s better to have loved and lost and blah blah blah and that it’s better to be alone than be with someone you don’t really fancy. Do you agree?”

  She nods solemnly, and her mouse ears almost fall off.

  “Sometimes, though, I get tired of learning lessons.” He looks down at his daughter’s puzzled face. “Are your feet getting wet?”

  She nods, and he squats on the ground so that she can get on his back. “Put your arms around my neck.” Once she is mounted, he stands, groaning a little. “You’re bigger than you used to be.”

  She grabs his earlobe. “What’s that?” she asks.

  “I used to have an earring,” he says.

  “Why?” she asks. “Were you a pirate?”

  “I was young,” he says.

  “My age?”

  “Older than that. There was a girl.”

  “A wench?”

  “A woman. She liked this band called The Cure, and she thought it would be cool if she pierced my ear.”

  Maya thinks about this. “Did you have a parrot?”

  “I didn’t. I had a girlfriend.”

  “Could the parrot talk?”

  “No, because there wasn’t a parrot.”

  She tries to trick him. “What was the parrot’s name?”

  “There wasn’t a parrot.”

  “But if there was one, what would his name have been?”

  “How do you know it’s a he?” he asks.

  “Oh!” She puts her hand to her mouth, and she begins to tip backward.

  “Hold on to my neck or you’ll fall off. Maybe she was called Amy?”

  “Amy the parrot. I knew it. Did you have a ship?” Maya asks.

  “Yes. It had books on it, and it really was more of a research vessel. We studied a lot.”

  “You’re ruining this story.”

  “It’s a fact, Maya. There are murdering kinds of pirates and researching kinds of pirates, and your daddy was the latter.”

  THE ISLAND IS never a popular destination during the wintertime, but that year Alice is exceptionally inclement. The roads are an ice rink, and ferry service is canceled for days at a time. Even Daniel Parish is forced to stay at home. He writes a little, avoids his wife, and spends the rest of his time with A.J. and Maya.

  As do most women, Maya likes Daniel. When he comes to the store, he does not talk to her like she is a simpleton just because she is a child. Even at six, she is sensitive to people who are condescending. Daniel always asks her what she is reading and what she thinks. Furthermore, he has bushy blond eyebrows and a voice that makes her think of damask.

  One afternoon a week or so after New Year’s, Daniel and Maya are reading on the floor of the bookstore when she turns to him and says, “Uncle Daniel, I have a question. Don’t you ever go to work?”

  “I’m working right now, Maya,” Daniel says.

  She takes off her glasses and wipes them on her shirt. “You don’t look like you’re working. You look like you’re reading. Don’t you have a place you go where you have a job?” She elaborates, “Lambiase is a police officer. Daddy is a bookseller. What do you do?”

  Daniel picks Maya up and carries her to the local author section of Island Books. Out of courtesy to his brother-in-law, A.J. stocks Daniel’s entire body of works, though the only book that ever sells is that first one, The Children in the Apple Tree. Daniel points to his name on the spine. “That’s me,” he says. “That’s my job.”

  Maya’s eyes grow wide. “Daniel Parish. You write books,” she says. “You’re a”�
�she says the word with reverence—“writer. What is this about?”

  “It’s about the follies of man. It’s a love story and a tragedy.”

  “That is very general,” Maya tells him.

  “It’s about this nurse who has spent her life taking care of other people. She gets in a car accident, and people have to take care of her for the first time in her life.”

  “That does not sound like something I would read,” Maya says.

  “Bit corny, eh?”

  “Nooooo.” She doesn’t want to hurt Daniel’s feelings. “But I like books with more action.”

  “More action, huh? Me too. The good news is, Miss Fikry, all the time I spend reading, I’m learning how to do it better,” Daniel explains.

  Maya thinks about this. “I want this job.”

  “Many people do, my girl.”

  “How do I get it?” Maya asks.

  “Reading, as aforementioned.”

  Maya nods. “I do that.”

  “A good chair.”

  “I have one of those.”

  “Then you’re well on your way,” Daniel tells her before setting her back on the ground. “I’ll teach you the rest later. You’re very good company, do you know that?”

  “That’s what Daddy says.”

  “Smart man. Lucky man. Good man. Smart kid, too.”

  A.J. calls Maya upstairs to dinner. “Do you want to join?” A.J. asks him.

  “Bit early for me,” Daniel says. “Plus I’ve got work to do.” He winks at Maya.

  AT LAST IT is March. The roads thaw, turning everything to muck. Ferry service resumes, as do Daniel Parish’s wanderings. Sales reps come to town with their summer offerings, and A.J. goes out of his way to be hospitable to them. He takes to wearing a tie as a way of signaling to Maya that he is “at work” as opposed to “at home.”

  Perhaps because it is the meeting he is most anticipating, he schedules Amelia’s sales call for last. About two weeks before their date, he sends her a text: Pequod’s OK with you? Or would you rather try something new?