Him Improvement

by Tanya Chris

  “There are a lot of factors,” he tried to explain.

  “Which Hailey is never going to understand,” Declan said. “This was a waste of time. You can’t explain a project of this size to someone whose business experience consists of running a three-hundred-square-foot used bookstore.”

  “And who has degrees in economics and urban planning from Columbia,” Hailey said. “I’m not new to the principles of urban renewal. I just don’t embrace them.”

  The revelation of Hailey’s credentials surprised Mac even more than it surprised Declan, because Mac had seen Hailey’s Comic and Declan hadn’t. Someone who’d graduated from Columbia ought to be able to do better, even with a small bookstore in Ball’s End.

  Declan shook his head. “You’re not going to change his mind, Mac. Careful he doesn’t change yours.” He pushed out of the conference room, allowing the door to bang shut behind him. Temper was unusual from Declan. He usually preferred sarcasm because it could be applied from a seated position.

  Mac was left with Hailey in the conference room—alone at last but not the way he’d been looking forward to.

  “That didn’t go well,” he said, stating the obvious.

  “Declan’s right, unfortunately. You didn’t change my mind with this, and I didn’t change yours with the tour of the neighborhood, did I?”

  “I understood your point. I hadn’t been considering the human impact of the project.” He could bring up Elisa’s impending interview, but she was only one person out of however many they’d displaced. “But it doesn’t change the economics of the situation, which I guess you understand….”

  “I do,” Hailey assured him. “I’ve always understood where C&G was coming from. I’ve seen some of your other projects. I know you do good work. I just can’t overlook the fact that it comes at the cost of the people who most need help.”

  “I’m sure we can find a better way for you to make a living, Hailey.”

  “I wasn’t talking about myself. I’m not one of the people who needs help. I mean, I’ve found a community in Ball’s End. I’m happy there. But part of what makes me happy there is that I’m helpful. I didn’t tell you what I did after college.”

  Mac shook his head.

  “I worked at a place like this.” He waved his hand at the sumptuously appointed room they stood in. “I made a good salary, I got good reviews, I was applying my degree, and I was harming people. I couldn’t keep doing it.”

  “So you think I shouldn’t either.”

  “That’s not a decision I can make for you. It’s not a simple decision to make at all.” Hailey came over to press a kiss against Mac’s mouth. “I have to go. The store opens at noon today.”

  “I’ll drive you. You said it’s raining.”

  “I’ll take the bus. They’ve got these great bike racks now, makes it easy to bike one way and ride the other. That’s some excellent urban planning right there. But I’ve gotta run. You going to be okay?”

  “What? Of course.”

  But Hailey patted him like he didn’t believe it, leaving Mac to wonder what his face looked like now. Did it look like he’d had his legs cut out from under him?

  He was the sole owner and primary investor in a multimillion-dollar development firm. He’d won every civic award in the tristate area. His family was one of the top donors to every cultural event of significance. He was well-turned-out enough that he’d been featured in a GQ spread on Most Eligible Entrepreneurs.

  And Hailey would be more impressed if he’d thought to have bike racks put on the front of buses.

  Chapter Nine

  MAC went around to the front door, not confident Hailey would let him in the back. He wasn’t sure where they’d left things. Despite his offer to drive Hailey back to the store, he’d had pressing appointments and couldn’t spend the rest of his day making futile attempts to convince Hailey that they could be on the same team, so he’d reluctantly watched Hailey float away in a cloud of patchouli and gone back to his own desk.

  Nevertheless, he’d wrapped things up by five—unheard of for him—so he could get over to Hailey’s Comic before it closed at six. He needed to know where things stood between them personally if they couldn’t see eye to eye professionally.

  He left his car in Hailey’s spot behind the building, guilty about presuming but too rushed to find another option, then skirted the church, feeling guilty about that too. Not that it was C&G’s fault the diocese was so eager to unload it. The doors to the church stood open, a handful of people leaving as he went by, all women, mostly older, dressed in black and walking slowly, the sort of people who went to church on a weekday. But there must be another one they could go to somewhere.

  All the lights were on in the store, and the bell tinkled when he opened the door, but no one came forward to greet him. Edgar sat in the armchair near the window, unkempt in stained gray work pants and several layers of flannel, a cup of coffee at his elbow and a book in his lap, though Mac couldn’t tell from the angle of his lowered head whether he was reading it or nodding off over it.

  Farther back, he could hear voices, so the store wasn’t empty. The height of the bookshelves and the narrowness of the aisles made it hard to pick out exactly where anyone was, but Mac followed the noise to the niche with the long table.

  Today the table was surrounded by children, ten of them, the youngest no older than five with the oldest two in their early teens. Hailey sat between a girl of about eight with a pair of black braids reaching halfway down her back and a boy with a dark fuzz of a buzz cut covering his bent head. Hailey looked up at Mac’s approach and smiled. Relief flooded him at the welcome in it.

  “Hey, I wasn’t expecting you, but this is great. I could use an extra hand. I’ve got a customer in here somewhere waiting for me to ring them up.”

  “I don’t know how—”

  “No, I’ll do that. You do this.” Hailey got up and held out the chair, and Mac sat down in it uncertainly. What did this entail exactly? Hailey disappeared before he could ask, so he turned to the little girl who had a pencil in her hand and a worksheet in front of her.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Math,” she said, as if that were patently obvious, which it actually was.

  “Do you need help?”

  “No.”

  Well. He checked over what he could see of her worksheet and decided she didn’t.

  “What’s your name?” she asked when she’d finished the column she was working on. Mac hesitated, caught between Mac and Greg. Or should he say Mr. MacPherson?

  “It’s okay if you don’t know,” she said with practical assurance.

  “Greg.”

  “Mine’s Pia. That’s Alexander.” She pointed at the kid on his other side. “He’s doing spelling. You could help him.”

  “How?”

  “You ask him his words and then tell him if he’s right or wrong. That’s what Hailey was doing.” She tapped a piece of paper in front of him, and he looked down to see a list of words printed in childish block letters on a ruled piece of notebook paper. Alexander turned a round face up to him, resigned to being quizzed but not happy about it.

  “Um, exercise,” Mac read from the paper.

  “E. X. C.”

  “No, the C comes later.”

  “You’re supposed to wait until he’s done,” Pia said.

  “E, X,” Alexander repeated. Mac did his best to silently communicate that the next letter wasn’t C. “E?”

  Mac nodded as subtly as he could because Pia was watching.

  “Now C?”

  “No, it’s E-X-E-R then C.”

  “E-X-C-R.”

  “E-X-E-R-C,” Mac prompted. Alexander sighed dramatically.

  “He doesn’t know that one,” Pia explained as her pencil flew down another column of math problems.

  “It’s not hard,” Mac said. “E-X-E-R-C. Here, look.” He opened his wallet and found a dollar bill. “I’ll give you a dollar if you get it right.”<
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  Alexander’s eyes widened. “E-X-C-R.”

  Mac waved the dollar bill at him.

  “E-X-E-R-C.”

  “Keep going.”

  “You’re bribing them?” Hailey asked, reappearing over Alexander’s shoulder with a smile.

  “I have no idea what I’m doing.”

  “I got this. There’s someone up front you might want to say hi to. I recognized the resemblance as soon as I saw her.”

  “Shi—” Mac broke off the curse that’d been about to pop out of his mouth. “I mean, wow. I didn’t see that coming.” He should have, though. She’d threatened it, and when did Julia-Louise ever threaten without following through?

  “She’s browsing around. Keep her company while I finish with the rug rats. They’re getting picked up soon.”

  “Mine’s all done,” Pia said, pushing her paper in front of Hailey. “You can correct it.”

  “I have a feeling it’s correct.”

  “But I want you to correct it.”

  Mac watched Hailey write a big 100 on top of her paper in green ink before going in search of his sister. He found her sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of a pressboard bookshelf crammed with paperbacks at every angle and labeled Romance in big block letters on a sign pasted to the middle shelf. She had two books in each hand, absorbed enough in the shelf in front of her that she jumped when he said, “What are you doing here?”

  “I could ask you the same thing. I didn’t realize you worked here now.”

  “It’s almost closing time. I only stopped in to take Hailey to dinner. You could come too,” he added grudgingly.

  He hadn’t actually asked Hailey about dinner yet, but the store closed at six, and it was nearly six. The bell rang up front, and then he heard Alexander shout, “Mom, Mom, look.” Mac had left the dollar on the table, a prize which Alexander proudly showed to his mother as they left the store.

  “I didn’t know you read romance,” he said to Julia-Louise.

  “How can you read anything else in this day and age? The world is too grim. These eighties romances are a hoot, though.” She showed him one of the covers. “So many heaving bosoms and dashing heroes. I love it.”

  “Well, good. Maybe if you buy a few thousand, Hailey can afford to move his store to another building.”

  “I wasn’t expecting the place to be so charming. You made it sound like a rattrap.”

  Was it charming? Mac looked around at the smaller touches—the fanciful cartoons decorating the hand-lettered signs, the random chairs, the mishmash of rugs. If you wanted to lose yourself in a bookstore for a few hours, he could see Hailey’s Comic working nicely.

  “Hailey mentioned there’s a book club here Wednesday nights,” Julia-Louise said. “I might check it out. They’re doing The Hate U Give. I’d love to talk about that with someone outside my own echo chamber.”

  Mac wasn’t sure what his sister would have in common with the other women in the book club, but Hailey could use the business. Book clubs were a more appropriate use of the store than whatever he had going on back there with that table full of kids.

  The relative silence indicated that said kids had all departed. The lights flickered off at the front of store, leaving him and Julia-Louise half in the shadows. Hailey appeared between two bookcases.

  “Are you closed?” Julia-Louise asked. “I was going to buy these.” She lifted what had become a pile of at least seven books.

  Hailey waved her off. “Take them. I’m not going to charge you for them.”

  “You should charge her double.”

  Julia-Louise stuck her tongue out at him.

  “They cost me nothing. A dime at the library sale, or people drop them off. But here.” Hailey leaned down and plucked the copy of Fifty Shades of Grey from her stack and put it back on the shelf. “Try this one instead.”

  The cover of the book he’d chosen featured two men in front of an open window, curtains blowing inward. One of the men was on his knees. Julia-Louise looked speculatively at Mac.

  “I don’t think—”

  “Too late, I’m taking it.” She put the entire pile into her bag and got to her feet. Mac didn’t bother to try to talk her out of it. In the entire thirty-five years he’d known her, he’d never once changed her mind about anything.

  “Coming to dinner with us?”

  “No can do. I have a hot date with a good book and a cheap bottle of wine.”

  Hailey escorted her to the front of the store and locked the door behind her, then picked up Edgar’s coffee cup and carried it into the back. Mac followed wherever he went, lurking behind him as he rinsed the cup out and hung it on a metal hook over the sink.

  “Can I take you to dinner?”

  “You can take me to bed,” Hailey said. “If that’s what you meant.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “Don’t scowl at me. I’m only teasing. I forget how serious you can be.” Hailey gave him a kiss that probably wiped the scowl off his face. At any rate, Hailey seemed satisfied with the result. “I’ve got a ton of food in the fridge that’s better than anything we’ll get out. Sit down and I’ll heat something up.”

  He should explain that he’d rather go someplace nice than eat microwaved leftovers in the back of Hailey’s Comic, except that he wouldn’t really.

  “You should’ve charged her,” he told Hailey as he listened to the beep-beep of buttons being pushed. “She could buy the whole place on a month’s interest.”

  “Yeah?” Hailey nudged him down into the chair. “What does she do?”

  “She’s a professional board sitter,” Mac joked. “She sits on boards,” he clarified when Hailey just gave him a look, the fork he’d been using to stir their dinner raised like an exclamation point. “Charities, trusts, museums, that sort of thing. They pay an honorarium, I suppose, but Julia-Louise doesn’t need the money. She’s a trust-fund baby like I am.”

  “One who’s chosen to give her money away instead of make more of it.”

  “Believe me, whatever she might be giving away, she’s got plenty left for herself.”

  Julia-Louise might do some good with those foundations of hers, but she could add more to the world by getting a job, in his opinion. Not that they hadn’t had that conversation before.

  The microwave dinged, and Hailey turned back to it to stir something before setting it going again. “Her handbag was a knockoff.”

  “What do you know about handbags?”

  “I know a lot about fakes. If I ever saw a real Fendi bag, I probably wouldn’t believe it. I’d just assume it was an extra-good fake.” Hailey put down a glass in front of Mac. Tap water, without so much as an ice cube floating in it, never mind a slice of lemon. Mac considered making a run to the liquor store to pick up something more relaxing, then decided against it. Being here with Hailey was more relaxing than anything he could buy.

  He stripped off his suit jacket and draped it over the back of his chair, then worked the knot of his tie free. Hailey’s hands came to his shoulders, and he slumped forward, letting Hailey work on him for a moment while the microwave whirred in the background.

  He hadn’t changed clothes, not wanting to waste time stopping home, but Hailey had. He was in his standard uniform of jeans and a T-shirt, but rather than skinny jeans with artful rips, today he had on hippie jeans, complete with pen-scratched peace signs and flared bottoms. Maybe they were even authentic, an inheritance from his parents. His black T-shirt bore a white unicorn on a rainbow-splashed background and was very much Hailey but probably too Pride for flashing around a business establishment, especially a business that attracted children.

  “What’s up with the kids?” he asked as Hailey’s strong hands worked him over. “You do story hour on Mondays?”

  “Every weekday, but no stories. They just hang out until their parents can get here to pick them up.”

  “Tell me you’re not running an unlicensed day care facility, Hailey.” Mac interrupted the magic Hailey w
as making happen by turning to look at him. Day care was a thorny business. The insurance was through the roof but vital, and there were all kinds of regulations and reporting requirements, not to mention that Hailey’s lease didn’t allow him to operate a business of that type.

  “Don’t worry.” Hailey patted him reassuringly on the head, then turned back to the microwave. “I’m not running a day care facility. I’d have to get paid for that.”

  “Okay, why aren’t you getting paid, though?”

  “Because one, then I’d be running an unlicensed day care facility, and two, if their parents could afford to pay me, those kids wouldn’t be hanging out on street corners or sitting alone in apartments. The school bus stops at the corner by the church, and the kids come in and work on their homework or look at comic books until their parents get here. It’s not a big deal.”

  “That’s what you meant when you said you used to help Elisa.”

  “Yeah, the two older ones used to hang out with me. I miss them.” Hailey slid a plate in front of Mac, then banged around in a drawer to produce a fork. He leaned up against the counter with his own plate, causing Mac to remember that there was only one chair, which was exactly why Hailey ought to be charging if he was going to offer child care services.

  “What about the book club? Are they paying you?”

  “For what? They sit and drink wine. I don’t even attend, though if I did I’d get more than I was giving.”

  “How about the AA meeting?”

  “They pay in coffee, which is super helpful. I love coffee, but I couldn’t afford the luxury if I had to buy it. Leftover cookies sometimes too. I’ve got Oreos for dessert. Double-stuffed.”

  “If they paid in money, you’d be able to afford to buy coffee. All of them—the day care, the book club, the AA meeting, those guys you’re teaching English to—”