A Pocketful of Stardust

by J P Barnaby

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  The walk back to the store, while only a couple of blocks, felt like eternity to Noah. Fifty thousand dollars. Fifty. Thousand. Dollars. Five-O. Grand. Where the fuck was he going to get that kind of money? Even if he could get an extension or a covering loan, he’d still have to pay it back. And the reason Charlie was in arrears in the first place was because he couldn’t make the payments.

  How was Noah going to do better?

  “SO THAT’S the situation,” Noah told Henry with a sigh. “I need to pay off the loan by the first of December—first of January if I’m lucky, not that it makes that much difference—and I don’t have the money. As for the rest—the house is worth a bundle, according to my neighbor’s daughter, who’s a real estate agent, but it’s part of the estate that’s going into probate, so even if probate closes quickly, it’ll still take longer than that to get it fixed up enough to put on the market. Then to find a buyer and do the closing… it’ll take too much time. And there’s no guarantee it’ll sell high enough to pay off the existing mortgage and the loan for the store.”

  “Another loan….”

  “They’re looking, but my debt-to-income ratio may be too high—I’ve got no assets and a metric crap-ton of school loans. The only person I know with enough money to help is my uncle James, and I don’t know that he’d be willing to. He seemed pretty adamant about me selling and going back to New York. I can borrow against my 401(k), but only to the tune of about ten grand, which is way short.”

  “What’s a 401(k)?”

  “A retirement fund. You contribute to it over the course of your working life, and hopefully your employer does too, so you have savings when you retire.”

  “You don’t have a pension?”

  Noah laughed bitterly. “No. Hardly anybody has pensions nowadays. It’s all about the businesses and the stockholders. Don’t get me started on that.”

  “Huh.” Henry shook his head. “Might as well be a small businessman for all that. Never had a pension, and hardly anything in Social Security. I was planning on working till I died…. Guess I did at that!” His laughter was a low, rolling rumble that made Noah smile back at him.

  “Guess you did.”

  “So, then, what are your assets?”

  Noah shrugged. “The house and the store are in probate, but the books are part of the business, so I can work with those.”

  “I used to have a nice sideline in rare editions—there might still be some around. But even if we found them, by the time we got them advertised, got the orders in, and got the checks cashed, it’d be well past your deadline. Mail orders have long turnaround times, sometimes six to eight weeks, and that’s after the order’s made….”

  Noah felt a spark of hope. “Not anymore. We should be able to find a website where we can sell them online and collect the money through PayPal or something. We’d see a much faster return… and God knows I can get a website up pretty damn quick if I have to. I told Dad for years he should have had one.”

  “Whoa. Who’s a PayPal and what’s a website?”

  Noah explained. Henry just sat shaking his head. “So you don’t use the mail anymore for any of that?”

  “No, a lot of times we use UPS or FedEx—those are package delivery services. They usually have next-day delivery.”

  “My goodness. Things happen very quickly these days.”

  “They sure do. And I don’t even know where to start.”

  “Basics first. You need to know what you have before you know what you need.”

  “I don’t even know where to start,” Noah repeated mournfully. He gazed at the bookshelves. “There’s got to be a million books here.”

  Henry snorted. “There are only a few thousand. Stardust was never a big store like Kroch’s and Brentano’s.”

  “There are boxes in the basement too.”

  “Which you’ll get to. Now, the most valuable books are signed first editions. First editions of some books are valuable on their own, but we’re mostly talkin’ classics. A first-edition Steinbeck would be worth a bundle. A signed first-edition Steinbeck would be worth a fortune. But don’t expect to find one here—they’re rarer than hen’s teeth, and your daddy would have had that up for auction long ago. Have you looked at the books in the cellar?”

  “Yeah, to make sure they’re in decent condition. They’re in plastic bins and on shelves. Most of them are labeled with the name of an auction Dad went to a few years ago. Don’t know why they’re still down there.”

  “Good. We’ll start with your daddy’s records—if he was a decent businessman, and I think he must have been to keep the store goin’ for all those years, he’ll have kept good records.”

  “On paper.” Noah sighed and led the way to the back office, where a half dozen big old ledgers lay on the worktable. “He’d only just started to get things computerized.” He opened the first ledger. “Do we start with any particular one?”

  “This one looks to be the oldest—it’s from the 1970s.” Henry shook his head. “To think of the 1970s as being old times…. Let’s see what he’s done here.” The page ruffled under Henry’s insubstantial finger. Well, good. Good.”

  “Good?”

  “Yes. You’re goin’ to look at the right-hand column and eliminate any that are marked sold. When you find a blank, make a note of it.”

  “Title, author… edition?”

  “Publisher too—it might be a first edition from a publisher who picked it up after the contract with the author ran out, in which case it won’t be worth as much. Ignore the prices—they won’t mean anything. If there’s any indication where the book is, note that too. No sense spending time lookin’ for something when you have a map at hand.”

  He didn’t see a lot of blanks, and Noah wasn’t sure whether to feel grateful. Some of the books were marked “disc,” which he figured meant “discarded,” but mostly they were sold. He set up a spreadsheet on his laptop and entered the notes there. Henry watched him a while, then shook his head and wandered off into the main part of the store.

  It was dry, dull work, but a lot of writing tech documentation was too, so after a while he got into a sort of zen state: coasting his finger down the faded pages and stopping to enter data, then back to the coasting. It wasn’t until his phone rang that he looked up and realized it had gone dark outside.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, Noah,” Karen said. The hairs on his arms bristled at how flat and stiff her voice sounded.

  “Everything going okay?” He didn’t really care, not when he felt so tired and everything was going wrong.

  “No. Cheryl’s baby came early and now she’s out on maternity leave, and Jane just told me that she found a new job. Our department is falling apart.”

  A pang of guilt flashed across his gut, but he pushed it away. He had every right to take leave.

  “Send me my laptop,” Noah offered. He could work from the store. The Wi-Fi was good enough.

  “That’s not going to work. I need you here. Your time ended already, and I can’t approve PTO for you with everything going to hell here,” she said, and Noah could hear her typing in the background.

  He looked up to see Henry watching him with cool, transparent eyes—no condemnation or acceptance in his expression.

  “I can’t come back right now, Karen. I’m still trying to close out my father’s affairs. It’s not something I can do from New York. He had a business.” Noah picked at the ledger page he’d been reviewing, running his fingers along the indentations made by his grandfather’s pen. This was his history—his legacy.

  “Damn it, Noah. You’ve got the rest of the week. You have to be back by Monday or I can’t help you.”

  The phone went dead in his hand.

  “Sounds like you have a decision to make,” Henry said and ran a finger down the page near his. A cool electricity crackled along the paper. “But no point in worrying until you hear from that banker about your credit. For now, let’s find s
ome of these books.”

  Chapter Ten

  NOAH CLICKED off his cell phone and set it gently down beside the register, then put his head back and screamed. Henry flickered in and out of view, startled.

  “I can’t believe him!” Noah raged. He shoved the thick ledger across the counter in frustration. “He said I’m running out of time, and of course he ‘can’t help me’—that’s bullshit. His family owns the frickin’ bank. He could give me an extension, he just won’t. He’s been torturing me since we were teenagers.”

  “I take it that was the bank.”

  “Yeah. Fucking Matt Handley. Guess he wanted to round out his week with a laugh. Thank God he didn’t know Karen tried to fire me yesterday. He probably would have called the loan for sport.”

  Henry said gently, “What did he tell you, son?”

  “He said my credit is for shit and I have no other assets. He also said that because of my debt-to-income ratio, I can’t even take a second mortgage on the house. Since I have a life in New York, the bank isn’t willing to bet I’ll stick it out and not let them foreclose. As if.” Noah reached down and rubbed Jake. That always seemed to calm him, especially now that Jake seemed to be more comfortable around Henry.

  “Well, I suppose we’d better sit down and figure out your options.”

  “Do I have any?” Noah sank down on the barstool behind the cash register. “I have a bookstore I don’t know how to manage, a mile-high stack of coffee equipment I don’t know how to use, oh, and I forgot to mention property taxes are due. On both the house and the store. So I need to come up with another three grand by the end of this month. My dad’s only been gone a week and already I’ve screwed things up.”

  “Can you manage the taxes? That’s the first priority.” Henry floated at the end of the counter.

  “Yeah. I have a little in the bank, and with what’s left from Dad’s life insurance, we’ll manage that.”

  “Noah….”

  “But that’ll almost clean me out until I get paid, and given Karen’s threat, that won’t last very long.”

  “Noah….”

  “I guess I could go over Karen’s head and see if they’ll let me telecommute for the rest of the year….”

  “Noah….”

  “What?”

  Henry tilted his head toward the door. Kyle stood there, his eyes wide.

  “Shit. Uh, hi, Kyle.”

  Kyle glanced around the store, then back at Noah. Noah gave him a weak grin. “You caught me. I talk to myself a lot. Sometimes I have conversations with the dog too.”

  Jake huffed in response.

  “Okay. I guess I do that too, but just not out loud.”

  “Come on in. What can I do for you?”

  “Um. I was passing by, and I thought… I wondered. I thought maybe there was something I could do to help out? Miss Sarah said Miss Edna said you were working really hard, and I don’t have anything to do today, and I thought maybe you could use some help?”

  “I can’t afford it, Kyle.” Noah smiled at his generosity. “But I appreciate the offer.”

  But Kyle was shaking his head. “Oh, no, no. I don’t mean pay me. I mean helping out. Like a neighbor thing. Miss Sarah says people around here do that. I could help out. And do stuff. Whatever you need. I’m stronger than I look.”

  “Hell, a green bean is stronger than he looks,” Henry observed.

  Noah bit his lip. It wasn’t that Kyle was skinny. He was slim, though, and Noah wondered how strong he really could be.

  IT TURNED out to be a lot stronger than he looked. He hefted boxes in the storeroom like a stevedore, putting them wherever Noah needed them to open and look through. He was tireless, carrying piles of books back and forth and doing grunt work like sweeping floors and dusting without any dawdling or complaints. With his help, they got the store cleaned up and ready to open again in just under a day, where Noah had expected it to take three or four.

  He was a cheerful worker too. They didn’t talk much, but more than once Noah heard him humming something that sounded like a hymn.

  Miss Sarah stopped by late in the afternoon with sandwiches and a thermos of the ubiquitous sweet tea. It was the first time Jake had roused from his bed in the main room all day. They both stopped what they were doing with grateful sighs. Kyle came down the ladder he was using to put books away on the highest shelf of the classics section, and Noah closed the computer program he was using to record new inventory. “My goodness,” Miss Sarah said, “you boys have been working hard! The place looks—and smells—wonderful!”

  “That lemon wood stuff is nice,” Kyle said. “It’s the same spray as you use, Miss Sarah.”

  “Kyle’s been working his butt off,” Noah said gratefully. “He’s such a hard worker.”

  “Oh, I know it. My garden hasn’t been so well tended in ages.”

  Kyle’s face was red. “It wasn’t all that much. I just did what Noah told me to do.”

  “And then some,” Noah added.

  “Well, it looks like it,” Sarah said. “I figured you boys would be hungry, even if you did take time for lunch—which I bet you didn’t!”

  “I kinda forgot,” Noah said, shamefaced. “I’m sorry, Kyle. I get that way sometimes when I’m working on something. Are you starving?”

  “I had a granola bar a couple of hours ago.” Kyle flushed again. “I ate it in the kitchen and washed my hands so the books wouldn’t get sticky.”

  “Jeez. You should have said something—I didn’t mean for you to go without lunch.” Noah turned to Sarah. “Thanks for bringing this, Miss Sarah.” His stomach growled.

  Miss Sarah laughed. “You boys take that back into the kitchen and eat up. Kyle can bring the thermos back when he comes home.” She waved at them as she left the store.

  Noah picked up the bag of sandwiches and the thermos. “Come on, Kyle.”

  OVER SANDWICHES, Noah got a little more out of Kyle than he had during the course of the day. He told Noah again he’d grown up “out west” before his stint in Chicago, and that he didn’t have much education aside from being homeschooled. He did have his GED, which he’d gotten when he was living with relatives in Chicago, and he liked reading books on different subjects. He mostly didn’t read fiction. Noah got the impression that literature hadn’t been a big thing in his homeschooling, and, worse, that it had been actively avoided. It was weird. Noah couldn’t imagine it. Books—whether physical or virtual—were so much a part of his psyche that the idea of being without their comfort was, well, uncomfortable.

  But something about Kyle’s expression when he said he didn’t read fiction…. Noah got the distinct feeling that Kyle wasn’t being quite honest about that. Maybe he thought Noah wouldn’t respect him if he did. He couldn’t figure out where Kyle had gotten that notion.

  “Can I ask a question?”

  “Sure.” Noah finished the last bite of his sandwich and washed it down with sweet, cold tea. Then he brushed a crumb from Kyle’s lips, which turned up into a smile.

  “You—when you were talking to yourself—it sounded like you were upset about something. Is there anything I can do to help?”

  Noah shook his head. “Not unless you have fifty grand in your pocket. I need to pay off debt my dad had. I think part of it went to all that equipment we got. Maybe he’d planned to expand the store, or maybe had the loans for something else, but if I don’t come up with the money, I might lose my father’s house and the store—everything I have left of him. It’s insane. He never said anything about taking out new mortgages, but the papers are there. I suppose I could sell the store, but I don’t know if I want to. Or even if I can, with the debt hanging over it.”

  “Would you stay here instead of going back to New York?”

  “I dunno. I still have a lot of decisions to make, and they aren’t getting any easier.” Noah put his head down on his arms. From their shelter, he mumbled, “Everything’s happening so fast, and I can’t seem to keep up.”

 
; A gentle, warm hand settled on his shoulder. “I know. I felt like that when I got to Chicago from… where I grew up. Everything was just so different, and I didn’t know what to do first.”

  Noah sighed heavily. “Yeah, I hear you. Henry said I have to figure out what I have before I decide what I need, but I have so much and I don’t know what to do with it all. A job, an apartment, a life in New York—and this store, and the house, and the people here…. It’s overwhelming.”

  Kyle squeezed his shoulder gently, then released him. “Who’s Henry?”

  “He’s… a friend of mine. He’s… wise.”

  Noah heard a disembodied snort but ignored it. Henry had disappeared when Kyle had come into the store and hadn’t shown up since, but Noah had the feeling he was always around.

  “Maybe he could help?”

  “He has, a lot. But there’s only so much he can do… from where he is.”

  “Oh, right. I guess he couldn’t do much from New York.”

  “Mm.” Noah sat up and busied himself with cleaning up the remnants of their lunch. As he was screwing the lid on the now-empty thermos, Kyle said, “I guess I’d better get going. You look tired—maybe you should too. I can come back for a couple of hours in the morning if you need me to.”

  Noah hesitated. “I’d really like you to—but I can’t afford to pay you, and I’d really rather I did.”

  “I told you.” Kyle smiled at him. “I’m just being neighborly. And, well, I like being with you. It makes me happy.”

  “It makes me happy too. I promise not to work you so hard tomorrow.”

  “It’s okay. I like it.”

  Noah followed him to the front door so he could lock up behind him. “Thanks again,” he said. “If I could hire you, I would in a flash. You worked really hard today.”

  Kyle held the door open a moment, looking back at Noah. “Like I said, I liked it. I worked a lot harder on the coffee cart in Chicago.”

  Then he was gone, Noah staring after him, stunned. “Coffee cart?”