Five Tuesdays in Winter(11)

“Isn’t he the most reticent person you’ve ever met?” she asked Kate, his only other employee.

“Maybe not the very most,” Kate said, not looking up from her pricing.

“But he’s—”

“That’s enough, Paula,” he said, then, feeling an unexpected pulse of blood to his cheeks, fled to the stockroom in back.

Mitchell had good ears, and just before he shut the door behind him, he heard Kate’s gentle reprimand: “I think as a rule people don’t like being spoken of in the third person.”

He’d hired Kate three months ago. She’d recently moved to Portland from San Francisco for a man named Lincoln. They lived in a small apartment in Bayside. On their answering machine, Lincoln sounded high-strung and full of anticipation, as if he only ever expected good news after the beep. Despite her strong résumé, Kate had unexpected gaps in her knowledge of books. She had never read The Leopard or The Go-Between. She had never even heard of Machado de Assis. Once he overheard a customer ask how many lines were in a sestina, and she didn’t know. She was a reader (she borrowed and returned as many as ten books a week) but not a speller. On the dupe sheet, she wrote J. Austin and F. Dostoyevski. At the end of the day, when she stapled the credit card receipts to the ticker tape totals, she didn’t always align the edges evenly. She let the mechanical pencils run out of lead. She had thin, sometimes dry lips that she picked at when she was thinking deeply and that he would have liked to kiss.

Wanting to kiss Kate was like wanting a larger savings account for Paula’s college education or one of those infallible computerized postal scales for mail orders. It was a persistent, irritating, useless desire. He had been on two dates since Paula’s mother left. The first one, over five years ago now, had been a setup, a friend of a friend. They’d gone to an Italian restaurant for pasta puttanesca. She’d picked out all of her capers and left them on the lip of her bowl, explaining that she was allergic to shellfish. Then she’d wanted to talk about his wife’s departure. The story—his college buddy Brad coming to visit from Australia and leaving two weeks later with a box of live lobsters and Mitchell’s wife—seemed to arouse her. He couldn’t bear to take her out again and lost the mutual friend as a result. Thankfully, others had left him alone.

He hadn’t been devastated when his wife walked out. People vanished. It had been happening all his life. His mother died when he was six, his father nine years later. His best friend from childhood, Aaron, had found a lump on his back—Mitchell himself had spotted it first on the beach—and he was dead by Labor Day. Even his favorite customer, Mrs. White, had died within a few years of the shop’s opening.

Mitchell stood at the stockroom’s one window and watched three gulls flap restlessly above the harbor. Thick broken slabs of ice, the size of mattresses, had been pushed to the shore by the tide. Out farther, beyond the frozen crust, the open water shimmered a luminous summer blue. In these kinds of cold spells everything seemed confused. Even the gulls overhead seemed lost.

Later that afternoon, Paula said, “Kate speaks Spanish.” Kate demurred from where she was shelving, but Paula overrode her. “She does. Did you know that, Dad?”

“Mm-hmm.” He was going through a mildewed carton a student had just brought in. They were good books, without writing or highlighting on any page, but the bottom edge of nearly every one had a pen-and-ink drawing of a hairy testicle.

“That’s my icon, in my frat,” the student said. “It’s a—”

“I know what it is.” Mitchell was sharp, even for Mitchell.

Paula glowered. She was trying to train him to be more forgiving of his patrons. That was her campaign, ever since she’d grown tall, learned words like reticent, and found him flawed.

After the frat boy had gone, Paula said, “I was thinking. Kate could help with my Spanish conversation.”

Kate approached the counter as if she were a customer. “I’m not a teacher. I just lived in Peru for a couple of years.”

“Are you fluent?”

He could see from her face that it was a rigid question. “By the time I left I could say pretty much anything I wanted. But it’s been six years now.”

She would have been living in Peru when his wife left. He hoped, with an uncomfortable swell of feeling, that Kate had been happy there, that if his and Paula’s life had been redirected, like the course of a river, she had been the recipient of those higher waters. Full of this fervent thought, he headed, for a reason he’d forgotten, to anthropology.

Paula found him there, staring blankly at the spines on the shelf. “She said she could come on Tuesday evenings. Can she?”

“If you think it will help.”

“I’ve told you Mr. Gamero never lets us speak.”

He did not say that she’d never mentioned this before.

To the store, Kate wore faded, untucked shirts and jeans slashed at the knee. He was often tempted to tease her, tell her that just because she sold used books she didn’t have to wear used clothes, but he thought she might snap back with a crack about the pittance he paid her, so he refrained. To the first Spanish lesson, however, Kate walked up the path to his door in wool pants the color of cranberries. Tuesday was her day off. Perhaps she’d had a late lunch date downtown with Lincoln. Worse, she might have had a job interview. It was an easy thing to find out. She was the type who could not take a compliment. If he told her she looked nice, she’d give the reason instead of saying thank you. But he was the type who could not give a compliment, so he just said hello and let her in.