Addie has been trying in small ways to make the store hers. She replaced the thick clanking cowbell on the front door with a small cast-iron garden bell that goes ca-chink ca-chink. She made a reading area for customers, with a plump sofa and an antique floor lamp and a red armchair. She has other ideas, too: Persian carpets, when she can afford them; glass-front barrister cases; a new name, when she can come up with the right one.
On the second floor — a vast, open storage area with brick walls and casement windows and oily plank floors that groan — she has carved out a small corner apartment. When she’s lying in bed she can hear pigeons gurgling in the eaves, and mice thumping around, making nests in old boxes of wing nuts and washers — things that came with the store that she has no idea what to do with.
Peale leafs through the childless poet’s book. “Where to shelve this? ‘Fictional memoir,’ it says. ‘Truer than true.’”
“Memoir, I guess.”
“We’re out of room in memoir. Besides, if we call it memoir, people will think it’s true. The regular kind of true, with facts.” He slaps the book shut. “Fiction.”
“I don’t know,” Addie says. “People will think there’s a plot.”
She is having coffee on the bench out front, in the shade of the awning. Across the street, a beggar takes up his post by the hotdog stand. He’s there every day in his feed cap and grimy T-shirt, rattling his soup can, singing his song. Wanna get me a hotdog, uh-huh (clank clank clank), quarter short. The sycamore tree in the background is full of crows — Addie saw them fly in but she can’t see them now; they’re hiding in the fat leaves. She imagines them hunched together, spying on the beggar, waiting for him to spill one of his coins.
This is her favorite time of day: Hillsborough Street waking up. Down the block, three girls sleepwalk into the coffee shop. A couple comes out buzzing. A woman in high-heeled sandals trip-trops down the sidewalk, chattering into a cell phone. A man in an SUV rolls up to the traffic light and lowers his window. He is bald, with a pink bullet-shaped head — probably he shaves it so that people will think going bald was his idea. “Hey, sweet thang,” he calls, and the cell phone woman looks up, but she isn’t the one he means. He’s calling at a cop reading meters.
The cop calls back, “Why don’t you get your hair cut?”
An ordinary day. An ordinary life. Exactly what she never thought she wanted.
Lullaby
Dusty’s mom talks while she drives. She says, “You can’t let your heart stay broken your whole life.” She says, “You have to know when to cut your losses.”
They are on a long highway, driving with the windows rolled down because there’s no air conditioning and it’s night and his mom says he should try and go to sleep but he never sleeps in the car. He likes to look at things. Besides, how can he sleep when she keeps talking?
“When to hold and when to fold,” she says. Her hair is sweaty and flat, the little spikes all wilted. The tattoo on her neck looks like a polka dot. A ladybird, she calls it.
What Dusty wants to know is when his dad will catch up with them. Already they are far from home.
“When to walk, when to run.” His mom is singing, sort of.
They are on a long highway and she is driving fast with her eyes straight ahead, not looking at him. Sometimes they stop and buy Cokes and M&Ms out of machines. They go to the bathroom and she brings out wet paper towels and they dab their faces. This is the hottest night that has ever been. His mom drives fast, trying to cool them off, but the air coming in the windows is hot and smells bad. At one place the smell is so bad he has to throw up, but his mom says this does not make him a baby. She says the smell is cows being killed and from now on they will never eat another hamburger. “When we get to Reno, we’ll be vegetarians,” she says. “You and me.”
Sometimes the highway is dark, sometimes it’s lit up by cars, sometimes by big colored signs. He likes the signs that flash. He hopes his mom will change her mind about driving all night and stop at one of the flashing motels. He hopes it will have a swimming pool, and his dad will come, and they’ll all go for a swim, and afterwards his dad will take them out for pancakes even though it’s still dark outside, and his mom and dad will be glad to see each other, and they’ll let him have extra syrup.
Elle is exhausted. She sinks onto the edge of her bed and the chenille spread slides around underneath her. Dusty is asleep in the other bed. His face is not peaceful like a child’s but tired like a man’s.
Her aunt’s guest room — her old room — has green wallpaper with tiny white flowers, baby’s breath. Baby’s breath is for remembering. She wishes she could remember something about Roland that would make her time with him not seem like a waste. Anything, just one small memory to rub around in her mind and put a shine on, like a lucky penny.
She has to go back eight years, before Dusty, to when Roland called her and said, “You want to try again? I miss you.” The way he said “miss,” it sounded like love. He came for her in his van and loaded her things and moved her back into his apartment, and she walked in expecting to be relieved and happy, expecting the place to look different somehow, but it was just as dingy and sad as before. Only one thing had changed: he had emptied out a drawer in his bureau to make room for the clothes and things she’d always kept in a box. He had made a space for her.
That can be her penny. His empty drawer.
Dusty, pretending to sleep, watches her through his eyelashes. She’s sitting on her bed with her head in her hands. Her hair is brown with yellow tips and her hands are in it like she’s feeling around for something, and she’s rocking back and forth, back and forth, making a little sound with her throat. Her bedspread is slipping, but she keeps rocking, and he’s getting tired but he can’t fall asleep because then who would watch her, who would hear her sing?
Red Hammer
Sometimes it takes a new person to call you by your true name.
William Glass, Peale’s friend, is a mural artist. He wants Addie to hire him to restore the big flaking-off hammer on the side of her store. Addie wonders if they shouldn’t have a new image, something to do with books. “No,” William says. “Absolutely not. This place is the red hammer.”
And there it is, the name she’s been casting around for, so obvious it never occurred to her: Red Hammer Books.
Peale approves, even if it wasn’t his idea.
“You don’t think it sounds too hardware-store?” Addie says. She has rejected all of Peale’s names — Buddenbooks, Wrinkly Reader, Tome Main, Dustjacket Sins.
“We are a hardware store,” Peale says. “We’re the hardware store of used bookstores.” He tells a story about a man who recently called asking for a book he’d seen in new arrivals. The man couldn’t remember the title or the author, only that the book had a green cover. Dusty green, like a chalkboard.
“Fiction or nonfiction?” Peale had asked.
The man didn’t know. He didn’t want the book to read, he wanted it for the cover. He wanted to paint his house that shade of green.
“Book green,” William says.
“Used-book green,” Peale says.
William’s hands are knobby, his fingernails outlined with paint. He smells faintly of solvent. He is tall, but bows his head like he’s trying to reduce the distance between him and everyone else. Broad-shouldered, with silver-brown hair. Handsome in an arty, unkempt way. He and Peale look to Addie like older versions of the Mod Squad guys.