Surprise Me by Deena Goldstone Read Free Book Online

gentrify the streets surrounding the campus.
    As beautiful as the college itself is, up a gently sloping hill from the urban sprawl, the city streets below it are a mixture of small appliance shops, fast-food restaurants—Popeyes, Burger King—and one sprawling mall anchored by a Food 4 Less and a 99 Cents Only Store. Here and there on the side streets are a few shops and a café or two which cater to the students and professors up the hill. Seaman’s is one of those.
    It is a tiny place, jam-packed with books stacked in piles on the floor and on chairs and crammed tightly onto flimsy shelves. The only way to find something is to devote several hours to browsing or ask Oscar, who is permanently installed, it seems, behind the front counter. He must be in his eighties, but it’s hard to tell. It’s entirely possible he’s in his sixties or even younger. He has the look of a person who never sees the light of day. Pasty skin, thinning white hair, rail thin, spine curved like a C, chain smoking. And always reading a book in poor light.
    There’s little light throughout the store. Isabelle can barely read the titles in the poetry section, which takes up a back corner of the store, but finally she finds what she’s looking for, a copy of Philip Levine’s What Work Is .
    She wants to take Daniel a small present, a way of apologizing for yesterday, and she remembers from an interview he once gave that Philip Levine, a working-class poet from Detroit, had had a huge influence on his decision to become a writer. If Daniel could write about what he knew—his own hardscrabble neighborhood of Erie, the men who broke their backs doing manual labor and broke their families with the resentment that kind of life causes—well, then, maybe he could become a writer, too.

    Finally she finds the slim volume with its brown cover and simple black-and-white photograph of a child at work in a factory and takes it to Oscar at the front desk. He never rings up a purchase without commenting upon it. He may well have read every book in his store.
    “He won the National Book Award for this collection, did you know?”
    Isabelle shakes her head. She doesn’t much like poetry; it seems a code she hasn’t yet cracked. “It’s a gift.”
    “So you want it gift wrapped?”
    She looks around the dusty counter with its ashtrays, cigarette butts, stacked books, and old magazines in teetering piles. “You gift wrap?”
    “Are you kidding me?” And he grins, his yellow teeth stained from decades of smoke poking through his thin lips. “I always ask just for the reaction.”
    “You’re a mean man, Oscar,” Isabelle says as she takes the small paper bag he finds for her book, and he chuckles.
    —
    SHE KNOWS WHERE DANIEL LIVES. In the small community of Chandler College, things like that are common knowledge. There’s a row of houses bordering the campus that the college rents out to professors at a much-reduced rate, and with a couple of questions to the right people, it’s easy for Isabelle to find out which one is his.
    She walks there now. Her plan is to leave the book in his mailbox with a little note she’s already written. It simply says, Next Tuesday can we start over? Isabelle. She spent more than an hour trying out different messages, everything from an out-and-out apology to a note that didn’t mention what had happened between them at all. She feels guilty for exploiting what his son told her—that he has writer’s block—to wound him. She has no idea what he’s feeling—disappointed in her, probably, ready to wash his hands of her; she’s not sure. It never occurs to her that Daniel’s guilt may be exponentially larger than hers.

    He doesn’t have a mailbox, not the kind that stands on a post near the curb. He has a mail slot in his front door, which means she has to walk up the front path of his house and try to slip the book in silently.
    The problem is, there’s Daniel, watching her from one of the living room