The Moment of Everything by Shelly King Read Free Book Online Page B

doing with yourself since the restructuring at ArGoNet?”
    Restructuring . What a polite way of describing the uprooting of my life. But I pushed aside the petulance and did a quick dig for an answer.
    “I’ve been doing some pro bono consulting at a small used bookstore my neighbor owns.” I’ve been wasting time at the Dragonfly and learning fifteen hundred new ways to describe a man’s privates. “Sales have been soft with the downturn in the local economy.” No one gives a flying frog’s butt about the Dragonfly with Apollo across the street. “I’m working with him to improve his margin.” I’m sitting in a dusty window reading trashy novels.
    “How interesting. What are some of your ideas?”
    Ideas? I didn’t think moving the boxes Jason deposited around the store like air-dropped supplies would count as an idea. My thoughts went back to Henry and Catherine.
    “It’s not just a bookstore, it’s a mystery,” I said. My mouth was wandering off without much thought to propel it. But in my mind, Henry’s and Catherine’s notes played like a tune I couldn’t get out of my head. “You never know what you’ll find. Apollo is predictable, like a planned subdivision. The Dragonfly is a medieval city without a map. Each turn brings something unexpected.”
    She smiled and reached into the pocket of her dress and pulled out a business card.
    “I’d like to hear more about what you’re doing at this bookstore of yours,” she said, writing a phone number on the back of the card. “And I expect to see you and Dizzy at our next meeting. I like your pluck. It’s a shame ArGoNet lost you. But I would be impressed if you could make a retail outlet like a used book shop profitable in this economy. I like to help people who impress me.”
    She gave me the card and told me to call her at home anytime. And then she left me alone with my wine and a heart that was beating out of my chest. I’d done it. Screw the pleading cover letters and dumbed-down résumé. I held the Golden Ticket in my hand. I was going to get my superhero cape back.
    *  *  *
    My legs were stiff as I set my laptop beside me on my bed and tried to get up. After the SVWEABC meeting, I was wired. But two nights in a row without sleep caught up with me and I finally crashed in the early gray of Sunday morning. I stayed under the covers for the whole day in that heavy kind of sleep that comes only during the day when you don’t want it. It was just past midnight now. I’d thought all that rest would make me feel better. But I still felt an odd brew of adrenaline behind my sternum, bubbling thicker in the dark.
    I church-keyed the cap off a Rolling Rock, and sat on my kitchen counter, too awake for sleep, but too tired for anything else. There was something about the blanketed sounds of the night that made me just want to be still for a bit. The whirling of my ceiling fan, the refrigerator clicking, Coltrane playing on KCSC from Hugo’s radio outside, all these whispered sounds you can hear only after the neighborhood turns in. Even the sound of pulling out Lady Chatterley’s Lover from my bag was louder than it normally would be.
    I paged through the book, watching the notes in the margins shift from Henry’s handwriting to Catherine’s until they came alive like the figures in a flipbook. In the soft night, I wonder about you , Henry wrote near the end. What color are the dishes you eat from? What pictures are on your walls? What books are on your shelf? All these definitions of who you are. But mostly, I want to assure myself that you are in the same world I am, that you aren’t just my hopes appearing on this page.
    I tried to remember the dishes Bryan had had at his home, but nothing came to me. Were they white, perhaps? Or maybe blue. I do remember that there were no pictures on the wall. He liked minimalist interfaces. And no books. None. All these definitions of who you are. Bryan had never left anything behind in my apartment.