clipped, careworn coupon. “I don’t—”
Prentiss looked at her in the weak morning light and she seemed about to say something before stopping, removing her hand from the purse, and walking out the door.
That afternoon, Silas Carlton was in the Bead Emporium, staring at rows and columns of bead drawers. He felt the paralysis of choice that struck him sometimes at the grocery store when he’d face seventy-two different breakfast cereals (he’d counted them during one of his twenty-minute stupefactions). There were too many alternatives. Ah, he’d think, give me a Soviet food line any day where I have to take whatever they’ve got. Unburden me of these decisions. By that logic he should have grabbed the nearest cereal and not bothered deliberating over the bran o’s and crispy muesli flakes and frosted chocolate nuggets, but he had preferences—he had tastes—and a bad selection would haunt him until he threw the cereal away and went back to the store, at which point the difficulty would begin again. Other people didn’t have this trouble and were quickly filling up plastic baggies with beads. No hesitation. A silver-haired saleswoman with thin gold-framed glasses sat on a stool holding a closed book of crossword puzzles and staring at him. Silas didn’t like people to pay attention to him while he shopped. Made him feel pressured, like he was being monitored and any deviation from standard browsing behavior—if he spent too long reading a label or talked to himself—would get him in trouble. As maybe it would.
He left the store without buying anything and felt a huge relief, like he’d resisted temptation, though all he’d done was fail to get a gift for his great-niece Lillith’s seventeenth birthday. He walked down and up the dip in Buhne Street—exacerbating but not making unbearable the pain in his knees—and turned left on Harrison and stopped in for a fountain-style soda at Lou’s Drugs.
Beto the Argentinian was at the counter with his long sideburns getting ever longer. He gently patted the stool next to him when Silas approached.
“Silas,” said Beto.
“Beto,” said Silas.
“It’s good for you to join us.”
Beto sat alone and no one was behind the fountain. The aisles of Lou’s were empty. The cashier was gone. The ceiling corners of the store were without security cameras.
“Where’s Lou and everybody?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you just get here?”
“Since two hours ago.”
“There hasn’t been anyone here in two hours?”
“People were here. Lou was here. But they left.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Lou wouldn’t just leave the store to be robbed by gangs.”
“No gangs come in here.”
“My point is that there are valuable items lying around.”
“I’m not saying if it were my store I would go away, but Lou is different. He is a smart businessman.”
“I’ve never heard anyone call him that.”
They sat in silence for some time before Silas said, “You mind if I ask you something?”
“Okay.”
“A few days ago, in the morning, early, did you come by my place and peek through the window for a minute and then run away?”
“Me?”
“I’m just curious.”
“You think I spy on you?”
“That’s not necessarily what I’m asking.”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“Okay.”
Beto pulled three white gold rings from his left hand and laid them on top of one another on the smudged porcelain countertop. Silas reached around the soda dispenser for a glass that he filled with cola before adding a thick vanilla syrup. Beto stared at the carbonation running up the insides of the glass and whistled. Silas drank it all out of a bent straw.
“You were thirsty,” said Beto appreciatively.
“Yes.”
The front door jangled open and Lou walked in, a short man with a brush-bristle crew cut dyed jet black. His eyes were red from the conjunctivitis he claimed to have gotten from the redwood and marijuana pollen in Humboldt County’s air. It clogged his tear ducts. Although he’d lived in Eureka for forty-seven years, his Georgia accent sounded thicker to Silas than any Southerner he’d ever heard. Lou talked about retiring in Georgia, but he hadn’t been back to visit in over a decade and feared the changes time had wrought. Better the devil you know, he said.
“Lou,” Silas said. “You left this place unattended. Beto and I could have broken into the pharmacy and taken everything.”
“You’d have left fingerprints.”
“True.”
“I went to the police station.”
“What for?”
“My employee Leon—part-time guy—is missing.”
“I read that,” said Silas.
“His mother’s offering ten thousand dollars for his return.”
“They think he’s been kidnapped?” Beto asked.
“They didn’t let on what they think.”
“What’d you tell them?” asked Silas.
“That a couple months back he stopped coming in because of an illness.”
“They think he’s dead?” Beto asked.
“They didn’t let on what they think.”
“You going to hire new help?” Silas said.
“I am.”
Silas left money for his soda on the counter and left. Walking down and up Buhne hurt his knees this time, and when he got home he took pills and lay in bed until his consciousness went blank.
In a small condominium in Old Town Eureka, Barry Klein dabbed water on the button-sized stain marring the front of his double-knit sweater and rubbed and rubbed it and then draped the sweater over the radiator. He went to the kitchen and placed two apples, a shearing knife, a corned beef sandwich, a pockmarked copy of The God of Small Things, and a thin folded blanket into a wicker basket, his Prairiewalker model Longaberger, and closed the top. It was four thirty and he wasn’t gay. Sunlight dappled the checkerboard carpet on which he rested his huge feet in the living room. The hairs growing out of his two big toes were long and he was ashamed of their coarseness, of their pubic quality. He would never again wear sandals.
A cat meowed from the top of a bookshelf and he said to it, “You could easily be a dog. I could’ve gotten a dog and been happy. It’s a cliché for gay men to have cats but that doesn’t matter because maybe I’ll meet a girl at Rainie’s tonight.”
He thought about eating half the corned beef sandwich, but then thought better of it. As a new guest, he was presenting at that evening’s Longaberger party, meaning whatever he packed was what he’d show, and if that included a half-eaten sandwich, what impression would that make? That he couldn’t control himself? That he was too poor to afford a whole one? That he kept an unkempt home? What a wrong impression that would be. Barry looked at the walls of his one-bedroom apartment and saw the Napa wine poster perfectly aligned with the street-facing window, a photo collage of his family and college friends, the theater masks of laughter and tears, a giant handwritten quote, “We