Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town Part 56

But when Adam left Mimi watching television and sat at his desk in the evening with the humming, unscuffed, and gleaming laptop before him, fingers poised over the keys, nothing came. He tapped out an opening sentence,

I suspect that my father is dead

and deleted it. Then undid the delete.

He called up The Inventory and stroked the s.p.a.cebar with his thumb, paging through screensful of pictures and keywords and pricetags and scanned-in receipts. He flipped back to the story and deleted his sentence.

My dead brother had been hiding out on the synagogue's roof for G.o.d knows how long.

The last thing he wanted was to write an autobiography. He wanted to write a story about the real world, about the real people who inhabited it. He hit the delete key.

The video-store girl never got bored behind her counter, because she could always while away the hours looking up the rental histories of the popular girls who'd shunned her in high school.

That's when Link rang his doorbell and he startled guiltily and quit the text editor, saving the opening sentence. Which had a lot of promise, he thought.

"Link!" he said. "Come in!"

The kid had put on ten or fifteen pounds since they'd first met, and no longer made Alan want to shout, *Someone administer a sandwich* stat*!*

Most of it was muscle from hard riding as a bike messenger, a gig that Link had kept up right through the cold winter, dressing up like a gore-tex Martian in tights and ski goggles and a fleece that showed hints of purple beneath its skin of crusted road salt and pollution.

Andrew had noticed the girls in the Market and at Kurt's shop noticing Link, whose spring wardrobe showed off all that new muscle to new effect, and gathered from the various hurt looks and sulks from the various girls that Link was getting more a.s.s than a toilet-seat.

Her brother spent the winter turning into the kind of stud that she'd figured out how to avoid before she finished high school, and it pained her to see the hordes of dumb-bunnies making goo-goo eyes at him.

That would be a good second sentence for his story.

"You okay, Abby?" Link said, looking concerned. Albert realized that he'd been on another planet for a moment there.

"Sorry, just fell down a rabbit hole," he said, flapping his arms comically. "I was writing " -- felt *good* to say that -- "and I'm in a bit of a, how you say, creative fog."

Link took a step back. "I don't want to disturb you," he said.

But for all that, she still approved his outfits before he left the house, refusing to let him succ.u.mb to the ephemeral awful trendiness of mesh-back caps and too-tight boy-scout jamboree s.h.i.+rts. Instead, she put him into slightly fitted cotton s.h.i.+rts that emphasized his long lean belly and his broad shoulders.

"Don't sweat it. I could use a break. Come in and have a drink or something." He checked the yellowing face of the tick-tock clock he kept on the mantelpiece and saw that it was just past noon. "Past lunchtime, that means that it's okay to crack a beer. You want a beer?"

And for all that, her brother still managed to come home looking like some kind of frat-rat p.u.s.s.y-hound, the kind of boy she'd always hoped he wouldn't be.

"Beer would be great," Link said. He stepped into the cool of the living room and blinked as his eyes adjusted. "This really is a h.e.l.l of a place," he said, looking around at the gla.s.s cases, the teetering stacks of books that Andrew had pulled down and not reshelved, making ziggurats of them instead next to all the chairs.

"What can I do for you?" Adam said, handing him a gla.s.s of Upper Canada Lager with a little wedge of lime. He'd bought a few cases of beer that week and had been going through them steadily in the living room, paging through the most favored of his books, trying to find something, though he wasn't sure what.

Link sipped. "Summer's here," he said.

"Yeah," Alan said.

"Well, the thing is, summer. I'm going to be working longer hours and, you know, evenings. Well. I mean. I'm 19 years old, Andy."

Alan raised an eyebrow and sat back in his chair. "What's the message you're trying to convey to me, Link?"

"I'm not going to be going around your friend's shop anymore. I really had fun doing it all year, but I want to try something different with my spare time this summer, you understand?"

"Sure," Alan said. He'd had kids quit on him before. That's what kids did. Attention spans.

"Right. And, well, you know: I never really understood what we were *doing*..."

"Which part?"

"The WiFi stuff --"

"Well, you see --"

"Stop, okay? I've heard you explain it ten times now and I still don't get it. Maybe after a semester or two of electrical engineering it'll make more sense."

"Okay," Adam said, smiling broadly to show no hard feelings. "Hey," he said, carefully. "If you didn't understand what we were doing, then why did you do it?"

Link c.o.c.ked his head, as if examining him for traces of sarcasm, then looked away. "I don't know. It was exciting, even if I didn't quite get it. Everyone else seemed to get it, sort of, and it was fun to work alongside of them, and sometimes the money was okay."

Which is why she decided to --

d.a.m.n, what did she decide to do? That was shaping up to be a really good opener.

Which is why she wasn't surprised when he didn't come home for three nights in a row.

Aha.

"No hard feelings, Link," Adam said. "I'm really grateful for the help you gave us and I hope you'll think about helping again in the fall..."

But on the fourth night, she got worried, and she started calling his friends. They were all poor students, so none of them had land-line numbers you could look up in the phone book, but that was okay, since they all had accounts with the video store where she worked, with their deadbeat pre-paid mobile numbers listed.

"Yeah, that sounds great, you know, September, it gets dark early. Just got word that I got into Ryerson for the fall, so I'll be taking engineering cla.s.ses. Maybe I can help out that way?"

"Perfect," Alan said. Link took a step backward, drained his beer, held out the gla.s.s.

"Well, thanks," Link said, and turned. Alan reached past him and opened the door. There were a couple of girls there, little suburban girls of the type that you could find by the hatful in the Market on Sat.u.r.day mornings, shopping for crazy clothes at the vintage shops. They looked 14, but might have been as old as 16 or 17 and just heartbreakingly naive. Link looked over his shoulder and had the decency to look slightly embarra.s.sed as they smiled at him.

"Okay, thanks, then," he said, and one of the girls looked past him to get a glimpse inside the house. Andy instinctively stepped aside to give her a better view of his showroom and he was about to offer her a soda before he caught himself.

"You've got a nice place," she said. "Look at all those books!"

Her friend said, "Have you read all those books?" She was wearing thick concealer over her acne, but she had a round face and heart-shaped lips that he wouldn't have been surprised to see on the cover of a magazine. She said it with a kind of sneer.

Link said, "Are you kidding? What's the point of a houseful of books you've already read?"

They both laughed adoringly -- if Adam was feeling uncharitable, he'd say it was simpering, not laughing, and took off for the exciting throngs in the Market.

Alan watched them go, with Link's empty gla.s.s in one hand and his full gla.s.s in the other. It was hot out in the Market, sunny, and it felt like the spring had rushed up on him and taken him by surprise when he wasn't looking. He had owned the house for more than a year now, and the story only had three or four paragraphs to it (and none of them were written down yet!).

"You can't wash s.h.i.+t," is what her mother said when she called home and asked what she should do about her brother. "That kid's been a screw-up since he was five years old."