Deena Goldstone - Surprise Me

“And Dylan,” Isabelle agrees as she shepherds her son into the Jeep, pulling on a sweater as she does, barefoot, her shoes stuffed into her purse, handing Avi a granola bar and an apple for breakfast as she buckles him into his car seat.

“Mommy, put on your shoes.”

“I will, pumpkin.”

“Right now or your feet will catch a cold.”

And she has to stop and show her conscientious son that she has in fact put on her shoes.

As she maneuvers the Oakland streets from Telegraph Avenue to 51st Street to Broadway, and then a right turn onto 41st, where Art’s school is located, she wonders, as she has many mornings before, when her son started taking care of her. And how she has become such an incompetent person.

She glances into the rearview mirror to see Avi eating his breakfast in a sort of rhythm of his own making — one nibble of apple, one bite of the granola bar, one nibble of apple. His attention is focused on whatever game he has made up for himself, and he doesn’t look up to meet her eyes. He’s never bored, her son. In that way he carries his father with him, even though he looks like Isabelle: long-limbed (he will be tall) and brown-eyed, with a cap of straight blond hair rapidly darkening to match Isabelle’s color.

Art is waiting for them as they pull up at 8:25, late again. Seeing him standing calmly beside the wooden gate painted with stars and the moon — a tall, angular man with a strong profile and a shock of gray hair — Isabelle marvels yet again at how the perpetual motion that is Casey came from the steady serenity that is Art.

“Just making sure you guys got here all right,” Art says with no judgment in his voice as he opens the door of the Jeep. Quickly he unbuckles Avi from his car seat, swings him up and out of the car, and deposits him safely on the sidewalk. “My man!”

“We had a shorts crisis,” Isabelle tells him from the driver’s seat.

“Mommy made these with scissors!” Avi is bursting with his news. “Come on, Grandpa!” he yells as he runs up the cement path, more painted stars leading the way like stepping-stones to the front door of heaven. “School’s started already !”

“Sorry,” Isabelle mumbles. “The mornings get away from me.”

“No worries.”

“Have you heard from him?” She knows she shouldn’t ask. Art would tell her if Casey had contacted them, but she can’t stop herself.

“Papua New Guinea, you know.” Art shakes his head. “Halfway around the world. The earthquake and then the tsunami…”

“All the thousands of people left homeless and all the villages washed out to sea and all the little old people floating dead and bloated in the water like guppies at the top of a fish tank.”

“Isabelle,” Art says kindly, in the gentlest of admonitions.

And she stops. She knows her comments offend Art’s Quaker sensibility, but she’s so deep-down mad at Casey, and Art and Louisa are the closest things she has to him.

“He’ll call when he can, I know,” she backtracks now. She appreciates Art, loves him really, for stepping in and being present every day for Avi, and so there are conventions they must observe: no criticisms of Casey, who’s doing God’s work; no airing of her own trouble with it, because her unhappiness tests Art’s loyalties. She smiles now and Art smiles back. Better this way; harmony is restored.

On to Full of Beans on College, where amid the hordes of Berkeley students, who look twelve to her — so young, when was she that young? — she gets a large cappuccino and a bagel. And then on to Noah’s Ark, where she usually opens the bookstore by nine o’clock.

It’s too early to have many customers. She’s told Meir that — nobody comes in until almost eleven — but he likes the idea that the store is open at nine just in case, and Isabelle manages to do that for him most days. He arrives after lunch, and that is Isabelle’s favorite time of the day. They sit behind the counter together and talk about the books they have read or what they hope to be reading, or Isabelle will tell an Avi story because Meir is such an eager audience. Or he will tell Isabelle what happened in the store after she left the day before or what he’s planning to cook for dinner. Anything and everything is fair game for conversation, except Casey, because Isabelle already knows without a word being spoken how Meir feels about that subject.

As they talk Meir eats junk food — Doritos and Mallomars, most days — and Isabelle pours one cup of coffee after another from the Mr. Coffee they keep going on the counter. Each tells the other to take it easy on their vice of choice, but neither acts on the suggestion, their conversations too engrossing to pay much attention to curbing appetites.

Yesterday during a midafternoon lull, while they were sitting at the front counter on their tall stools, Isabelle relayed the conversation she had had with Deepti about Avi’s night terrors.

“It’s a neurological condition, fairly common, that will resolve itself as he grows.”

“That’s a relief.” In his heart of hearts, Meir claims some small familial connection with Avi — an older uncle or a surrogate grandfather — although he would never presume to voice it.

“A huge one.”

“You guys got used textbooks?” a Berkeley student, long hair tied in a ponytail, wearing sandals, calls from the half-open front door, not willing to commit to coming in if the answer is no.

“Back wall.” Meir points as he tells him, and the kid saunters in.

“We were sitting on the porch last night as we were talking,” Isabelle begins again. She has an agenda here. Meir can feel it. “It’s quiet on our street, you know.”

“I do.”

“And the only sound was the television going in your sister’s half of the house.”

“Isabelle…” he says in warning. Meir knows where this is heading and doesn’t like the destination, but Isabelle plows ahead.

“She falls asleep in that BarcaLounger every night, Meir, all alone in there, watching one stupid television program after another. Nobody visits. I hardly ever hear the phone ring—”

And a customer stops them, bringing a Moroccan cookbook up to the counter, which Meir rings up.

“Do you carry any new books at all?” the woman asks. “I’m looking for Summer Sisters by Judy Blume.”

Meir and Isabelle look at each other. This has been an ongoing debate for years; she thinks Meir should expand their inventory and he is reluctant to make any change.

“It’s on the Times bestseller list!” the customer adds, as if she’s announcing the Nobel Prize. “She’s written an adult novel. Interesting, don’t you think?”

Bestseller list? Judy Blume? What does Meir know about the bestsellers, or current authors? The past is where he is comfortable.

“We’re thinking about expanding into that area,” Isabelle says pointedly, her eyes on Meir.

“Yes,” he says, “we’re thinking about it.”

“Oh, that would be wonderful! Then I could get everything I need right here!” She takes her used cookbook, slips it into her cloth bag.

“Thank you for coming in,” Meir and Isabelle say in unison, and smile at each other. “She’s making me redundant,” he adds, pleased nonetheless.

And their customer, with her heavy gray braid swinging across her back, pushes open the front door, the welcome bell jingling as she passes through, and is gone.

“Popular fiction!” Meir says with a tinge of horror, but Isabelle is not to be derailed. She picks up their previous conversation right where they left off.

“Why don’t you just pick up the phone and call her?” She is fed up with this brother-sister feud.

“Call Fanny?!”