Kyle tried to calm the waters. Knowing Anita, this could escalate quickly. “Couldn’t you just call it probation and let him stay? It’s honestly more of a punishment to keep him in school than to let him stay home.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Let me get this straight,” Anita said. “My son is being suspended from school for completing an assignment in a way that you do not like, while students who did not complete the assignment at all face zero punishment.”
“Those students will receive failing grades. And it has nothing to do with what I like: Nick here used profanity.”
“So what sort of grade will Nick be receiving? Or is he to be punished twice by being suspended and receiving a failing grade?”
“That will be up to the teacher.”
Anita stood, and Kyle and Nick followed suit. “This is a slap-on-the-wrist offense, Dennis, and you know it. Drinking at school? Taking drugs? Stealing? Fighting? Those are suspension crimes. Using a bad word? Slap on the wrist, Dennis, slap on the wrist.”
Nick seemed surprised to hear his mother address the principal by his first name, and Kyle realized that his son was probably not aware of the fact that the two of them had dated back in high school.
In a small town, the past was never past.
Without another word, Anita marched out of the principal’s office, Kyle and Nick following. The three of them walked past the counselors’ doors and past the attendance desk into the school’s main hallway. “Get what you need out of your locker,” Kyle told his son. “We’ll wait here.”
Nick hurried away, stopping before a bank of lockers halfway down the corridor.
“Dennis.” Kyle shook his head. “Did you notice how he said ‘upon a toilet’ instead of ‘on?’”
She nodded, smiling despite her annoyance.
“Still trying to impress you.”
She hit his shoulder. “Knock it off.”
He watched Nick open his locker and take out a book, putting it in his backpack. He lowered his voice. “I know we need to take this seriously, be sober concerned parents and all. But…Taking a Shit?” Kyle chuckled. “That was pretty damn funny.”
“It was hard not to laugh,” Anita admitted, smiling.
Nick had slung the backpack over his shoulder and was already returning. “Okay, so you need to take him home,” Kyle told Anita as he approached. “I have to get back to the store.”
“I have to go back to work, too.”
“I know, but Gary’s out today. There’s just me, and I’m already half an hour late opening. These days, I need all the customers I can get. Someone stops by and sees that the store’s closed, they’re likely to go online or—”
Anita nodded. “I get it. I’ll take Nick.”
“Take me where?” he asked, walking up.
“Home,” Anita said sternly. “Where you will remain and do your schoolwork.”
Nick nodded. “So how long’s my suspension? He said it’s a ‘minimum two-day suspension,’ but he didn’t give a maximum, and kind of left it open, it seemed like.”
“Shit,” Anita said. “Wait here.” And she strode back to the principal’s office.
Neither Kyle nor Nick commented on the fact that she had just uttered the same curse that had gotten Nick suspended, and a moment later she emerged into the hallway. “Two days.”
Kyle nodded. “Two days.” They walked outside, where he pinched Nick’s shoulder and gave Anita a peck on the cheek. “See you guys at home.”
He headed across the faculty parking lot to where he’d pulled his Ram truck in between two teachers’ cars, and Anita and Nick made their way toward the field, where Anita had parked her Kia in the visitor’s lot.
2
On his way downtown, Kyle had allowed himself the fantasy that when he got to the shop, there would be two or three people waiting patiently in line for it to open. But of course the sidewalk was empty, and behind the name “Brave New World” painted on the front window, the bookstore was dark.
He pulled around the alley in back, his oversized pickup taking up two of the three spaces behind the building. Entering through the rear door, he switched on the lights as he walked in. From the safe beneath the bottom shelf of the small storage space next to the bathroom, he counted out money for the register before going up to the front of the store, unlocking the glass door and flipping the sign from Closed to Open. He popped a Mozart CD into the player behind the counter, and music issued from the speakers he’d mounted in the corners of the room.
What he hadn’t told Anita was that Gary was out today because he was interviewing for another job, at the Costco in Sirena.
Gary was not stupid. He knew that the store was struggling, and he knew that it might be only a matter of time before Kyle had to let him go. Sirena was forty miles away, but the starting salary at Costco was more than Gary was making now, after five years, and the benefits were far beyond anything Kyle could offer.
Which was why Kyle had given Gary his blessing.
Bookstores had been dying on the vine since the advent of Amazon, and while independent and used bookstores had hung on a bit longer than most of the chains, they were falling by the wayside as well. For awhile, Harry Potter, Twilight and other blockbuster young adult books that appealed to all ages had guaranteed at least minimum foot traffic. And children’s books had been consistent sellers no matter what the state of the economy. But phones and their game apps continued to significantly chip away at people’s reading time, and Brave New World was having a difficult go of it, especially since the junior college bookstore had expanded its inventory to include not only textbooks but general fiction and nonfiction.
Some of the surviving chains now included Starbucks or Starbucks-like cafés in their stores, trying to encourage patrons to hang out and (hopefully) buy more, and in his most ambitious moments, Kyle had considered doing such a thing himself. His shop was adjacent to a narrow empty retail space that could easily be converted into a coffee bar/bakery with a wifi hotspot, but unless he won the lottery or received an inheritance from an unknown rich relative, there was no way he could afford to buy, rent or renovate anything.
And even if he did, there was no guarantee it would work out.
He could end up even more deeply in debt.
Thank God Anita had a traditional job with an assured income. They couldn’t really survive on her salary, but if he could continue to limp along the way he had been, they should be able to get by. And, who could tell, maybe eventually things would turn around.
Although that seemed less and less likely by the day.