Monte—that was the name of the bar. Not Monte’s, just Monte, with a Budweiser light glowing tiredly in the window. It was barely noon, but the bar was open. Roy pushed open the smudged glass door and went inside.
“Morning,” a cheerful woman with dimples in her cheeks greeted him from behind a set of drums at the back. “Don’t mind me.” She wasn’t drumming; she was looking at her phone.
“Not at all.” Roy chose a green vinyl–cushioned stool at the bar and placed his laptop on the shiny wooden bar top. The stool was comfortable, its back just low enough to offer lumbar support, with a perfectly positioned slat across the legs to rest his feet on. He opened his laptop and powered it on. He might just be able to work here.
Gold, he thought, opening a new Word document. Boris Bowne Books is thrilled to announce Gold, the long-awaited new novel by Roy Clarke. Or perhaps Golden was better. No, too 007. His readers would think he’d taken to writing spy novels. Race relations and secret agents—not subjects he could tackle without doing extensive research. Best to stick to what he did best—the quiet humor of two grown children traveling with their incontinent father, a drunk boy driving to pick up the girl he likes, a tedious dinner with an incompetent waiter, a hilariously muddy outdoor wedding.
Gold. Not exactly a title for a family novel. Unless… Roy’s daughter Shy had a rich Russian-American classmate whose grandmother gave her a solid gold Krugerrand every Christmas, one for every year she’d been alive. Last spring the family had relocated very abruptly to the Bahamas.
Roy appeared to be staring hard at the blank screen, but really there was a scene playing out in his head in which a teenage girl was burying a pile of gold beneath a palm tree.
“There’s no bartender,” the woman called from the back of the bar, distracting the partially awakened lumbering beast that was his brain. “But I can probably grab whatever you need.”
Roy swiveled around. “Tea?” he said distractedly, forgetting he was in a bar and that Americans didn’t drink tea constantly, as if it were some sort of vital fuel that one’s body couldn’t function without, the way most of the English did.
She slid off her drum stool and ducked behind the bar. “Sure, just a sec. There’s an electric kettle, I think.” She looked up and smiled. “I’m Peaches. I work at the school, as a nurse. You’re Roy Clarke. I read in the real estate section last year that you moved to Strong Place. And my husband went to your book thing at the new bookstore on Smith. How do you like it here?”
Roy hated being recognized. Blustering internally, he hit return twice to demonstrate that he was writing, even though his screen was still blank.
“That was a dumb question, never mind.” Peaches pushed a nondescript white mug across the bar. A Lipton tea bag dangled in the steaming water. “We only have that really coarse sugar they use in cocktails, and nondairy creamer.” She set the containers on the bar. “I can’t find a spoon, but there are cocktail straws there. Help yourself.”
She walked out from behind the bar and retrieved her denim jacket from the drum stool.
“I have to get back to work. I was an English major, but now I’m an elementary school nurse. Don’t ask.” She shrugged on the jacket and buttoned it up. “I have to admit, I own all your books. My husband gave me the box set for my birthday a few years ago. We both genuinely intended to read them, but we never did. Sorry.”
Roy nodded. “It’s a thing, I understand. My daughter explained it to me. Everyone has my books displayed prominently on their bookshelves, but literally no one has read them. It’s all right. The covers are nice to look at. I’m flattered all the same.”
The dimples resurfaced on the drumming nurse’s cheeks. “You’re a nice man, but don’t be too generous with us. One day I’m going to read them all, I promise. I was an English major, I really was. I used to love reading books!”
Something buzzed. She pulled her phone out of her back pocket and glanced at it.
“Fuck. I have to run.”
Roy picked up the mug. “Thanks for the tea.”
He watched her through the smudgy storefront window as she hurried down Henry Street, sorry to see her go. He was alone in the bar now. Presumably the proprietor was in the back someplace, rotating beer kegs or sorting the whiskeys. Roy didn’t mind. He removed the tea bag from the mug, drizzled in some creamer, turned back to his computer, and began to type.
* * *
Liam lay on his back in the school hallway, too exhausted to go out to lunch. Besides, he didn’t have any money. He never had any money; his parents wanted him to get the free school lunch.
Sometimes the insanity got to him. It got to all of them. He could feel the pressure in the classroom rising, the barometer that was his brain constricting so that his thoughts were not really thoughts anymore but feelings of discomfort: hunger, numb feet, suppressed farts, cranial itching, sweat, shaking hands, exhaustion. Back in middle school they’d all carried spinning devices—fidget spinners—meant to alleviate the stress, but they’d grown out of them. Now the focus was on sex, and, to a lesser extent, college.
Liam’s father, Greg Park, had “peaked in college.” Liam didn’t really get what that meant. It was something his mom always said when Liam’s skin or hair or outfit looked particularly bad.
“At least you won’t peak in high school, or even in college like your dad. You’ll peak later, when it matters.”
Somehow in Liam’s mind, “peaking” was intrinsically linked to virility, which was how much sex you were having, and he definitely wasn’t waiting until after college to have sex.
Some of his classmates had had it, or claimed to, the ones who’d ventured to parties hosted by kids whose parents were never home. “It wasn’t that long ago we were the ones at those parties,” his parents would say, trying to make him feel better about his stay-at-home lameness. “We know what happens. You happened.” Most of the time Liam just hung out with them. They watched the same TV shows he wanted to watch anyway. And they let him eat most of the pizza.
There was a girl he liked. She was new last year, from England, with a famous dad. Liam hadn’t told his parents about her. He knew they knew about her dad. They were always spotting him, talking about him, acting like they knew stuff about him, when all they really knew was what they’d garnered from the New York Times, Wikipedia, Google, and his book jackets. He was older and English. The mom was American, with some fancy magazine job.
The girl’s name was Shy. She was extremely tall and thin and clumsy-looking, like she woke up in the morning much taller than she’d been the night before and had no idea where her arms and legs began and ended. She didn’t seem that shy either. They only had one class together, Latin II, and she was always raising her hand, bulldozing her way through readings and translations in her English accent. Their Latin teacher, Mr. Streko, had a thing for her, Liam could tell. It bordered on inappropriate.
“Shy is my best student,” Liam could hear Mr. Streko’s voice now, resonating down the hall. “I’m surprised to hear she’s struggling so much in her other subjects. She’s never late, she’s always prepared, her grasp of Latin is profound.”