Chapter 6: Receipt

The lobby door let them out onto the sidewalk, and the morning had turned into a mistake. He’d put the orange hoodie on because everything else he owned was gray or black or brown and she had opinions about all three, and the hoodie had been cut for a colder version of the world, and by the time they reached the corner it was stuck to his back.

Wren walked on the outside, near the parked cars, her bag on one shoulder. She walked like she had somewhere to be. Across the street the mall sat behind a wall of glass with the sun coming off it, and there was a fountain inside and a kiosk and a man in a navy polo who had already given up on the day. It was ninety feet away and he was going to sweat through getting there.

At the corner she said, “You don’t have any pictures.”

“What?”

“On the fridge. On the wall. In the whole apartment, and I’ve been in it twice.” The signal was red. She watched the countdown instead of him. “Do your parents come by?”

“Parents in a story like this are dead weight,” he said, and then, when she didn’t laugh, “They show up, they ask questions, everything stops. You don’t want that. I don’t want that.”

She made a sound that wasn’t a laugh.

The rent on 3B came out of an account with his father’s name on it, paid on the first of every month, and that was the arrangement, that was the whole of the arrangement, and he didn’t say that either.

The countdown had eleven seconds on it. He looked at it, and then he said, much quieter, “What about them. Later.”

“What about them.”

“In the future. Are they—“ He moved his hand, a small circle in the air, a gesture meant to do the work of a whole sentence.

“You didn’t like talking about them,” she said. “So I don’t know much.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It is, though.” The signal changed. She stepped off the curb. “I saw them the once. At your funeral.”

She was already a third of the way across. A car waited. He crossed behind her and didn’t say anything, and she didn’t slow down and she didn’t turn around and she didn’t offer him anything else, and by the far curb the thing had gone in and set.

It wasn’t the funeral that got him. He’d known about the funeral the way you know about weather in another state: it was happening somewhere, and he had never once checked the forecast. It was the room. His parents had been standing in a room at the end of it — that was what saw them the once came to mean — and nothing between this morning and that room had moved them any closer to him. They came for the one event. That was the whole of it.

He thought about asking when. There was a date somewhere and somebody knew it. He’d ask later, when it was a better moment. He would not remember later that he had thought that.

The mall was the mall: glass, tile, a fountain with coins in the shallow water, a kiosk selling phone cases. Wren went the way she’d already decided to go, past the escalator, and stopped in front of a store with one word on the glass in thin gold letters.

MERCIER.

He’d walked past the window maybe two hundred times in his life.

Inside it was cold and half-empty, and one woman was working, forty or so, at a table in the middle, folding a sweater. She looked up, decided they weren’t going to be trouble, and went back to it. The music was low. There was a wall of bottles with no prices on them.

Wren picked a tester off the shelf and sprayed the inside of her wrist.

“Here.” She held it out.

He leaned in. Wood, but not the way lumber is wood — the inside of a drawer, warm, with something green under it and under that almost bitter.

“It’s fine,” he said.

“Fine.”

“It doesn’t smell like anything bad.” He looked around. The store sold perfume and then, apparently, everything else: knitwear, a glass case of watches, one skateboard on a shelf like a joke. “It’s a nice smell.”

“It’s been everywhere for years,” she said. “Which is not the insult you think it is. Everyone has smelled it, so nobody’s surprised by it. You can’t get it wrong.”

She turned the bottle so the label showed. ORRIS. 100 ML. And under that, in a smaller font that had clearly been designed to be read only after the decision had been made, $185.

He turned around and walked out of the store.

“Ethan.”

He got four steps. “Ethan, a hundred and eighty-five dollars for a hundred milliliters, that’s a year of it, that’s—“ She caught up and got in front of him, walking backward. “Why are you walking.”

“A year of smelling like a hotel lobby. That’s two games. Two games at full price, and I don’t buy anything at full price.”

“Nobody’s asking you to buy it.”

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s worse.”

She stopped walking, which meant he had to stop walking. A man with a stroller went around them and gave them a look.

“Okay,” she said. “Say it.”

“I don’t have anything to say.”

“You have something to say. You walked out of a store. Say it.”

He put his hands in his pockets. Took them out again.

“I use soap,” he said. “On my face, on everything, it’s the same bar, and it works, and I’m not going to—“ The rest of that sentence was about her paying for it, and he wasn’t going to say that part in front of a woman folding a sweater through a plate-glass window. He started again somewhere else. “I’m not going to stand in a store and let somebody decide I’m a person who spends a hundred and eighty-five dollars on smelling like a tree.”

She took a breath and let it out and rested the heel of her hand against her forehead for a second, the way people do when they’re working out how much of it to say.

“And the hoodie smells like the sun,” he said. “That’s a good smell. That’s what people like. Laundry on a line. There’s a whole candle.”

“The smell of sunshine is dead bugs.”

“What?”

“Mites. They live in your sheets and your clothes and they come off on you. Something dries in the sun, what you’re smelling is them cooking.” She flipped the tester and caught it. “That’s not even the interesting part. The interesting part is that you think girls can’t tell the difference between a cologne and a dryer sheet.”

“Can you?”

“Everybody can. It isn’t subtle.” She pointed the bottle at his chest. “And how long has that hoodie been in rotation? Because I have been in your closet and the answer I got was ‘the whole time.’”

He opened his mouth.

“It doesn’t matter how it smells,” she said. “It’s the first thing you say to somebody, before you open your mouth. You get in an elevator with a girl and she’s decided something about you before she’s looked at your face. You can leave that to the dryer sheet if you want. Or you can decide.”

“So I smell like a decision I didn’t make.”

She looked at him.

“Don’t,” she said.

“Don’t what?”

“Do that. Find the clever version of what I said and hand it back to me.” She put the tester on the shelf. “I’m trying to give you a—“

She didn’t finish it either.

“Fifty dollars,” he said.

“What?”

“Fifty dollars. That’s still the number. You said it in my kitchen and I said fine, and it’s still fine, and it stays fifty until this is over.” His ears went hot and he kept going anyway. “If you’re paying, then you’re paying, that’s apparently a thing I’m letting happen. But it stays fifty. Over fifty and I go home. It’s across the street. I’ll be home before you get your card out.”

She held the bottle up between two fingers like she was considering dropping it down a drain.

“Fine,” she said. “Fifty.”

“Fine.”

“Fifty is not a budget, it’s an insult. But fine.” She put the tester back on the shelf with a click a little harder than it needed to be. The woman at the table glanced over.

And then there was nothing to say.

That was the part he couldn’t do. He could do arguments. It was the other thing — the two of them standing in a cold store on a Saturday with no sentence on deck, her looking at her own wrist, the music low on purpose, nothing between them but the sound of the mall coming in through the door. He could hear his own breathing getting organized.

“There’s a guitar store,” he said. “Upstairs.”

She looked up from her wrist.

“I mean, we’re here. If you want. I don’t care.”

“You don’t care.”

“There’s a guitar store, or we can go look at the watches.” He nodded at the case, which held maybe four watches, none of which anyone was going to look at. “You said you wanted to see the—“

“I did not say that.”

“We can go look at the watches.”

“No,” she said, and picked up her bag. “Let’s see the guitar store.”

It was narrow and shabby in the specific way music stores are shabby: the carpet worn in a path, forty guitars hanging on the wall like something you’d count in your sleep, a counter with a register on it, a bowl of picks, a stapler, and a guy.

He was mid-thirties and built like a man who’d been strong once and made his peace with it, and his T-shirt said NO DAYS OFF in letters that had been washed soft. He had a handheld console in his lap and he didn’t look up from it.

“Don’t tell me,” he said. “You want store credit for a stack of games that came out when you were twelve.”

“Hi, Nate.”

“Because I’m not doing that again. You talked me through three of them. Three.” He looked up. He saw Wren.

His mouth stayed open for about a second and a half, which is a long time, and he did not close it until he’d looked at Ethan, and then at Wren, and then at Ethan again.

“Oh,” he said.

“Nate.”

“Hale.” Nate sat forward slowly, like the chair had an opinion about it. “You brought a person. Into my store.”

“She’s a classmate.”

“Sure.”

“Hi,” Wren said.

“Hi. Hello.” Nate set the console down on the counter with great care, and the care told Ethan everything he needed to know about the next ten minutes. “He plays, you know. He’s not going to mention it. Sit down, don’t sit down, there’s no chair. He plays.”

“I don’t—“

“He plays.”

Ethan took the Yamaha off the wall. It was the one with the finish worn cloudy where somebody’s forearm went, and he wasn’t going to sit down with a guitar that cost more than the store in front of the guy who owned the store.

“Two minutes,” he said.

“Play as long as you want.”

He sat on the stool. The seat creaked. The guitar was cold against his chest, and then it wasn’t.

He turned the first peg and hit the string open, listened, turned it a hair, hit it again. B was flat. He brought B up and the low E went with it out of sympathy, so he did that one, and then the whole thing had moved, the way they do. It took him maybe thirty seconds and he didn’t talk during it, and he could feel her watching him do it, and he made himself not look up.

Then he set his thumb on the low E.

The piece had taken him a winter. He’d built it a section at a time, the way you build a wall in a yard nobody’s going to see, and he’d never written any of it down. The opening figure went up and came back on itself a third lower. His right hand did the work; his left stayed almost still, and then his left moved.

He didn’t close his eyes. He’d learned not to. There was a version where you closed your eyes and it looked like a guy trying to look like a guy playing.

The body of the guitar was warm against his ribs. He caught the strings on the pads of his fingers and not on the nails — skin, not plastic — which was why it was never as loud as it should have been. The figure came around again and this time he dropped his thumb into the top of the guitar, once, like a door.

He heard her blink. It wasn’t a thing you could hear, and he heard it anyway. She had stopped moving, and a room is a different shape when somebody stops moving in it.

Halfway through, the smell of her wrist came across the gap between them — wood, and the green thing under the wood — and for four bars it was the loudest thing in the room, and then he was past it.

The bridge went up the neck and stopped on a harmonic at the twelfth fret, one finger, a bell in an empty house, and then he let the shape fall back down into the first figure, and then it was over, and the last note had a little hair on it because his thumb was tired.

He put his hand flat on the strings.

Nate was clapping. It was a big sound in a small room. Wren had her hand on the strap of her bag and her shoulder against the door frame.

He set the guitar back on its stand.

“So,” he said.

“That was—“ She shook her head once, like she was clearing it. “Why did you never say you played?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

He didn’t have anything for that one either.

“He’s got a channel,” Nate said.

“Nate.”

“Two hundred twenty-three thousand, last I looked.” Nate already had his phone off the counter. “He’s got a channel and he doesn’t update it and he comes in here every couple of weeks to trade games with me like it’s a normal hobby.”

He held the phone out. She took it.

She looked at it for a while. The store was very quiet. Behind the register a tube amp ticked the way amps do when they’ve been on a while.

“Two hundred twenty-three thousand,” she said.

“It’s not—“

“Fifty-seven videos.” Her thumb moved. “The one pinned at the top has five and a half million views.” She turned the phone so he could see it, which was worse than her seeing it. “Five and a half.”

“Five point four,” Nate said. “Larkspur. That’s what you just heard — that’s the one.” He leaned his elbows on the counter. “There’s comments on it going back two years. Every day, somebody asking when he’s coming back, and I read them, because he won’t.”

“Nate.”

“I’m just saying it out loud. It’s been a year.”

“Eleven months,” Ethan said.

“Fine. Eleven months. Somebody in this room ought to say it out loud.”

Wren turned the phone back around and looked at it again, and then she lowered it and stood there with it in both hands, and he watched it land on her. It wasn’t the numbers.

He’d been assuming she knew everything. It had not once occurred to him to check whether everything included him.

“Why,” she said.

He picked his wallet up off the counter and put it back down.

“It’s a long story.”

“Try the short one.”

“There’s no short one.”

“Okay,” she said, and then she didn’t say anything, and she didn’t look away, and she let the nothing go on until he could hear it. Behind the register the amp ticked. Out in the mall a kid was screaming about something and being ignored.

Nate pulled the calculator across the counter. It was one of the big ones with the fat keys, the kind a store keeps because the receipt printer is a pain in the neck. He hit a few numbers. Then he tore the corner off a receipt already sitting in the bowl, turned it over, and wrote on the back with the pen he’d had behind his ear for the entire conversation.

He slid it across.

“That’s what I paid for it,” Nate said. “I’m not making a dollar on you.”

Ethan looked at the receipt.

$450. Under it, in Nate’s square handwriting: the Yamaha.

“That one’s six ninety-nine on the wall,” Nate said. “It’s sat here a year. Nobody wants a guitar with somebody else’s arm rubbed into it.”

“I don’t have four hundred and fifty dollars.”

“I know what you have. You’ve been buying used games off me since you were fifteen and you still count out the change.” Nate put the pen back behind his ear. “So it sits here a while longer. Keep the paper.”

Ethan folded the receipt in half, and then in half again, and put it in his back pocket.

He didn’t say thank you. He was aware of that while he was doing it and he didn’t fix it, because thank you was the part where you agreed with the number, and he hadn’t decided yet whether he was going to.

The receipt made a small sound going into his back pocket. Wren still hadn’t picked up her bag; it was on the floor by her foot, and she was looking at the Yamaha on its stand, and she hadn’t said anything since she’d asked him why.