The Bait Shop

The bait shop was where I went to not be home. It belonged to Mr. Petrakis, who had run it for forty years and looked like a thumb in a fishing hat, and it sold worms, lures, sunscreen, soft drinks, and a rotating selection of candy that had been in the sun too long. I worked there three mornings a week. Mostly I restocked the cooler and lied to tourists about whether the bass were biting. It was good, the bait shop. Nothing there expected anything of me. The worms certainly didn't. That summer I was learning that this was a rare and valuable quality in a place — to be somewhere that did not, the moment you walked in, hand you a job to do. Home had become a place full of jobs. Be cheerful at dinner. Don't ask Caleb the wrong question. Watch Mom's face for the light that was about to burn out and pretend you weren't watching. The bait shop asked none of that. The bait shop asked only that the cooler be stocked and that the tourists be gently lied to, and both of those I could do with my hands while the rest of me rested. "Your brother's back," Mr. Petrakis said on the Friday, not looking up from his crossword. It was not a question. In our town nothing was a question. The town knew things before you did and announced them to you as a courtesy. "He's back," I said. "College man." He filled in a word. "Henderson boy said he saw him at the gas station. Said he didn't say hello." I stacked root beers and didn't answer. The thing about a small town is that it keeps a ledger. Caleb not saying hello at the gas station would be entered into the ledger, and it would sit there next to every other small strangeness, and the town would do the math whether we wanted it done or not. "He's just tired," I said, which was the sentence I had decided to carry around with me that summer, smooth as a stone in a pocket. Mr. Petrakis grunted. He'd known Caleb since Caleb was small enough to need lifting onto the counter to choose his sun-melted candy. "Tired," he said, in a way that put quotation marks around it without using his voice. Then, because he was kind under the thumb-shaped exterior, he changed the subject to the weather, and the weather was hot, and that was the whole conversation. I thought about that, restocking the root beers. About the ledger, and how a town keeps one whether you ask it to or not, and how my family had spent the whole month of June trying to keep our particular entry off the books. Caleb was tired. Caleb was settling in. College had been a hard year, you know how it is. We had handed those lines to the town the way you hand a receptionist a form, and the town had taken the form and smiled and not believed a word of it, because a town that has watched a boy grow up can tell the difference between tired and whatever it was Caleb actually had. I just didn't have the word for it yet either. I was sixteen and my whole family was speaking in receptionist-forms and I was the youngest one and nobody had taught me the real language because nobody had wanted to admit there was a real language to teach. Mr. Petrakis, I should say, was one of the people I had quietly studied that summer the way you study anyone who seems to have figured something out. He was the only adult I knew who could be told a hard thing and not immediately do something about it. Other adults, when you handed them a worry, started fixing — they got bright and busy and a little frightening, the way my mother got bright and busy. Mr. Petrakis just received the thing. He let it sit on the counter between you. He went back to his crossword and left a silence open beside you that you could climb into or not, your choice, no charge. I had thought, before that summer, that helping someone meant doing something. Mr. Petrakis was teaching me, without ever once meaning to, that sometimes helping someone means only being a warm shop with a crossword in it, a place a tired person can stand for a while without being asked to be anything. At eleven the bell over the door went, and it was Caleb. I had not told him where I worked. I mean, he knew, in the way you know the layout of a house you grew up in, but I hadn't told him I'd be there that morning, and he hadn't asked, and yet here he was, standing in the doorway with the heat behind him, holding the door open so the cool air leaked out into the parking lot. "Door," said Mr. Petrakis. Caleb stepped in. The door slapped shut. He looked around the shop like a man checking a memory against the original and finding small discrepancies. The candy rack had moved. The poster of the record catfish had finally been replaced. "You work here," he said to me. "Since April." "Right." He picked up a lure, one of the ugly ones with too many hooks, and turned it over. "Mom said. I forgot." It was the most words he'd offered me unprompted since the dock. I was so surprised I did the worst possible thing, which was to act normal, the way you don't move when a deer steps into a clearing. "You want a root beer?" I said. "They're warm. Everything here is warm." And Caleb almost smiled. Not a real one. But the corner of his mouth moved, the way the lake moves when something passes under it without surfacing, and he said, "Yeah. Okay. A warm root beer," like it was the most normal request in the world, and we stood in the bait shop drinking warm root beer while Mr. Petrakis pretended very hard to do his crossword, and for eleven minutes by the clock that summer let go of my throat.