Olive Juice

Phillip beat him to it. “How’s work going?”

He could do that. Small talk was safe. “It’s good. I’m. Um. I’m working on a new project now. It’s updating a previous edition. Nothing too complicated.”

Phillip’s smile was warm. “That’s good, David. That’s real good. I’m happy to hear it.”

David reminded himself he was human, and humans were supposed to ask questions too. “And you?” he asked, strangely proud of himself. “How is everything going? With the store.”

Phillip laughed, rough and quiet. “Good,” he said. “It’s good. Borders goes out of business, Barnes & Noble are closing down stores, Amazon opens brick-and-mortar in an effort to continue their plans for world domination, and my little-used bookstore somehow manages to thrive. It’s a conundrum that I cannot explain, but enjoy nonetheless.”

“It’s the hipsters,” David said. “It’s retro. They need a place to convene and argue whether Holden Caulfield was deep or just a spoiled brat.”

“They do seem to enjoy the irony.”

“Yeah,” he said, sipping again on his bourbon. It tasted a little watered down now, but he supposed that was okay. He wasn’t buzzed, but he did feel a bit looser. He’d take it easy. Take it slow. “That’s good, though. I mean, about the store.”

“Yeah,” Phillip said, sitting up a little in his seat. He put his hands on the tabletop, thin fingers stretching along the cloth. The candle in the middle of the table flickered, casting shadows along his skin. “It’s okay. I was worried for a little while. You remember Tiffany Ketchum?”

David frowned, the name familiar, but he couldn’t quite place her.

“She owned that little bookstore in Bethesda.”

“Oh! Right. Yeah, her. How is she?”

“Her store went out of business,” Phillip said. “And, you know. It worried me. Because she’d been around forever. And if she couldn’t make it work, then what chance did I have?”

David wasn’t sure if he should be shocked or dismayed or whatever emotion was probably expected of him. He went with a little bit of everything. “That’s terrible.”

“Yeah.”

“Didn’t she… wasn’t that the store that had all the cats?”

Phillip chuckled. “Yeah, her store cats.”

“Like, thirty of them.”

“It wasn’t that many.”

“It was more than five. Which is too many cats.”

“It was her thing.”

“Probably why she went out of business.”

“Buddy,” Phillip admonished lightly even though he was still smiling.

“I’m just saying. A lot of people are allergic to cats. You’re cutting out potential consumers. It always smelled like cat piss in there.”

“So what you’re saying is that I’ve survived because I don’t have cats in the store.”

David shrugged. “Nah. You would have survived even if you did. You’re just… different.”

Phillip watched him.

David tried not to squirm.

Phillip had been a lawyer, working long hours for very little reward. He’d dreamed of doing public defense work, but his father had said there wasn’t money in it, and no son of his would be a public defender. “You’d be defending rapists,” Phillip had said, doing a full-throated impression of his father just under a year after he and David had met. “Do you understand that, Phillip? Rapists and murderers. Of children. Do you think you could sleep every night knowing you represented the scum of the earth?”

His father had been an intimidating man. He was also footing the bill for Phillip’s college education. Those things combined course-corrected Phillip’s career path so that he could work at his father’s firm as a personal injury attorney, representing those people in minor fender benders who showed up in court with a neck collar on, shouting for anyone to hear that their neck was hurt, and it was permanent, and they needed compensation.