Table of Contents
From "In the Icebox"
By Amanda Morrison '03Written for English 310, Advanced Fiction Writing
As David entered the bookstore, he rolled beneath the sign Rick had made, and he prepared himself for the inevitable. As he took up his station behind the second register in The Empty Icebox, he smiled, though as yet there were no customers in the store. Rick was lounging by the coffee pot and nodded hello to David, but he and Cindy were deep in conversation. He watched them. The size of the main room was small, but they might as well have been miles away. He kept looking at Rick's feet. He was standing now with his back to the little table and had one foot crossed in front of the other. David had always wanted to be able to do that: the Humphrey Bogart Stance. He looked away before they could find his eyes on them.
It turned out to be a slow morning. Rick was opening cartons of books and shelving them, and Cindy was able to deal with the few customers easily. She was the one who most liked register, so he was glad to find somewhere else to be and something else to do. Maybe it would pick up after lunch, he thought as he held open the door marked "Employees Only" with one hand and pulled himself through with the other. For now he would check on the status of the special orders and the other regular paperwork, the desk jobs that needed to get done but that no one ever wanted to do. From the back, he could still see into the main room, and Rick and Cindy were back to playing their usual game of here-I-am-pretending-not-to-notice-you. He heard her laughing at something Rick said, and shook his head slightly, refocusing on the forms and invoices on the desk. "I am such a stalker," he said out loud to himself in a low voice.
He was being ridiculous; he knew it and he couldn't help it. He had known her for so long, and she still captivated him. In fact, she was more attractive to him now than she had ever been after pulling an all-nighter. Her skin was more vibrant, her laugh deeper and yet at the same time less self-conscious, because she had lived through more things. He looked at her hands too as she broke a roll of quarters into the change tray in the drawer. He wanted to take her hands, which had done everything from wrapping soft-shell tacos as a summer job to drafting the plans to make the aisles wide enough for his chair to turn around in, and he wanted to kiss those hands, wanted to capture them and never let them go, the way she captured him with the barest flicker of a smile, or the tilt of her head, so that her hair fell over her eyes. He wanted to do this, wanted to show her that he loved her, but he knew he never would. Their history was too long, and he had never been the handsome leading man but rather the faithful sidekick. It had never really bothered him, or maybe he had never stopped to think about it.
The three of them had met at college and had become inseparable. Rick and David had taken English and sociology classes together, struggled with the structure of the short story, and eventually dreamed of opening a bookstore to support their reading habit. What better way to have access to the most ample reading lists of their own devising, either by previous agreements in taste or by the chance encounter on the shelves? It turned out there was a lot more to it than that, and now it seemed that Cindy, who had graduated with a degree in architecture, was as knee-deep in running the business as he and Rick were. But was Cindy still knee-deep in Rick? They had dated heavily, if in a dramatically on-and-off way, for two years at college. And for as long as Cindy had loved Rick, David had loved Cindy.