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Paul smiles as he reaches under the counter. “Well, Evan. Let me show you what I’ve got for Marcus this time.” He pulls out two records and lays them across the counter. “Been holding onto these since October for him.”
“How do you know what he’ll like?” Evan asks curiously.
“I don’t,” Paul answers Evan before turning to me. “You remember the first time you came in here?”
“Yep.”
“He walks in, doesn’t say a word. I don’t even think he responded to my greeting. Just stands in the aisle, arms crossed, giving everything this look like it pissed him off to be in the presence of so much great music.” Paul’s laughing now, clearly enjoying himself retelling the story. “I finally asked if he needed help, and he said, ‘I don’t want anything popular or well-known.’”
Evan’s nodding along. “That sounds like him.”
“Right? So I handed him some obscure noise-rock album that nobody buys, fully expecting him to hate it out of spite. But to my surprise, he came back two weeks later and asked for more like it.” Paul shrugs, satisfied with himself. “After that I just started pulling records that people sold to me that I felt he’d like. You come in here, what, like every three months?”
“Something like that,” I murmur.
Evan’s watching me with a warm look on his face, like this is his new favorite story.
“So what’ve you got for him this time?” Evan asks, nodding at the records still sitting on the counter.
Paul slides them over. “This one’s a local band, actually recorded a couple blocks from here, so I figured it’d be a good one for him to test out. And this—” he taps the last one, some scratched-up secondhand album with a faded cover, “—this one’s just good. It’s a bit moody, not full-on emo as the kids call it, but there’s a lot of depth to the lyrics.”
I pick it up, flipping it over, and I can already tell he’s right. He usually is.
“You’ve got good instincts,” Evan tells him.
“After thirty years in this business, I’d better.” Paul glances between us. “Now, feel free to look around, and let me know if you need me.”
Evan smiles at me and starts walking deeper into the store, heading toward the folk section. We spend another twenty minutes or so in there. Evan picks out two records, and I can tell he loves the place.
By the time we check out and go to leave, Paul calls out to me. “Marcus, bring him back sometime. I like this one.”
“Working on it,” I admit. Evan doesn’t say anything, just laces his fingers through mine on the walk back to the car, records tucked under his arm.
CHAPTER 22
Evan
Back at Marcus’s apartment, stuffed from the deep dish pizza we ate, I find myself standing in front of the same bare walls as yesterday.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” Marcus answers, sitting on the couch.
“Why don’t you have anything on your walls?”
He crosses his arms, sinking further into the couch. “I never let myself think of it as permanent, I guess. When I took this job, I envisioned it almost as somewhere I’m passing through until the next thing. Didn’t seem worth decorating a life I didn’t think I was staying in.”
“What if you hung something up now?”
“Like what?”
I grab one of the records I picked out today, it has mountains and a hopeful sky on the cover. “This.”
He takes it from me, studying the artwork for a moment like he’s seeing it differently now than he did in the store. “That’s an insane thing to hang on a wall instead of, you know, playing it. And besides, you picked this out.”
“It’s something, and it can remind you of me. Besides they make these plastic stands you could set them in and then you could display your favorites versus leaving them stacked up in the corner.”
Marcus crosses the room, holding the record up against the blank space like he’s testing the way it’d look.
