These days, where he buys his coffee depends on which way he walks to work. Say he comes up behind the Union and along Maynard under University Towers and through the Arcade, in which case he stops at Expresso Royale and carries his cardboard cup steaming along State Street. That’s his route on cloudy days. When it’s sunny, though, he walks all the way up Fifth to Liberty, then straight up Liberty into the rising sun, because one of his favorite sights in the world is the view up Liberty on a brisk autumn morning or on a mild spring one, under a scrubbed blue midwestern sky, with the Michigan Theater’s black marquee soaking up the slanting light and Burton Tower printed against the sky at the end of the street, limned in astringent northern light. Here, at least in Kevin’s youth, was once the epicenter of funky retail Ann Arbor, the heart of elvendom on earth. Within two minutes walk of each other were three world-class record stores: Liberty Music, where a middle-aged clerk in a tie escorted you to a booth so you could listen to six different recordings of Shostakovich’s Fifth; hip Big Star, where if you didn’t know what you wanted, you were in the wrong place; and Discount Records, where Iggy Pop once worked. And five bookstores: overlit Follett’s, fussy Charing Cross, overstuffed David’s, bohemian Centicore, and the original, independent, prelapsarian Borders, whose clerks had to pass a book test to get the job and afterward strutted the carpeted aisles as arrogant as Jesuits. “Romance novels? We don’t sell romance novels. Why don’t you try Walden’s? At the mall.”
Not to mention a shoe store and a barbershop and a pharmacy and a five-and-dime and a declining old midwestern department store. And two Greek diners, a gourmet hot dog stand, a vegetarian restaurant, a five-dollar steak house, a Japanese restaurant, two or three sub shops, an ice cream shop, a cookie shop. And Drake’s, where he first met Beth, not long after he started at the Asia Center as an editorial assistant. As an undergraduate Kevin had never liked Drake’s, with its sickly green decor and cramped, unpadded, wooden booths, unupholstered since 1935. The place survived on nostalgia — misty alums on football Saturdays sharing a pot of weak tea, and the rest of the week homesick undergrads who’d been steered there by sentimental parents or older siblings. By Kevin’s time it was cluttered and dark, the entryway heaped with boxes, the counter lined with dusty jars of mummified candy. The owner, an enormous, bald old man, bloodless as a slug, his trousers pulled up to his armpits, slumped immovably on a stool at the end of the counter, doing God knows what; Kevin never saw him stir or speak. And the portions were smalclass="underline" a Coke came in an eight-ounce glass, more crushed ice than cola, and a sandwich was a flavorless scoop of something pink in mayonnaise on wilted lettuce and dry white bread, cut into fussy little triangles skewered with toothpicks. Worst of all, you had to fill out your own order ticket with a blunt pencil stub and then try to catch the attention of one of the sullen girls behind the counter.
The first time Kevin laid eyes on Beth, he vainly waved his ticket at her as she whispered with another haughty Drake’s girl, the two of them casually ignoring him. He hadn’t been in Drake’s since he’d graduated, despite working only a block away at Big Star for years, but this was his first week at the Asia Center, and he figured, if you work at the U, you might as well eat at Drake’s at least once. Plus the girls behind the counter were usually cute, despite the shapeless green tunics they wore, and looking back at that first exchange of glances now, as he steps up out of the crosswalk at Sixth and Congress in Austin, Texas, it comes to him as a much-belated revelation that it was probably her Drakette hauteur that drew him to Beth in the first place. At last she pried herself away from her conversation with the other girl — Debra, Kevin learned later, shorter but equally cute; how different would his life have been if she’d come to take his order? — and carried herself down the narrow aisle behind the counter as imperiously as a runway model, tall, clear-skinned, wide-eyed. She fixed him with her gaze and, without a word, plucked the ticket from Kevin’s hand with two fingers and pivoted away, her hair swinging. Kevin, who fell easily and hard, felt a tingle that started in his balls and reverberated all the way up his spine and down his arms to the tips of his fingers. And she knew it, too. When she called him back to pick up his sandwich, she thrust her lower lip at him and slid the plate across the counter with a surly clatter, fixing him with her gaze again as if daring him to say something. He started back to his booth, heart pounding, then turned and carried it back to the counter, where he lifted his finger to get the tall girl’s attention. She exchanged a look with Debra — what does this idiot want? — and carried herself down the aisle to Kevin again. She placed her long, pale fingers on the countertop, canted her hip, and lifted an eyebrow.
Kevin leaned on the counter, extracted a toothpick, and peeled back the top of one quarter of his sandwich. He frowned sheepishly. “Is this tuna?” he said.