Work Text:
Leo arrived in Kepler on a morning in December, nineteen hours after the first part of his life had come to an abrupt and inelegant end. He’d spent five fitful hours curled up in the backseat, fourteen white-knuckled at the wheel, and now here he was, in a town populated by strangers, which he’d chosen on the basis of its ban on cell phones.
Leo parked in front of a shopping strip crowned by a wall of scraggled trees, climbed out onto the salt-crusted asphalt, and stretched his legs. For nearly a day he’d driven, too terrified to look in the rearview mirror, crossing slouching backroads and dramatic mountains and still feeling like New York was breathing down his neck. Now the crisp air tugged him back to his body, and Leo squinted up at his new surroundings: Pizza Hut, Dave’s Dehumidifier Depot, General Store.
“You here about the manager position?” asked the oldest woman Leo had ever seen, gesturing to a HIRING sign in the window. “Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you. I own the general store.”
“Uh,” Leo said.
“That your car?”
“Yeah.”
“New York plates, huh. You know, parts of the Quiet Zone you can’t drive gas. You might wanna invest in something diesel-powered if you’re gonna be in Kepler for the long haul. I’m Mrs. Finley, by the way.”
“Leo,” he said, extending his hand. His parka was rumpled, and he could feel the body odor percolating in his pits. He followed Mrs. Finley inside.
The store was dustier than his old grocery. Pale beams crossed overhead; day fell in through a skylight. Mrs. Finley shuffled behind an old-fashioned cash register and pulled out a notebook from the counter. She looked even more ancient inside the store, hands knotted like bark. Out the window, Leo could see sunlight climbing the mountain.
Relief stung in his throat. Kepler was beautiful.
“So you have experience running a store, Mr. New York?”
“Tarkesian,” he said, which was true. Then he lied: “I was the assistant manager at the Key Food in Sunnyside, Queens.”
“How’d you find this place?”
“Just moved here.”
“Kepler is as different from Queens as you can get,” Mrs. Finley said.
“You’re right.”
“You have any family out here? Caring for your old lady?”
“No.”
“Government job?”
“No.”
She smiled. “Then it’s a wonder you’re here at all.”
“You’re right,” Leo said, regretting the lie about Key Food. “I should go.”
“Go? You can have the job, Mr. Tarkesian.”
“Oh. Thank you.” He waited a moment, realizing he had nowhere else to go. “Is there a campground around here?”
Mrs. Finley looked up from the ledger. “Now that just won’t do.”
***
The roof over his head was a boon, but Mrs. Finley’s pull-out was a sleep-stealing, back-wrenching death trap. Leo developed a caffeine dependency and poured himself into the store.
His enthusiasm didn’t necessarily compensate for his inexperience. He noticed, for instance, that the store always ran out of key lime yogurt the day after he restocked it. For whatever reason, the citizens of Kepler were wild about key lime. So he upped the order from 14 units to 196 and felt smart.
Except it turned out that Susan from the doctor’s office ate key lime yogurt for breakfast every morning, and that the store only stocked it on her behalf. None of the other shoppers went near it. Leo ate four key lime yogurts a day, saved enough cash to put down a deposit on an apartment, and never touched key lime anything again.
He mustered up his nerve and went door to door taking requests. He learned that Michael Nagler cooked a Thanksgiving ham instead of turkey and that the whole Powers family was allergic to peanuts. He took note of what beers were popular at the pub and stocked up on those first. He built a three-sided display to show off the fruit better. After six months, Mrs. Finley formally retired, and she handed over the store to him.
Town Hall fined him for a faulty carbon monoxide detector. The pipes froze the first winter, and the second. A rat chewed through the wires and the whole freezer melted overnight.
With every mistake he made, Leo waited for the whole store to come crashing down on him. But in Kepler, he noticed, he never paid for mistakes alone. Dave of the Dehumidifier Depot helped him mop up the melted freezers, then leant Leo a dehumidifier for the rest of the week.
The sign out front got old. He replaced it with one that said LEO’S GENERAL STORE.
In his third year, a storm swept down the mountain, plucking ancient trees by their roots. Leo barricaded the door and caught leaks in sawed-off milk jugs, but a new one sprang every minute, and it was nearing midnight. He was cranky and exhausted and wished he were asleep at home. Then he got the call from his neighbor that a tree had crashed through his bedroom window. “Thanks for checking in, Duck,” Leo said into the receiver, noticing how beautiful the leaks made everything. It was like standing on the rainforest floor.
***
At the Christmas party in the community center, five years after the store saved him, Leo caught the park ranger spiking the punch.
He didn’t recognize Duck right away. Duck had traded his uniform for an elf hat and jeans, and he was grinning to himself as he dumped a worrying volume of rum into the bowl. Even more concerning: the the bottle said TROPICAL BANANA, and Leo could smell it from five feet away. He tapped Duck’s shoulder.
Duck lurched away from the bowl. “I’m not doing anything!”
“I don’t remember selling you, uh, that.” Leo pointed at the monkey smiling on the rum.
Duck smiled sheepishly. “Does it make it better or worse if I tell you I took this off of one of the high schoolers?”
“Depends which high schooler.”
“Yeah, some of them can be real asses,” Duck said, tipping another nip into the punch. “Then again, so was I.”
Leo accepted a cup. The punch smelled more like something a fruit fly would bathe in than it did sparkling cranberry. They toasted to teenage delinquents and leaned against the snack table.
“How’ve you been, Duck?” Leo asked. They lived next door to each other, but Duck often worked night shifts, and Leo was in bed by 10 o’clock.
“Oh, all right. A little adventure here and there. Found a couple of campers half-frozen to death last week. Made them a cup of coffee, got them some blankets. Turns out saving lives is real easy.”
“Sounds like it.”
“How long you’ve been here, Leo? Four years?”
“Five.”
“Time flies.”
Leo didn’t respond for a moment. It was stupid, but he had started to feel like he’d always lived in Kepler. He’d spent 35 years in New York. He’d seen things most people never see. And yet none of those memories seemed to belong to him. They existed only outside Kepler’s protective barrier, and belonged to another Leo.
Duck took him by the elbow. “C’mon, come help me with the raffle. First place is a Christmas ham and an iPod Shuffle.”
Duck pulled names out of a sequined Santa hat while Leo handed out prizes. After the raffle, people filtered back into the gym, where the holiday standards had given way to cheery pop.
Duck choked on a swig of the Tropical Banana. “Damn, you’ve really gotta mix this stuff. Hey, quit laughing, Tarkesian.”
“Then quit making me laugh.” Leo tapped at the bottle. Plastic. It really was the most frightening bottle of liquor he’d ever laid eyes on. “At least I know the kids aren’t getting their stuff from me. We sure this isn’t shower cleaner?”
“I don’t know. Is it hot in here?” Duck tugged at his collar, face pink. “I’m getting hot.”
Leo watched his neighbors sway as a warm crowd in the gym. “Let’s take a walk.”
***
Kepler in December resembled a snow globe. And Kepler at night in December, when the streets were empty and the snow sifted down from an invisible sky and tinsel waved from trees, resembled—well, a fancy snow globe. Leo laughed. The dubious punch had started to hit.
Duck did a park ranger bit for a while, pointing out fire hazards and classifying light-tangled trees and pretending parked cars were bears. And Leo practically doubled over from it, but—he realized as they rounded the corner—they were walking back to their apartment complex. Where they both lived. Leo started doing some panicked mental math—he’d kind of assumed they would hang out some more, but maybe Duck just wanted to face-plant on his bed and sleep off the impending hangover, and Leo calculated how badly had he damaged his own dignity assuming…well, assuming.
A passing car broke the library-stillness, and Leo realized he had clammed up.
When they got up to their twin doors, Duck paused. “Wait here,” he said, and disappeared inside his darkened foyer. He emerged a moment later with a Party City shopping bag.
Leo peered inside. Plastic mistletoe, still in the package. “Oh.”
“So this woulda been cooler if I’d actually gotten around to decorating,” Duck said. “Did I just make things ten times more uncomfortable or what?”
“Not sure.”
“I don’t think I have it in me to say what I mean, but do you know what I mean?”
“You’re supposed to stand under mistletoe,” Leo said, avoiding the question—because he, too, could not say what he meant. But he leaned forward, anyway, because at least he understood.
***
Later, dozing next to Duck on his bed, Leo remembered a very important question.
“Hey,” he said, jabbing Duck in the side. “Why do they call you Duck?”
Duck flopped over to face Leo. “In eighth grade gym, some of the kids were playing kickball and some of us were sitting on the bleachers, doing homework or goofing off, and suddenly I hear one of the kids yell, ‘DUCK!’ So I do. And a kickball nails Marabelle McKeon square in the face.”
“Really?”
“Uh-huh.”
“People still call you Duck? Over a lousy kickball?”
“It had more of an impact if you knew Marabelle. She never said two words. Then she gets hit and yells, ‘Fucking watch it!’” Duck shrugged. “Of course, it’s funnier if you knew me back then, too.”
“Who were you?” Leo asked.
“Like I said. A bit of of an ass.”
Leo found that hard to believe. But probably he’d been an ass in the eighth grade, too.
Leo closed his eyes for a moment. When he was living the earlier part of his life, he thought it would never end. And then it did, of course, and he ran away. He ended up in Kepler because he’d looked up “places to disappear.” No cell phones, no internet, limited television. God, it had sounded boring. He’d expected the people to be total monks. But the people were his favorite part. Even more than the store and the scenery.
“You know,” Duck said quietly, “you’re always so happy when I see you at work. Even when you’re mad about something, you seem kinda happy.”
“I am. I love that store.”
“Good,” Duck said. Then, curious, he asked, “Why?”
Leo thought about the wide, clean windows in the front of the shop. The mornings, when the sun climbed the mountain; the evenings, when the mountain faded into darkness. He thought about the TV dinners gleaming in the freezer. He thought about the wall of potato chips. There were more potato chips than one person could ever eat.
“I just like it.”
***
Five more years passed and Duck Newton burst into Leo’s store, yelling about the sky falling. Which it did, right on top of them.
In the car, on the way back from the hospital, Leo thought about something Duck had said a month earlier. Start locking your door. Duck could be cagey, but he wore his fear on his face. That time after the Christmas party played out again and again—Duck couldn’t say what he meant, but Leo understood anyway.
Bad luck had come to Kepler.
But I’ve still got some good neighbors, Leo thought as he pulled onto the exit to Kepler. He was almost home again, and for now, that was enough.