The Store Read online

I guess she finally ran out of compliments to hand out. Megan turned silent but kept on smiling. It should have been a perfect time for Bette and Bud to tell us how terrific we both looked.

  “Well, Megan looks as beautiful as ever,” Bette said.

  “She certainly does. Looks even younger than when we last saw each other,” Bud added.

  Uh-huh, I was thinking. Keep going, folks. Tell me how great I look.

  Instead Bud smiled and said, “Now, you, on the other hand, Jacob, look like you’ve been working too hard. Are they working you too hard?” He chuckled.

  “No. Hard but not too hard,” I said.

  “And he’s lost about ten pounds since the last time you saw him,” chimed in Megan. “Without trying to lose it.”

  “What? Are you three ganging up on me? Maybe I need a makeover.”

  I laughed, but nobody else laughed. I was pissed off, but nobody seemed to notice.

  “Listen, Jacob,” said Bette. “I’m a big proponent of watching your weight, but too thin is just as bad as too fat.”

  Megan said “Amen.” I looked at her with that what-the-hell-is-going-on-here look. She smiled and said, “It’s all for your own good.”

  I was thinking that whenever someone said that something was for your own good, it never really was. But even more, I was thinking how hurt and angry I was that Megan jumped on the “Doesn’t Jacob look like shit” bandwagon.

  Fortunately a waiter came to take a drink order (on his electronic pad, of course; I think I was the last person in America who still used an old-fashioned lead pencil).

  Megan asked for a vodka and tonic. Bette ordered Diet Coke. Bud ordered club soda (“and don’t go putting any lime twist in it, ya hear?”). I ordered a Chivas on the rocks.

  “You guys on the wagon?” I asked.

  “Not really,” Bette said. “We’re just trying to cut back. That’s always good advice.”

  I wondered why she felt she needed to call what she said good advice.

  Megan then told them that we had tried to locate them when we’d arrived in San Francisco.

  “Well, we didn’t come to San Francisco when we first got transferred,” Bette said. “They sent us to San Diego.”

  “San Jose,” Bud corrected her.

  “Oh, all these saints,” Bette said. “Clara, Monica, Anita, Diego, Clemente. I can’t remember where I am half the time.”

  “So tell us,” Megan said. “What are you doing here? It seems like you just disappeared from New Burg overnight.”

  “Well, we did leave New Burg overnight,” Bette said. “Some exec at the Store called and said they’d send a car to take us to the airport and have a private company plane at the airport to whisk us away to…” She hesitated for a moment. “San Jose.

  “So that’s where we’re living and working. Only about an hour from here. I’m at the fulfillment center in San Mateo.…There ya go, another saint’s name,” she added.

  Bette and Bud looked at each other with bright eyes and broad smiles. In fact it seemed like they hadn’t stopped smiling since the moment we’d spotted them.

  I should have dropped the subject. I tried, but I couldn’t.

  “Look. We’re your friends. You were our best friends in New Burg. Tell us what happened,” I said, perhaps a bit too intensely.

  “What happened, Jacob, is what we told you,” said Bud, the smile gone from his face. “They called. They said they wanted us to get ready. The plane was ready. So we got ready. And we got transferred.”

  I was becoming very impatient. My voice shot up pretty loudly.

  “Who the hell is ‘they’? Who is the ‘they’ that called? And why did it have to be overnight, immediately? And what exactly does it mean to be transferred? Answer me. Tell me. You two just disappeared. That’s not normal! That’s not natural!”

  “Calm down, Jacob,” Megan said.

  Bette spoke. “It seemed perfectly natural to us.”

  “It’s not!” I shouted. “It’s not perfectly natural to be flown off in the middle of the night to a new place. That’s not how things happen in this world.”

  There was a long pause. I took a big gulp of my Scotch. Then Bud spoke.

  “That’s exactly how things happen in this world. And if for some reason it doesn’t seem perfectly natural to you, that’s fine. But it does seem perfectly natural to us.”

  The Refill button on the coffee table in front of us was flashing. We all ignored it, and the flashing eventually stopped.

  Bette tried to restore order. Her sweet little voice came into the conversation as if nothing unpleasant or argumentative had been said.

  “So,” she said. “That’s how the transfer happened. A private plane, a zip-zip-zip out to San Jose.”

  “All in a few hours?” Megan asked. “That’s amazing.”

  “Actually, it’s kinda creepy,” I said. Megan reached out and patted my hand gently. I was becoming an expert at saying the wrong thing. And Megan was becoming an expert at bailing me out.

  “I don’t think it’s creepy,” Megan said. “I think it actually sounds kinda cool.”

  “And that plane ride sure was luxurious. Just six seats on the plane, a full kitchen, a bar…” Bud began rattling on.

  “Pipe down, Bud,” Bette said with a chuckle. “I’m sure the Brandeises have been on a private plane.”

  “Well, if you think that, then you’d be wrong,” I said. Bette and Bud laughed so hard you’d have thought Joan Rivers had left me that punch line in her will.

  The laughter stopped. But our old friends never stopped smiling. The anger and cynicism they had both harbored about the Store seemed to have completely evaporated. Here they were in their cool clothes and their smiley faces, happy in their jobs and happy in their lives.

  We finished our drinks.

  I did ask them how they knew Megan and I were in San Francisco.

  Bud casually replied, “Oh, you guys know how everyone in the Store knows everything about everyone else.”

  “That’s part of the charm of it,” Megan said.

  “Yeah. A big part of the charm,” I added.

  I don’t think either Bette or Bud knew for sure whether I was being sarcastic or not.

  We chatted for a while about our kids, their new house, Bette’s new haircut. Then it was time to say good-bye.

  We all stood up and said how great it was to catch up. It felt like old times. Bette and Megan hugged each other. Bud hugged Megan. Then, just before we went our separate ways, Bud turned and gave me an unexpected hug as well.

  “Don’t forget,” he whispered in my ear. “You never know for sure whether you can trust us.”

  Chapter 38

  MEGAN AND I watched Bette and Bud leave. We sat silently in the lobby. After a few minutes I said, “I’m sorry, sweetie. I’ll be better. I’ll control myself.” Then I made those little quotation marks with my fingers and said, “I’ll get with ‘the program.’”

  Megan nodded gently.

  Nighttime had sneaked up on us. It was eight o’clock, and I was hungry.

  “You want to go get some food? We haven’t had anything since breakfast.”

  “Sure,” Megan said. It was not a good, solid “Sure,” but it was a yes nonetheless.

  “Should we text Sam and see if he wants to join us?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “There’s some important meeting of big shots that he has to go to. We’re on our own.”

  After consulting the concierge, we headed south to the Nob Hill Café. “Nearby and reasonable,” he had said. “You’ve sure got our profile,” I had answered.

  “Yes, I do,” said the concierge, and I realized he wasn’t joking.

  The night had that chill that everyone says is special to San Francisco. So we walked quickly.

  It was the usual crowd: tourists, natives, people in surgical masks, drones overhead, and, of course, our personal drone hovering over Megan and me. Megan never seemed to mind the surveillance. It always made me furi
ous.

  As one of the WALK signs changed to DON’T WALK, I said, “Let’s go. We can beat this light.”

  “No,” she said. “I hate it when you cross against the light.”

  “C’mon. I’m cold.”

  We started to cross. Our drone was keeping up with us. It swooped in low, very low, almost hitting us.

  Immediately there was the sound of a car horn. We saw a huge SUV, a Chevy Tahoe, a foot or two away from us. We managed to stop short and avoid it. The low-flying drone was not so lucky. The drone slammed mercilessly into the driver’s side of the SUV. The crash was deafening. The crash was hideous. The Tahoe crumbled into a broken smashed mess of steel. Immediately fire began raging under the hood of the vehicle. People gathered around the crash; others ran from the blaze. The fire spread almost instantly throughout the rest of the Tahoe. The battered and squashed drone was trapped in the rear part of the SUV, snug against the disfigured, bloody faces of two small children. The two kids in the back and what looked like the mom and dad in the front burned like fireplace logs, as if gasoline had been poured on them, and then—boom!—they ignited.

  Megan and I and four other people tried to get to the passengers, but the heat was unbearable, and it was clearly too late to help.

  We heard distant sirens and a few crazy-sounding old-fashioned fire engine bells. As we watched, we realized to our horror that there was another child in the way-back section. That kid was also on fire.

  A car marked SFPD arrived with three police officers inside. Then we heard an insistent, relentless beeping noise from above. Within a minute, two massive drones swept down to the scene of the accident. Each drone had mechanical claws dropping from its base down to the twisted, burning mess below. One drone clamped its claws onto the front of the SUV. The other drone performed the identical maneuver at the rear. Together they lifted the entire vehicle, including our personal drone—part of this awful piece of steel sculpture—into the dark city skies. It seemed like a strange mechanical ballet as the burning SUV was lifted up and up and up, looking from a distance like a flying piece of slowly dying charcoal.

  The few people who remained on the scene watched until the SUV disappeared. The three policemen told people to move on.

  I walked toward one of the cops.

  “I saw this all happen, Officer. I was even sort of involved. Let me—” I said.

  “Please move on, sir. It’s over.”

  “Jacob, please. Let’s go,” Megan shouted.

  “But—” I said.

  Suddenly there were the sounds you usually hear when a truck backs up—that irritating beep-beep-beep. Sure enough, the sound was coming from two trucks, but they weren’t backing up. They were driving straight down Mason Street very slowly. Each one looked like a very modernist marriage between a garbage truck and a sleek luxury bus. Big heavy steel scrapers—like enormous spatulas—were attached to their fronts. They gathered debris—scraps of metal, burned luggage, a Coca-Cola cooler—and then lifted it into construction bins attached to the trucks’ sides.

  Then it was over. Totally over.

  The people dispersed. The streets were clean. The trucks drove away. Five people had died brutally, yet it was as if nothing had happened.

  “I feel like I just stepped in and out of a nightmare,” I said to Megan.

  A lone policeman’s voice: “I thought I told you folks to move along.”

  We weren’t hungry anymore. We headed back to our hotel. A new drone—a replacement drone—was now assigned to follow us.

  “That was fast,” the concierge said. We said nothing.

  Back in our rooms, we immediately turned on our computers. Local websites? Nothing. National websites? Nothing. AOL? CNN? Nothing. We turned on the television. TV news? Nothing.

  The next morning the San Francisco Chronicle was delivered to our hotel room door. The Metro section? Nothing.

  Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. As if the accident had never happened.

  Chapter 39

  “I HAVEN’T heard a word about it,” Sam said.

  Megan, Sam, and I were on our way to the San Francisco airport. The taxi driver had barely closed the car trunk when I asked Sam if he’d known about the SUV accident the night before. He didn’t.

  “That’s unbelievable,” I replied.

  Megan gently but firmly disagreed with me.

  “C’mon, Jacob. It was pretty awful, yes, but not that newsworthy. I mean, it wasn’t 9/11,” she said. I was fairly outraged that Sam laughed at Megan’s uncharacteristically tasteless joke.

  The check-in machines spat out our tickets, and when I looked at mine it said SPEED-CHECK. I assumed that we all were going to go through speed-check, but it appears I was alone in receiving this convenience.

  “Well, aren’t you special?” Sam said with another laugh, and I headed toward the speed-check area with—okay, I admit it—a slightly smug farewell: “See you at the gate,” I said to Megan and her boss.

  Good luck turned into bad luck in approximately five seconds. The moment I showed my boarding pass to the guard, he asked me to step aside and join him at “the desk.” That desk turned out to be a small, cheap-looking card table parked in front of a metal door bearing the sign SECURITY: APPROVED PERSONNEL ONLY. A middle-aged woman wearing one of those uniforms that’s supposed to remind you of the police smiled at me and then spoke.

  “Were you in San Francisco for business or pleasure, Mr. Brandeis?”

  “Uh, both.”

  “What type of business was it?” she asked.

  “I work for the Store. They were having a national meeting.”

  She pushed a few buttons on her computer, scrolled down a few pages, and then spoke again.

  “I don’t have you listed at that meeting, sir. There’s a Megan Brandeis on the—”

  “She’s my wife,” I said. I glanced up and saw that Sam and Megan had already passed through “normal” security, but speed-check had me waiting. Then the security woman signaled to another agent, who was holding an electronic wand.

  “If you don’t mind, Mr. Brandeis, this officer is going to screen you electronically.”

  I did mind, of course, but this was no time to make a scene.

  The wanding procedure took less than fifteen seconds.

  “That’s fine, Mr. Brandeis,” the woman said. “Now we’d like to continue the screening privately. This officer from airport security would like you to accompany him through this door to an examination booth.”

  “What? Are you kidding me?” I said.

  “No, sir. I am not. It’s a normal procedure, for your own safety as well as everyone else’s. Just through this door behind me,” she said.

  “But why?”

  “It’s just a procedure, sir. If you care to continue with boarding, please cooperate.”

  “But why?” I asked again.

  “Sir, please,” she said. By this time the other agent had opened the SECURITY door. Before I walked through the door I looked out toward the area where Megan and Sam had been standing. After a few seconds I spotted them. Sam was talking on his cell phone. Megan was talking on hers.

  The agent holding the door open spoke for the first time.

  “We’re losing patience, sir. Please come with me.”

  Chapter 40

  SWEATING. PANTING. Dry-mouthed. That was me, the last passenger to board United Airlines flight 5217 from SFO to Omaha.

  My boarding pass was clenched between my teeth. My shirttail was flying like a miniskirt over my chinos. And I only hoped to God that I had remembered to put my laptop back in my carry-on after the twenty-minute security check.

  Immediately I ran into my traveling companions, Megan and Sam…in first class. To add insult to injury, they were both sipping Champagne.

  “We thought you missed the flight, man,” Sam said. “We were worried.”

  I couldn’t figure out whether he actually was worried or whether he simply was trying to sound worried.

  “What ha
ppened, Jacob?” Megan asked. She probably thought that I had done something to cause the delay.

  A flight attendant behind me said, “We’re ready for takeoff, sir. Please take your seat.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. I guess I was getting used to taking orders.

  “I upgraded Megan and me to first class,” Sam said. “But we’ll trade seats. You sit here with your wife. I don’t mind flying in the back.” Before I could protest his generous gesture he had grabbed my boarding pass and headed through the curtains to the back. I settled in next to Megan, and we both remained silent throughout the safety instruction video.

  Megan broke the silence only seconds after “…and we do hope you enjoy the flight.”

  “Jacob,” she said. “I was worried about you. So was Sam.”

  “Well, you couldn’t have been that worried. I saw you two on your cell phones,” I said, sounding a lot like a six-year-old.

  “We just assumed you had gone to the men’s room or gone to pick up a sandwich or something. Oh, Jacob,” she said, her eyes full of concern and her hands reaching to touch my shoulder and arm. “I feel terrible. What happened?”

  I was about to tell her when a voice came through the loudspeaker.

  “This is your captain, Brian Heller. Before takeoff we have some final luggage checking to take care of. It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes. Then we’ll be off to lovely Omaha, where the temperature is…sixty-three degrees. Thanks for your patience.”

  Almost immediately, two flight attendants appeared at my seat.

  “Mr. Brandeis?” the male attendant asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I understand that this is not your originally assigned seat.”

  More grief, I assumed.

  “Well, a friend of mine gave me his—”

  “Yes,” the woman attendant said. “No problem, Mr. Brandeis. However, the captain…” There was a pause. Then the male flight attendant chimed in.

  “The captain would like to examine your carry-on luggage, sir. Is this backpack the only luggage you brought aboard?” he asked as he lifted the backpack resting on my lap.

  “Well, yeah. But why does he need—I mean, I’ve never had this happen before.”