Friends and Strangers - J. Courtney Sullivan Page 0,18

that was normal. George, in his newfound zeal, was fond of saying, “People should be doing something and most of them aren’t.” It was impossible not to feel like he was referring, at least in part, to them.

Now George repeated himself. “How about it, Lizzy? The Hollow Tree: An Exposé of American Greed—it sounds big to me.”

“Maybe you’re right, George,” she said. “It could be a big book.”

“She’s humoring me, but I’ll take it,” George said.

“I think you should write it,” Elisabeth said. “It’s your idea.”

“I’m not a writer,” he said. “You are. Here’s a whole chapter for you. ‘Commerce: The End of the Mom-and-Pop Shop.’ You know the Dead Mall over in Dexter?”

Elisabeth shook her head.

“It’s this enormous shopping center, maybe what, fifteen minutes from here? Andrew and his buddies hung out there all the time in high school. It’s officially called the Shops at Evergreen Plaza. Years ago, that place was considered the height of sophistication. Now it’s mostly empty.”

No one replied, but George went on, undeterred.

“I got to thinking about that because, at my discussion group on Sunday, we had a presentation from Hal Donahue, who owns the shoe store downtown. They’re going out of business after sixty years. He told us that a while back, customers started coming in, having him get three or four pairs of shoes for them, or their kids, to try on. Then right in front of Hal, they’d go on their phones to see if they could find them cheaper online. You know what Hal said? He said, ‘Good luck to them. Is Amazon going to sponsor a Little League team and a parade float on the Fourth of July?’ Great question, I thought. People can’t live without all that.”

“We couldn’t live without Amazon,” Andrew said.

Elisabeth shot him a look. Why?

Andrew never would have admitted it to any of their friends back in Brooklyn. Everyone claimed to be done with Amazon; you had to. Though Elisabeth had seen the packages on doorsteps all over their old neighborhood every evening when she arrived home from work.

“What do you buy there?” George said now.

“Everything,” Andrew said. “Mostly stuff for the baby. We have a recurring order set up for diapers, wipes, formula. Free delivery. You should try it. It’s so much more convenient than driving to the store, only to find that half the time they don’t even have what you need.”

“You choose convenience at the expense of humanity,” George said.

Faye clucked her tongue at him.

Andrew shrugged. “I’ll worry about humanity once my kid starts sleeping through the night.”

A low blow, Elisabeth thought, especially considering Andrew never got up in the middle of the night. She gave George an encouraging smile.

“Tell Lizzy about the toaster,” he said to Faye.

“What about it?”

“This morning, our new toaster crapped out for no reason,” George said. “We bought it a month ago. The one we got rid of was a wedding gift. It still worked fine. But there’s no one we can complain to. The store says it’s the manufacturer’s problem. The manufacturer doesn’t answer the phone. You go around in circles until you give up.” He smacked his hand against the table for emphasis. “Boom. The Hollow Tree.”

“They don’t make ’em like they used to,” Andrew said.

“I know you’re making fun of me, but that statement is one hundred percent correct. The world has gone to shit,” George said. “And yet most people are too comfortable to care. We used to think Big Brother would come along and steal everything from us against our will. But now we just hand it to him with a smile.”

“You sound like the college kids at my work,” Andrew said.

“Good,” George said. “I’m glad the young people get it. Gives me hope. They’re the ones who will suffer the most if things don’t change.”

“They’re self-identified socialists,” Andrew said.

George shrugged.

Looked at one way, he was practically a socialist himself these days. He wanted to dismantle the evils of capitalism. To halt progress in its tracks so that everyone might be equal. Looked at another way, he was almost conservative. George was the only person Elisabeth knew who wasn’t in the least bit excited about Obama.

“He keeps saying small business, that’s the answer,” George had said recently. “How’d that work out for me, huh? Or for you, Lizzy, with your unpaid maternity leave. It’s basically this administration’s way of saying, without saying it, that none of the real jobs are coming back—manufacturing in this country is dead—so you’d better invent