I tapped the icon and opened the app. The Dow Jones average appeared. I had no idea what the numbers meant, but I could see they were fluctuating. 14,720 rose to 14,728, then dropped to 14,704, then bumped up to 14,716. Mr. Harrigan’s eyes widened. His mouth dropped open. It was as if someone had hit him with a juju stick. He took the phone and held it close to his face. Then he looked at me.
“Are these numbers in real time?”
“Yes,” I said. “Well, I guess they might be a minute or two behind, I don’t know for sure. The phone’s pulling them in from the new phone tower in Motton. We’re lucky to have one so close.”
He leaned forward. A reluctant smile touched the corners of his mouth. “I’ll be damned. It’s like the stock tickers magnates used to have in their own homes.”
“Oh, way better than that,” I said. “Tickers sometimes ran hours behind. My dad said that just last night. He’s fascinated with this stock market thingy, he’s always taking my phone to look. He said one of the reasons the stock market tanked so bad back in 1929 was because the more people traded, the farther behind the tickers got.”
“He’s right,” Mr. Harrigan said. “Things had gone too far before anyone could put on the brakes. Of course, something like this might actually accelerate a sell-off. It’s hard to tell because the technology is still so new.”
I waited. I wanted to tell him some more, sell him on it—I was just a kid, after all—but something told me waiting was the right way to go. He continued to watch the miniscule gyrations of the Dow Jones. He was getting an education right in front of my eyes.
“But,” he said, still staring.
“But what, Mr. Harrigan?”
“In the hands of someone who actually knows the market, something like this could . . . probably already does . . .” He trailed off, thinking. Then he said, “I should have known about this. Being retired is no excuse.”
“Here’s the other thing,” I said, too impatient to wait any longer. “You know all the magazines you get? Newsweek and Financial Times and Fords?”
“Forbes,” he said, still watching the screen. He reminded me of me at four, studying the Magic 8 Ball I’d gotten for my birthday.
“Yeah, that one. Can I have the phone for a minute?”
He handed it over rather reluctantly, and I was pretty sure I had him after all. I was glad, but I also felt a little ashamed of myself. Like a guy who’s just clonked a tame squirrel on the head when it came up to take a nut out of his hand.
I opened Safari. It was a lot more primitive than it is today, but it worked just fine. I poked Wall Street Journal into the Google search field, and after a few seconds, the front page opened up. One of the headlines read COFFEE COW ANNOUNCES CLOSINGS. I showed it to him.
He stared, then took the newspaper from the table beside the easy chair where I’d put his mail when I came in. He looked at the front page. “That isn’t here,” he said.
“Because it’s yesterday’s,” I said. I always got the mail out of his box when I came up, and the Journal was always wrapped around the other stuff and held with a rubber band. “You get it a day late. Everybody does.” And during the holiday season it came two days late, sometimes three. I didn’t need to tell him this; he grumbled about it constantly during November and December.
“This is today’s?” he asked, looking at the screen. Then, checking the date at the top: “It is!”
“Sure,” I said. “Fresh news instead of stale, right?”
“According to this, there’s a map of the closing sites. Can you show me how to get it?” He sounded positively greedy. I was a little scared. He had mentioned Scrooge and Marley; I felt like Mickey Mouse in Fantasia, using a spell he didn’t really understand to wake up the brooms.
“You can do it yourself. Just brush the screen with your finger, like this.”
I showed him. At first he brushed too hard and went too far, but he got the knack of it after that. Faster than my dad, actually. He found the right page. “Look at that,” he marveled. “Six hundred stores! You see what I was telling you about the fragility of the . . .” He trailed off, staring at