The Merchant of Venice Beach Read Online Free Page A

numbers, but as far as Suzanna could tell, none of his classes inspired him to thin out the rows upon rows of books.
“I’m not surprised Eric is going to business school,” Suzanna’s mother had said during one of their lengthy phone calls. “He’s always been the mature one.”
Eric had always been the most practical of them all—which wasn’t saying much—but Suzanna sometimes thought that he got stuck with the role of “the mature one” through his looks as much as his demeanor. At five-feet-ten, with perfect posture and soulful eyes, he just gave off the vibe that he could take care of things.
Suzanna sort of flitted from establishment to establishment. She referred to herself as the “ing” specialist: waitressing, hostessing, ordering or stacking books. If the word had “ing” in it, she probably was in charge of it.
Lately, Suzanna found her temper getting short with Fernando and Eric for no apparent reason. Everything the men did seemed to drive her to distraction. She chided herself when she thought about how much effort the guys had put into making the enterprise a success. Fernando was forever trying new recipes and poor Eric was like a man on a mission, attacking the mildew that was always threatening the books.
Fernando was the darling of the neighborhood and Eric breathed customer service. If she were working in the nook and a customer were looking for a particular book the store didn’t have, Suzanna would shake her head sadly and say they didn’t carry that particular tome. Eric, on the other hand, would offer to track down the title, no matter how obscure. He would jump on the computer and spend hours searching for a book that would probably turn only a dollar or two of profit. Whenever Suzanna mentioned this, Eric said that that was beside the point.
They stood shoulder to shoulder making the Bun a success.
“We stick together . . . I’ll say that much for us!” Suzanna would often say to herself. But by the end of any given day, she was totally exasperated with them. She remembered overhearing a woman telling Fernando that she was falling out of love with her husband and that she felt powerless to stop the slow ebb of affection. He wasn’t doing anything wrong or even doing anything different. There had just been some subtle shift in her feelings, and there didn’t seem to be anyway to set things back the way they had been.
“I want to stab him with a fork when I hear him chewing,” the woman almost wailed. “Everything about him drives me nuts, and it isn’t his fault.”
Suzanna had strained to hear Fernando’s response, but couldn’t make out what he said. She wanted to heed his advice, whatever it was.
Because that’s the way she was feeling about her two best friends. They were driving her nuts, and yet she couldn’t put her finger on why.
The three of them had known each other since high school, in Napa Valley. That was in the mid-nineties, when Napa was just becoming the zoo it is today.
“You know that traffic and noise pollution have gotten out of hand when you move to Los Angeles to get away from it all,” Eric would tell customers as he regaled them with story of “the three musketeers.”
The fact that Suzanna was inseparable from her two male counterparts caused some buzz, she knew. The fact that Fernando was gay didn’t seem to stop the guesswork. In fact, it probably added to it. Were Eric and Fernando a pair? Suzanna and Eric? It didn’t really bother any of them. Speculation, as Fernando would say, was probably good for business.
Suzanna and Eric always joked that they had a When Harry Met Sally relationship—only without the sex.
“We have all the good things about marriage,” Eric would say, throwing an arm around her, “without the great things about marriage.”
Haha.
After they had graduated from high school, Fernando, Eric, and Suzanna each had a vague idea that they might find their collective self in L. A. , so they just loaded up a U-Haul and