prologue

MIMI THE BOOKSELLER

 

 

 

We are defined by the moods and whims of a wild tidal river surrounding our small town, cradling us in its curved basin. We don’t shape it; it shapes us. The gray-blue water brings us what it will and only when it desires. One sweltering, languid afternoon as I shelved dusty paperbacks, I looked up to see a ghost. The girl was the spitting image of a woman I knew years ago—too many summers ago to count. It could have been another whim of the river.

Just when it seemed things were settled and placid in Watersend, South Carolina, in breezed the daughter of a Summer Sister. I should have been expecting her because of course I’d heard that Bonny Blankenship had returned to the old Moreland family house. It’s that kind of town; I hear everything. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a bit of a shock seeing her walk through my door.

A young girl, I guessed on the brink of her twenties, stood in my bookshop, a daughter of the past who walked in all wide-eyed and exhaling like she’d finally found what she was looking for. It was a look I knew well. So glad to be in a cozy bookshop, in air-conditioned comfort, surrounded by stories, and to find that in the chaos of the world there was still a place like this. A place where books were piled to the ceiling and tables were crowded with the paraphernalia of reading: bookmarks, reading lights, stationery, pens and framed quotes to inspire. I’m no dummy. I keep the air conditioner set to frigid. I know I’m luring customers and some might call it bribery, but whatever works, works. I lost my store once, and now that I have it again, I’ll do pretty much anything to keep it alive.

Her blond ponytail pulled at the skin around her heart-shaped face, moist at the hairline and cheeks flushed pink. Her round eyes, almost disproportionate to her other tiny features, were wide open to wonder as she looked around the store. She possessed an ephemeral quality one can’t buy with plastic surgery or proper training. Her mother had been the same, almost floating through childhood with her best friend, Lainey. They came in here for the same reasons—cold air and escape. Two little girls who were so close it seemed that they’d been sewn together by the seams of their flowered sundresses. History, they say, repeats itself. I surely hoped not.

Was she like her mother, Bonny, all fire and no ice? Older than her years and too young to know better is how I once described her to a customer. The years blended together, but those three summers in the late 1970s stood out like a beacon in the fog of my memory.

I welcomed this ghost into the store but then walked away, and allowed her to roam at her leisure. Thirty minutes later, she chose a poetry book and set it on the counter. I approached her with a smile. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

She held a cell phone in her hand, and it appeared permanently attached, just as it did to all the young ones who came in here. Cells are an appendage now, I’d told my book club.

“I did find exactly what I was looking for. This is a great bookshop.” The girl sounded like her mother, too. A certain lilt to her voice like she was about to break into song and then changed her mind. How do I remember all these small details from so long ago when I can’t remember where I put my car keys or glasses? I know why, of course—for reasons I’ve never told a soul.

“Thank you. I’m Mimi. The owner of this messy store. Welcome. Are you visiting Watersend?” I kept my voice light, but I wasn’t much good at pretending.

“Yes,” the girl said. “I’m here on vacation.” She caught my gaze. It took my breath away; so familiar and yet completely foreign. “My name’s Piper,” she said and brushed at a wayward hair falling into her eyes.

“Well, Piper. I’m glad to meet you. I hope you’ll come back while you’re in town.”

“Oh, I will,” she said. “I’m glad I found this on my first day.”

“Me, too. And if you’re here for the summer, there are plenty of summer book clubs that you can join.” I handed her a sheet of paper that listed the clubs and dates and times. “There’s even a poetry one.”

“Thanks,” Piper said. “I might stop by. But I’m going to be . . . busy.”

“Well, busy is something for sure,” I said.

Piper laughed, but it sounded rusty with disuse. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“I mean, busy is something to be but maybe not the best thing to be?” I took off my glasses and they dangled from the purple string that held them there so I wouldn’t lose them. I smiled to let her know that my advice was harmless, just an old woman rambling along. I didn’t want to scare her off. I rang up the book and placed it in a brown paper bag with our book logo stamped onto it with my favorite quote, “Books may well be the only true magic. Alice Hoffman.” And then handed it to Piper.

She smiled in a sad way. I wanted to tell her how much she looked like her mother, but she didn’t seem to be the kind of young woman who would want to hear such a thing. There she was trying to carve out her own place in the world with her little nose stud, like a sparkling freckle, and black eyeliner smudged around her blue eyes like dark curtains.

“Well. Anyhow, Watersend is a great place to be for the summer. I think you’ll like it. What brings you?” I already knew the answer: the river. But she would believe it was her mother, or the house.

Piper exhaled and rolled her eyes in that perfect way all teenagers do. “I’m here to help my mom and babysit her best friend’s kids. They used to spend their summers here and my mom fixed the old house and . . .” She trailed off like she’d forgotten why she’d arrived at all.

“That sounds like a better job than most get in the summer,” I said, straightening some papers on the counter that didn’t need straightening.

“You’re probably right,” Piper said, “but I just didn’t imagine spending my first college summer with my mom and her friend and little kids.”

“You say they’ve been here before. Do I know them?” I looked away with my false questions, feeling slightly ashamed for prodding into what I already knew.

“I don’t know. Maybe. My mom is Bonny. Her maiden name was Moreland. Her friend is Lainey.”

“The Summer Sisters.” I smiled. “For gravy’s sake, who could forget them?”

“You know them?” Piper leaned forward conspiratorially. “And isn’t that the stupidest name? Summer Sisters.”

“Not such a bad name if you knew them then.”

“It sounds ridiculous to me.”

“Ah. I’m sure it does.”

She nodded, this young girl, and she looked at me the way the young can and do when the aged baffle them, when they don’t believe that they will ever be the older ones.

“Well, least tell your mother I said hello.”

“I will.” Piper held up her book, now wrapped in a paper bag. “And thanks for this.”

“You’re welcome. Come anytime and make your escape.”

I sidled out from around the counter and walked Piper to the front of the store, struggling for something to say, anything. But nothing seemed right. She hesitated at the entrance and then asked, “Did they have other friends or was it just the two of them?”

“I forget, dear. It was so, so long ago.”

Piper pushed open the door and let herself out without another word.

Now, everyone knows I believe in stories being told. Why else would I own a bookshop? I also know that some stories should stay crouched in the dusty corners of the past. It had been a record-breaking hot summer the last time those Summer Sisters were here with their boozy, somnolent parents who paid the children no mind, almost forty years ago now. The town had loved those girls: silly and full of sass, buzzing around town pretending to be Nancy Drew, solving mysteries that should have never been solved.

That night, at our monthly poker game over bourbon and pound cake with Loretta and Ella and my beau, Harrington, I would say, “You will not believe who walked into the store today.” And they would guess until they couldn’t anymore and I would say, “A Summer Sister’s daughter.”

I walked outside and watched Piper as she headed toward the market, her poetry book in a paper bag and dragging one of those wagons that announces, “I’m a vacationer”: rolling carts that people tug around full of towels and toys, groceries and kids.

Heat wavered off the brick sidewalk like Watersend was one large coffee mug. Posters hung in store windows to announce the summer concert series on the square, and the new market awning was bright yellow and garish against a sky where gray clouds gathered into thunderheads. But instead of a young girl with a cell phone and a nose stud, I saw her mother, Bonny, a wildflower of a child, walking along the same street sure as punch that nothing could ever go wrong.

Overhead, clouds gathered into an afternoon congregation—a reminder that once the past begins to nudge itself into the present, the future changes. Soon the thunder would begin and yes, indeed, a summer storm was coming.