Chapter Thirty-Eight

A JOLLY ACCOUNTANT. What were the odds? The man chuckled and guffawed all the way through his unintelligible explanation of the contract he was presenting to Nan.

She had heard a big number. That was about as much as her brain could process.

“What’s this again?” She pointed to the number.

“Your salary as the bookstore manager.”

That can’t be right. It’s four times the salary I’m making now. I could help Jeremy pay for college. I could take so many trips. I could actually save money so that my eighty-year-old future self won’t go hungry or without heat.

He explained that Chuck wanted to put her in the strongest possible financial position. So he would remain the bookstore owner indefinitely and keep all the risks of running an independent small bookstore, but Nan would own the entire building outright. The building was the valuable asset. The big salary was to ensure the taxes and upkeep were not a burden. The apartment on the second floor was all hers too. She could live in it rent free or rent it out. If she rented the apartment out, she kept the proceeds. Store profits would also be hers, of course. Chuck would pay for all the necessary renovations and would lease the store from her at fair market prices, so she’d always have an income stream no matter how the store did.

“Why would he do that? Lease his own building back. It’s his building.” She would never understand high finance.

“He’s a very generous man. He has a lot of money to give. He does this kind of stuff all the time. I’m not allowed to divulge specifics, but I can tell you he’s propped up many of the small businesses around here, no strings attached. I’m the luckiest accountant alive to work with him.” He chortled at Nan.

She was completely overwhelmed. It was all too much to absorb. She had lived paycheck to paycheck for thirty years. Any little luxury she had, like a few days in Provincetown, went on a credit card that she struggled to pay off for the rest of the year. Now Chuck wanted to give her a building, a huge salary, profits from a business, and a rent-free apartment. It sounded stone-cold crazy to her.

“No pressure of course,” Chuck said afterward. “I know it’s a big decision. So you can let me know by tomorrow.” He chuckled at the shock on her face.

“Really, when?”

“Take all the time you need.” He patted her hand. “Day after tomorrow would be fine.”

“You think you’re funny?”

Then calm and philosophical Chuck, her steadiest, sweetest friend, leapt up and danced what she could only call jetés and pirouettes around the old shop, pointing to the corners, and naming them as he twirled by: classics corner, local history there, bestsellers right up front, philosophy there, cookbooks corner, children’s corner there.

“There are only four corners, man. You just named six.” She poked him as he swooshed by.

The joy on his face. He had been through so much pain with his daughter’s addiction; he deserved to enjoy every exuberant move, every shining, hopeful vision.

*

NAN DIDN’T TELL Immaculata any of this. She wasn’t in the mood to hear more opinions, and that woman was full of them. She was also full of surprises.

“I’m kicking you out,” Immaculata announced.

“What in the world are you talking about?” Nan had to reel herself back in from the painful place she’d been in her head, the place where she worried about her choice, feared both making the biggest mistake of her life and missing the biggest opportunity of her life.

She felt like a woman in a horror movie with viewers screaming Don’t go through that door at her, but which door was the door to keep shut and which one was the one to fling open?

“Annunciata needs to move in with me. She don’t want to live with her kids; they drive her crazy. So I’m kicking you out so she can have your apartment. It’s better for you anyway. You don’t want to hang around with old ladies. You’re young.”

“How soon?” Nan had no lease, no leg to stand on.

“Not right away. She has to sell her house and get rid of a bunch of stuff.”

The universe was trying to tell Nan something. But what?

“Don’t worry. You can come over to dinner every night if you want,” Immaculata said.

Like that’s all I’m worried about.

Well. I will miss that.

*

AFTER MAIN STREET closed down for the night, the old shoe repair shop was a haunted place. Nan didn’t want anyone passing by to see her there, so she sat on the floor with her flashlight and hoped no mice would run over her lap.

She let herself breathe the place in. The floors creaked and popped. The faint animal smell of old leather lingered. The cast iron radiators gurgled like a stomach full of good food.

How would they get enough bookshelves in here, with all those radiators taking up half the wall space? If she were in charge, she wouldn’t allow them to be removed to make more room, absolutely not. They were beautiful useful objects, pleasingly curved warmth-givers. She believed in old things that still worked great.

Wait, was that herself she was talking about or the radiators?

No games, she decided. No toys. No crafts. No library-scented candles. No socks with quotations on them. No T-shirts. Definitely no story time corner. The bookstore was not going to compete with the library story time right down the street. No coffee. There was a wonderful coffee shop right across the street. She wasn’t going to put them out of business.

Yes to a custom Pinetree Bookstore mug though. She loved bookstore mugs, especially the ones in classic diner shapes. And matching bookmarks—that would be appropriate.

But if she ran the bookstore, visitors would smell books. They would be surrounded by books, and they would absolutely know they were in an actual store full of books and mainly books, without a doubt. A kind of book heaven.

This was still really Chuck’s dream though. Living in the library world had been the closest thing to a dream she’d had. But she’d been in that world so long it now felt like a recurring dream, the kind that when she woke up, she’d say, “I had that dream again,” and it was always the same, with small variations.

Nan often dreamed of having to take care of babies, startling dreams where no one else was feeding the baby and she had to, no one else was saving the baby from the speeding car and she had to, no one else was rescuing the baby from the raging fire so she had to. According to the dream theory books she pored over, looking for answers, she was actually the baby, saving herself over and over again. She was the helpless and the helper, the adult and the baby, all in one. She hated that recurring dream; it was exhausting to be all things to herself.

She shone the flashlight slowly around the store one last time, turning it into a searchlight. She was searching for a sign.

*

“YOU HAVE A visitor,” Trixie announced, standing in Nan’s office doorway first thing the following morning.

Nan pointed to the phone she was holding up to her ear, indicating that she was in the middle of a call.

“No, you don’t have to call anybody. You have an actual visitor here now. To see you,” Trixie repeated.

Nan sighed, asked her caller if she could call back later, and acquiesced. Trixie was not going to let up until that visitor was admitted that very second; she could tell. What a one-track mind.

Sophia Sardone walked in, bringing with her a faint scent of lemons and flowers. Wow, she smelled good. Wow, she looked good. Nan had often thought about her since meeting her at Joe’s funeral. But she could never figure out how to bump into a funeral home director casually. Go browse her casket selection? Go to random funerals just to catch a glimpse of her?

She looked a little nervous. Nan wondered why.

“I wanted to thank you, to tell you that you changed my daughter’s life,” Sophia began, leaning in.

Oh. She has a daughter. Probably married. To a man.

“She went to your glassblowing program. They picked her to blow a glass ornament in front of the crowd. She came home a completely different person. Now she wants to be an artist. She’s determined to be one, in fact. I’ve never seen her passionate about anything like this. She’s studying art books; she’s been back to the glass museum five times so far; she found an art class; and most of all, she is deliriously happy. She had been terribly sad about my divorce.”

Divorce. Ding, ding, ding.

When the moment expanded to Sophia’s bashful confession that she’d been angling to meet Nan, hoping not only to thank her but also to ask her out on an honest-to-god date, Nan felt herself jump off the ground for an instant, levitated by joy.

She had the crazy notion Joe had sent Sophia here and pictured Joe grinning at her, giving her his thumbs-up, go-ahead signal. That man knew what it was to enjoy a moment fully. That man knew what it was to find love.

*

FOR THEIR FIRST date, they went out to dinner at a Japanese restaurant a few towns away that Sophia suggested. Nan’s avocado sushi fell apart as usual, her ineptitude with chopsticks the same as always. Why did she even try to use them? How in the world did Sophia pull that off, the elegant swooping in and capturing those tiny little strands of rice? It must be that her beautiful long fingers worked better for chopsticks than Nan’s stubby little ones. Sophia saw her difficulties and without remarking on it or slowing down the flow of words between them, gestured to the server for a fork.

They talked about the library; for Nan, it was rare that people talked to a librarian without feeling they had to boast how long it had been since they’d been in a library or apologize for their reading tastes. Did people feel compelled to confess to hair stylists at a party how long it had been since their last haircut or dye job? She didn’t think so.

So why did people feel the need to immediately announce their reading proclivities to librarians (who hadn’t asked)? She had heard it all: I don’t read. I only read fantasy. I never read novels. I only read military history. I only read magazines. I haven’t read a book since high school.

It was genuinely funny to Nan. She never had any kind of response to make. Should she absolve them when they confessed, as if she were a priest? Assign them to read outside their chosen categories and limits? Go forth and sin no more. For your penance, read the top ten Booker Prize nominees in literary fiction. For your penance, read a poem a night for an entire year.

Sophia read in bed every night (Nan shivered at the image). “Whatever catches my eye, I’m eclectic that way,” she said. “I browse in bookstores in Philly and New York or wherever I’m traveling, always have a stack waiting, but I don’t rush through books. I take my time.”

Nan didn’t share the bookstore offer with her. That felt like too much, too soon. She wanted to ease into this as if she were sliding into a warm bath. She wanted to get to know Sophia little by little, to prolong the pleasure. She wanted Sophia to know her deeply, and that took time.

Everything Sophia said landed in Nan with a warm bump. Not a fireworks explosion, but a lovely simmer. Sophia was a steady flashing green light of a woman. It was so basic; Nan had learned in kindergarten that green meant go, red meant stop. But her whole life until now, she had ignored the red lights of the women in her past, hoping they would magically turn green. Even at fifty years old, when T came along flashing FUN but with huge red lights surrounding it, Nan had blithely followed the fun and ignored the inevitable disappointment ahead.

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time, Maya Angelou said, that most wise and wondrous writer. Nan was embarrassed at how long it had taken her to get it, when all she had to do was search out the green lights and go, go, go.

They talked about the rivalry, dating back decades, between Sophia’s funeral home and Bongiovani’s. “The truth is, there’s plenty of business to go around.” She laughed. “We’re good friends; we help each other out. But people enjoy a good drama, a story of who undercut who, who beat out the other.”

The dinner lasted a long time. When Nan kissed her goodnight and went home, all she could think about was kissing her again and again for a very long time. Soon, she hoped.