32. Juliette #2
I help her find a book with girl dragons - there are several excellent options, once you know where to look - and she runs back to her mother with it clutched to her chest like treasure.
Zachary appears at my elbow.
“Was that the girl from opening day?”
“The very same. She’s reading chapter books now.”
“They grow up fast.”
“They do.” I lean into him. “Did you carve that new star? The one with the 1 inside?”
“I might have.”
“When?”
“Last month. You were in Boston for that publisher meeting.”
“I was gone for two days.”
“It only took me one. I’m getting better.”
He says it with the quiet pride of a man reporting quarterly growth, and I look at his hands - boardroom hands, gone nicked and callused at the fingertips from a year of carving stars into oak for children he’ll never be thanked by - and I have to reorganize my face before Rosie sees it and starts charging admission.
I turn to face him, wrapping my arms around his waist. “You’re ridiculous.”
“I’m thorough. There’s a difference.”
“There really isn’t.”
He kisses my forehead, and over his shoulder I can see Rosie making exaggerated gagging faces at Walt.
“Get a room,” she calls. “Preferably one that isn’t my place of business.”
Walt looks up from the biography section. “Is that the anniversary?” he asks the room. “Is today the anniversary?”
“It’s the anniversary,” Rosie confirms.
“Then it’s a tie,” Walt announces, to no context whatsoever, and everyone who was at the chowder contest laughs, and everyone who wasn’t demands the story, and Helen begins telling it wrong with tremendous confidence.
“It’s my place of business,” I call back.
“Technically it’s our place of business. I have equity now.”
“You have two percent.”
“Two percent of a thriving bookshop.” She grins. “I’ll take it.”
Helen arrives at four with a pot pie nobody ordered, on the grounds that anniversaries are hungry work.
Jenny from the bed and breakfast comes for a paperback and stays an hour.
A postcard is tacked behind the register - Boston skyline, Marcy’s precise hand: The ledger better be in use.
He knows what happens if it isn’t. Congratulations on year one. -M
The island, it turns out, doesn’t do quiet celebrations. It just shows up, all day, in shifts, with food.
A card came at Christmas, for the record. Cream stock, engraved, Boston postmark. Compliments of the season. The shop is spoken of well. -E.D.
Eleven words, and she spelled the shop’s name correctly, and Zachary read it twice and put it in the drawer with a straight face and said, “For her, that’s a sonnet.” We’re calling it progress. We’re not calling it anything else.
***
That night, in our apartment above the shop, I watch him read.
He’s deep into a novel he’s been working through for weeks, his reading glasses sliding down his nose, his face soft in the lamplight. He looks happy. Settled. Home.
The lamp makes its small gold country at his end of the couch.
Downstairs, the shop settles - the building talks at night, beams and salt air negotiating, and I know every voice of it now.
My feet are in his lap. His free hand has been absently keeping charge of my ankle for an hour, thumb moving, a man holding on even in his reading.
I think about the first time I saw him read. Seven years ago, in a library, when he didn’t know I was watching. He’d been lost in the pages the way he’s lost in them now, unaware of anything except the words.
I’d fallen in love with him then, though I didn’t know it yet.
I’m still falling.
“You’ve gone quiet,” he says without looking up.
“I’m admiring.”
“You’re planning something. I can tell by the way you’re breathing.”
He marks his page with his thumb and gives me his full attention - the research-desk attention, seven years old and still the most flattering thing I’ve ever been handed - and waits.
“I breathe normally.”
“Not when you’re planning.” He sets down the book and looks at me. “What is it?”
I reach under my pillow and pull out the bookmark I made this afternoon.
Stay, the first one said.
Staying, the second one answered.
This one has one word, too.
Still.
I hand it to him.
He reads it. His eyes go wet.
“Still,” he says quietly.
He turns the bookmark once in his fingers, careful of the ribbon, and sets it on the nightstand propped against the lamp where he’ll see it first thing - filed in the morning-light section, where the important inventory goes.
“Still.”
“Even after everything?”
“You know the collection’s uneven now,” he says, turning the bookmark over. “Stay, Staying, Still. Three of yours to - what, several hundred of mine? The shoebox is full. There’s a second shoebox.”
“It’s not a competition.”
“Everything’s a competition.”
“Then you’re winning.” I settle into his side, into the seventh year, into the apartment above the shop with the good light. “Write that down somewhere.”
“I don’t need to.” He reaches over and turns off the lamp. “You’ll leave me a note about it in the morning.”
“Especially after everything.”
He pulls me close, the bookmark pressed between us, and I let myself be held by the man who learned to say my name.
We’re still here.
We’re still choosing.
We’re still us.
THE END