CHAPTER 23 THE BOOK NOBODY BOUGHT
The book sat in the front display for six weeks.
Nobody bought it.
It was a slim local memoir titled A Porch Facing East, written by eighty-one-year-old Samuel Pike, who had printed two hundred copies at his own expense.
Clara had agreed to carry twenty.
She had sold none.
Samuel came in every Thursday and pretended not to check the display.
On the seventh Thursday, he said, “You can send them back.”
Clara looked at him.
“Do you want them back?”
“No sense taking up space.”
“Sit down.”
He obeyed cautiously.
Clara had read the book.
It was not polished.
It was also beautiful in places: stories about forty-eight years of marriage, raising daughters, losing a son, farming land that had belonged to his grandfather, and learning to pray after years of believing prayer was for people with fewer practical skills.
“Would you do a reading?” Clara asked.
Samuel looked alarmed.
“No.”
“Good. We’ll schedule it for January.”
“I said no.”
“I heard you.”
“You’re like June.”
“That accusation is becoming common.”
The reading drew thirty-two people.
Samuel stood at the front of the reading room with shaking hands.
He read a chapter about his wife, Ellen, planting tomatoes every spring even after the doctor told her she had only months to live.
By the end, half the room was crying.
Samuel sold seventeen books.
Clara bought the eighteenth.
Afterward, he signed it:
For Clara, who knew a book could need a reader before a reader knew he needed the book.
Clara placed the copy in the glass cabinet beside June’s first editions.
Eli found it there that evening.
“Collectible?”
“To me.”
He read the inscription.
“Good day?”
“Very.”
Clara closed the cabinet.
“I’ve been thinking about starting an editing service through the shop.”
“For local writers?”
“Local and remote. Manuscript evaluation, copy editing, maybe workshops.”
“You wanted novels.”
She smiled.
“Yes.”
“So do it.”
“That simple?”
“No. But the decision can be.”
Clara looked around.
A bookstore.
Editing.
Community.
A life she had never planned in exactly this form.
“I think I will.”
Eli kissed her.
“Good.”
Samuel’s book remained in the cabinet.
Not because it was expensive.
Because worth and price had finally become two different columns in Clara’s mind.