Chapter 3
Marty had the first box open before the coffee finished brewing.
He liked this part best. The shop to himself, the harbor going gray to gold through the front windows, nobody yet wanting anything from him.
Just the box cutter, the cardboard, and the smell of new paper, which was a better smell than most people gave it credit for.
He slid the blade under the tape and folded the flaps back.
Literary fiction on top, the way he'd ordered it.
A new translation of a Hungarian novelist nobody on this stretch of coast had heard of.
Two debut story collections with quiet covers.
A slim book about grief he'd read one review of and ordered a single copy of.
He'd probably end up keeping it for himself.
Underneath, the local history. A reprint of a Gulf shipwreck survey. A thin volume on Florida lighthouse architecture. He'd ordered three of those and knew, even now, sliding them out, that he'd be lucky to move one.
"Optimistic," he told the box.
The box didn't answer. Boxes rarely did, which was one of the things he liked about them.
He'd gotten into the habit of talking to the shop in the mornings.
To the boxes, the shelves, and the register that stuck.
It wasn't a worrying sort of habit. A man who lived alone either talked to his rooms or went strange in the quiet, and Marty had decided, years ago, which of the two he could live with.
He carried the lighthouse books to the local-interest shelf near the front.
He slotted them in spine-out, where a person might actually see them.
Tides & Tales had good bones. High tin ceiling, tall windows facing the water, a back room full of somebody else's abandoned rare collection that he'd spent years tending and loving. He pushed his glasses up onto his forehead to read a spine and left them there.
He was halfway through the story collections when the door opened and Hal Gardner walked in.
"Morning, Marty."
"Hal." Marty didn't look up from the shelf. "You're early."
"Couldn't sleep. Knees." Hal drifted toward the counter the way he always did, hands in his pockets, a retired man with a morning to spend and nowhere it needed spending. "You get the new Maxwell in?"
"The new what?"
"Maxwell. F. L. Maxwell. The mystery fella.
Hank Carson books." Hal said it slowly, like Marty might be hard of hearing instead of just willfully ignorant.
"I need that last one. Donna's got me hooked.
Fifteen of 'em and I've read every one but the last one.
It's been out a while. I'm hoping he'll put out another one soon. "
"I don't carry Maxwell."
"You don't carry much, if you ask me."
"I carry what's worth carrying." Marty set down the story collection and turned around.
His glasses were still up on his forehead.
He reached up, found them, and brought them down with the air of a man who'd misplaced something he'd been wearing the whole time.
"I can order you something with a little more under the hood.
There's a Spanish detective novel that just came out.
Does everything Maxwell does and means it. "
"I don't want it to mean anything. I want to find out who killed the guy in the alley." Hal grinned. "That's the whole appeal, Marty. You sit down, you turn the pages, and the smart detective sorts it out. The world makes sense for three hundred pages. You should try it sometime."
"I've tried it."
"You've sniffed at it."
That was fair. Not that Marty intended to say so. "Commercial fiction is built to be forgotten. That's the design. You consume it, you forget it, and you buy the next one. Very efficient machine." He shrugged. "I'd rather sell a man a book he remembers in twenty years."
"I'm seventy-three. I don't buy green bananas, and I sure don't buy books for twenty years from now." Hal thumped the counter, but it was a friendly thump. "Order me the Maxwell. Donna'll have my hide if I come home with a Spanish detective who means things."
"Donna has better taste than you do. Why isn't she picking the books?"
"Because she's got me trained to fetch." Hal spread his hands, helpless and pleased about it. "Forty-one years. You'd be amazed what a man'll fetch."
Marty wrote it on the pad by the register. Hal was a regular, and the shop did not, in fact, have the luxury of turning away a sale on principle. "A few days. Week at the most."
"You're a good man under all that snobbery."
"I'm a terrible man. It's the only thing keeping the lights on." He tore off the slip. "Tell Donna I said hello."
Hal was still chuckling as he walked out the door.
Marty stood a moment in the quiet he'd gotten back. He looked at the order slip, at the name printed in his own ink-smudged hand. F. L. Maxwell. Fifteen books. A devoted reader who couldn't sleep for his knees and came down to a failing bookshop early to make sure he had all the books.
And here Marty was, acting like it was a problem to order it.
He shook his head at himself and slid the slip under the register clip. Snobbery was a luxury too, when a man thought about it. Maybe he couldn't afford that anymore either.
He headed to the back office. The column was due Thursday. He'd left it half-finished, four hundred words on a forgotten Florida poet. The Beacon would run it on page six, between the tide chart and the church suppers. Nobody read it. Well, Hal read it. Hal read everything, then came in and argued.
Marty had started writing the thing eight years ago as a favor to the editor.
He'd kept writing it for a smaller reason.
It was the only place left where he got to make the case for the books he loved.
Four hundred words, once a week, into the silence.
He'd finish it tonight. Or he wouldn't, and he'd finish it Wednesday, and tell himself Wednesday had been the plan all along.
Winnie came in on the back of a warm gust off the water. She had a foil-covered plate in both hands. "You left your door propped open," she said. "Anybody could wander in."
"That's generally the idea with a shop."
"Don't be smart. I brought you sugar cookies." She set the plate on the counter and peeled the foil back partway. The smell of them went straight past his defenses, butter and vanilla with a sugar crust on top. "Made a double batch. You look like you're not eating."
"I eat."
"You eat crackers over the sink, Martin. That's not eating, that's grazing." She slid the plate an inch closer to him. "Take two. You'll hurt my feelings."
He took one and ate half of it. It was very good. It was always going to be very good. Winnie's things always were. She always knew it, and she never once let on that she knew it, which he respected enormously.
"How's the shop?" she asked.
"Doing okay. We're still here." He brushed a crumb off the counter. "Sold three books yesterday. Two of them to the same person, so really one customer. But we're here."
"Mm." She looked around the place the way she looked at everything, taking inventory without seeming to. The spine-out lighthouse books. The literary fiction nobody browsed. The reading chair in the corner that mostly held him. "You ever think about stocking the things people actually ask for?"
"Don't you start."
"I'm only saying. A man's got to keep the doors open before he can be particular about what's behind them.
" She said it gently, no edge to it. That was how she got away with saying things nobody else could.
"Henry kept that lighthouse to be useful first and beautiful second. He'd have told you the same."
"Henry didn't have a Spanish detective novel doing real work that nobody would buy."
"No. Henry had other troubles." A shadow crossed her face, there and gone.
She reached for a cookie of her own, and that was the end of that.
Marty had learned, over the years, that Winnie's face did that sometimes when the lighthouse came up.
Asking about it got a man exactly nowhere. He didn't ask.
"You came all the way down here to feed me and insult my inventory," he said. "There's usually a third thing."
"There's a new tenant." She brushed sugar from her fingers, light about it. "Sea Glass Cottage. Moved in a few days back."
"Sea Glass." He tried to place which one that was and couldn't, and didn't much care to. The cottages came and went with seasonal renters. The renters came and went with their reasons. Most of them never once made it into town to find a bookshop on the harbor. "Tourist?"
"A writer."
He glanced up. "A writer."
"That got your attention." Winnie smiled. "Don't get excited. She's private. Down here to work, she says. Needs the quiet."
"They all need the quiet." He'd heard it a hundred times. Every other person who came to a coast like this was a writer needing quiet. The quiet was the easy part. The writing was the part that broke them, and then they went home. "What does she write?"
"Wouldn't say. 'Small stuff,' she told the girls. 'Nothing you'd know.'" Winnie turned the foil back over the plate, careful, like she was tucking it in.
"Mm."
She leveled her eyes at him, patient as a tide. "This one's got a wall up. The whole height of her. I thought you'd recognize the type."
He held the look and didn't answer that. There wasn't a clean answer. Winnie had a way of saying a thing and then letting it sit on the counter between the two of them until he had to pick it up.
"You're matchmaking," he said instead.
"I'm gossiping. There's a difference, though I'll grant you it's a fine one. I'm only telling you there's a reader in town pretending she isn't anything at all. Seemed like your kind of puzzle. Do with it what you like, Martin. You usually do nothing, so."
"That's not fair."
"It's a little fair." She patted his hand where it rested on the counter. Her own hand was warm and knotted and stronger than it looked. "Eat another cookie. I'll want my plate back. Don't you dare keep it a month like the last one."
"I returned the last one."
"You returned it in March. I brought it in December." She was already at the door, knob in hand. And with that, she disappeared out into the sunshine.
The shop was quiet again. He preferred it quiet. That was the thing. He told himself so, anyway, sweeping the foil plate to the end of the counter and going back to the second box.
A writer with a wall up, pretending to be nothing at all.
He thought about that while his hands worked, slitting tape, folding cardboard.
He caught himself half-curious and didn't entirely care for it.
He'd built a good life out of not being curious about people anymore.
Curiosity cost something. A man got interested in a person and started wanting things for them.
Then they left, or they changed, or they got sick in the early summer and were gone by the fall.
And he was left holding all that interest with nowhere to put it.
Not that a single renter in a cottage was any of that. He was getting ahead of himself over a plate of cookies and a woman he'd never laid eyes on, wasn't he?
He unpacked the grief book last. The slim one. He read the first page standing up. It was a thing he never let customers do and did constantly himself.
It was good. Quiet, plain, and true, the way he liked a thing to be.
The author had lost a wife too. A reader could tell by the second paragraph, the particular way grief settled into the ordinary stuff of a house.
The coffee for one. The side of the bed that stayed made.
Marty knew that house. He'd lived in it sixteen years now, the one Annette wasn't in.
The grief wasn't sharp anymore. That was the thing nobody warned a man about.
It didn't stay a knife. It wore down to something duller and heavier.
Then a book or a song or the smell of somebody's vanilla cookies reminded him it was there.
He didn't cry over Annette these days. He just lived in the space she'd left.
In the shop she'd have loved and would have made him stock differently.
She'd have liked Winnie. She'd have liked Hal too, and would have ordered him his Maxwell without a single sniff. She'd have read one herself just to argue with Marty about it at dinner.
"Worth carrying," she'd have said, holding up some paperback he'd turned his nose at. "Worth more than that Hungarian you'll never sell."
He could hear it exactly. That was the trouble with sixteen years. A man got the voice down so well he could lose whole afternoons to it.
He closed the grief book.
Then he carried it behind the counter and set it on the narrow shelf back there, the one customers couldn't reach. The keep-shelf. It held the handful of books that weren't for selling. His own. He slid the slim gray spine in beside the others and squared it with a thumb until it sat flush.
His glasses were up on his forehead again. He brought them down. Out past the front windows a fishing boat was coming in slow against the glare. He watched it a moment. Then he went to put the kettle on for a cup of tea.