Chapter 2 #2
Logan is an incredible baseball player. His knuckleball is once-in-a-generation stuff, as the three old men I usually sit by at games like to say.
Their names are all Chick, which I guess used to be short for Charles, and they’re the kind of cute, grumpy old men you’d see in a movie, the kind who’ve been sitting in the same seats since the stadium was built and almost seem like they’ll outlast it.
They love telling me all about baseball and the ins and outs of the sport that casual fans don’t realize.
Like every baseball only lasts six or seven pitches before the ump takes it out of the rotation.
Or how infield dirt isn’t actually dirt, but an engineered blend of sand, clay, and silt to better bounce and handle rain.
Or how Logan will be called up to the pros in no time, once he gets over his “yips.”
That one I already knew.
He’ll be gone, and I’ll still be here in Mullet Ridge. Or Sugar Maple, depending where my stepmother decides I’m of most use.
Alma has finished wiping down the tables, and now she’s in the kitchen rinsing out her washcloth. I glance outside to the Little Free Library and call out.
“I’m going to check on the books. Be right back!”
I push back out into the night.
It’s louder out here, what with the sound of cars driving home from the game, but it’s an odd night. Somehow peaceful and charged at the same time. Maybe it was getting to sit with Lulabelle and Nicolette, who’s always sweeter when she’s not around her mom.
More likely, it’s the fact that for a single moment at the end of the game, I could have sworn Logan saw me. I felt like something zipped between my chest and his.
But, then, I’m a hopeless romantic who wants to read into the fact that he was looking in my direction right before he turned the inning around, dominated the next two batters, and saved the game.
Yes, my direction was also the direction of the batter, but if I were the kind of girl who believed in magic, I’d be sure he was looking at me.
Oh, pumpkin, I can hear my mom say. You keep believing in yourself and you’ll be unstoppable.
I don’t know if I stopped believing or if she was wrong. More likely, this is what unstoppable looks like for me: surviving with a smile.
The little library sits at the northwest corner of the building, right where Sycamore meets the edge of the parking lot. I built it from a kit I found at the thrift store a couple months ago because I needed … something. A change. More.
It’s not very good. Anyone with DIY experience must see the flaws in the pitched roof and the gap where the door hinge meets the frame. The shade of powder blue it’s painted makes me happy, though.
The latch catches as I swing the door open. Someone has taken the Red Rising series and left behind a pristine paperback edition of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. The pages and spine are in perfect condition.
Unread.
What a shame.
I stand there, holding the book in my hands for a moment longer than I need to, feeling a pinch in my heart that a book so beautiful has been overlooked for so long.
Then I look back at the shop. My grandparents built Meant to Bean when my mother was a teenager, converting the ground floor of this house into the shop and moving the three of them upstairs into what is now my apartment.
I’ve always thought it must have felt impossibly cramped, three people sharing a space I hit the edges of all by myself, but Mama always said they were too proud of what they’d built to care.
I love this shop. I love the legacy my family left me.
I even love Marlowe for what she did when my dad didn’t care enough to do anything.
She stepped in, took on the loans the place was buried under, and has spent the last ten years turning Meant to Bean from something that was barely surviving into something stable enough that we’ve expanded to a coffee truck. That’s not nothing.
But sometimes I wonder if there isn’t more …
I glance up at the stars and breathe.
I worked a full day for my family’s business and got to spend the night watching a baseball game with my stepsister and niece.
I lived a life inside the pages today, not just in the margins.
Not bad.
I display A Tree Grows in Brooklyn as prominently as I can, hoping someone will give it a chance, and then I head back toward the shop, my eyes on my Chuck Taylors with every step.
When I’m almost to the door, I look up to see that Alma is spraying the front windows down, but she gives me a significant look. I’m about to pull the door open when my hand stops on the handle.
There, through the pane of glass, I see someone standing at my booth.
Not standing—towering, really. Still in a powder-blue-and-rust-red baseball jersey with the number 49 on the back. He’s wearing cleats and a baseball hat over his blond hair, and his chest is rising and falling so fast, I wonder if he ran here.
The fact that sweat is curling the hair peeking out from under his cap only confirms this.
Logan Fischer ran here, to my shop.
Why?
His back is to me, his arms and head bent in a way that tells me he’s reading.
My eyes flit to the table and back to him.
He’s reading my copy of Robert Frost poems.
My heart flips in my chest at the exact moment I see him flip a page. His head moves an inch, then back, like he’s bouncing between pages, trying to figure something out.
I don’t know Logan. One thirty-minute conversation in Phoenix told me he’s even more bookish and cute and funny than I imagined, but we never saw each other again—not in real life—and he went right back to being a dream man. And now he’s here in my coffee shop.
I have to hide.
If I can sneak inside and hug the outer wall, he’ll never see me disappear down the small staff hallway with the staircase to my apartment. If I hadn’t left my bag behind the counter, I could have used the outside stairs.
But suddenly, the idea that he might not see me—that I could slip past him to the back and up the stairs and he would never know I was here—is the worst thing I can imagine.
My heart drums loudly in my chest.
Do it! Do it!
I pull the door open.
And the chime sounds.