4. Margot
MARGOT
The stranger came back, and this time he stayed long enough for me to thoroughly ruin my own composure.
I know him the moment the light shifts in the doorway, before I even turn, the way you catch a song from a single held note.
He is last night's ghost, the one who left with my grandmother's poems and no explanation, and now he has the nerve to walk back in like a man collecting on a debt I do not remember signing.
He is older than the men who usually flirt with my shelves, and a good deal older than the ones I say yes to, a category currently holding steady at nobody.
There is gray coming in at his temples like a decision he made on purpose.
He wears his years the way some men wear a good coat, and I resent, immediately and specifically, how well it fits him.
Last night he unsettled me for a solid hour after he left, and I told myself it was only the strange luck of the book, my grandmother's book, chosen off a back shelf by a man who could not possibly have known what it was.
Tonight he is here again, and the luck is starting to look less like chance and more like a plan nobody has shown me.
"You're back," I say. "Either the poems let you down, or you have come for something heavier."
"The poems were perfect. That is the trouble with a perfect thing. You finish it, and then you want to know the person who put it on the shelf." His voice is low and in no hurry at all, and it does something to the backs of my knees that I intend to deny under oath.
"That is a line," I tell him. "It's a good one, and a well-worn one."
"It would be," he says, "if I had ever said it to anyone before."
I have spent a year describing men like him for a living, and I have never once gotten the eyes right.
His are dark and patient and faintly amused, and they travel the shop the way a reader's travel a first page, taking inventory, missing nothing, deciding whether to stay.
When they come back to me, I feel counted.
It should not be a pleasant thing, being read down to the studs by a man I met yesterday. I make a note to examine, at a later and safer date, exactly why it is.
Behind me, Birdie makes a sound like a kettle deciding whether to scream. She is meant to be filming the new releases for the internet. She is filming me instead.
"Ignore her," I tell him. "She reviews things."
"I can hear you," Birdie says, without lowering the phone. Then, in the stage whisper of a woman convinced a stage whisper is subtle, she adds, "Ten out of ten. Would perish."
I abandon the counter and pretend to reshelve a cart I emptied an hour ago, which has the happy side effect of putting me near enough to eavesdrop on my own conversation. It is a terrible plan. It is the only one I have.
He follows, not close, just close enough, and lifts a worn novel off the cart before I can slot it home. It is one of mine, one of the ones I reread until the spine gives up. "You keep the saddest books within reach," he says. "Why?"
"Because happy endings lie about where they stop," I say, before I have decided whether he has earned the truth. "A sad one tells you everything. It does not pretend the credits roll while the people are still in love. I trust a book that is willing to hurt me."
He looks at me a beat too long, the way he did the night before, like I am a line he has chosen to read twice.
"You reread them because you already know they survive the last page," he says.
"The hurt is safe once you have been through it before.
" It is the truest thing anyone has said to me in a year, and he says it about books so that he does not have to say it about me.
I laugh, because the alternative is to hold very still and let him go on being right. "That is an awful lot of theory for a man buying a two-dollar paperback."
"I read people the way you shelve them," he says, "quickly, and by the spine."
"You shelve people, then," I say. "You do realize that is an alarming thing to admit to a woman alone in a shop after dark."
"You are not alone," he says. "You have Birdie, and the cat, and a letter opener within reach of your right hand that you have touched twice since I walked in."
I had, in fact, touched it twice. I make myself stop. "Most people don't notice the letter opener."
"Most people are not paying attention," he says, as though that settles the matter, and the unforgivable part is that it does.
"You talk like a man who has read everything and confessed to nothing," I say. "What is it you do, when you are not haunting bookshops?"
"I carry things from one language into another." The half-smile arrives and is gone in the same second. "Mostly I listen."
"And do the things you carry have names? Do you?"
"Daniil," he says, and adds nothing to it. No surname, no offered hand, no reason for being here. Just the one word, set down between us like a coin he expects me to bite to see if it is real.
It is a good name. It settles into the shop as though it has stood here before. I try it silently against a dozen surnames, and not one of them fits, which is either instinct or plain wishful thinking, and I have never once been able to tell those two apart inside myself.
"Daniil," Birdie repeats from across the room, savoring it, recording it for the ages.
I could throttle her. I could also, if I am honest, thank her, because hearing his name out loud has confirmed the thing I have spent ten minutes refusing to notice, which is that I want him to keep talking until well past close.
We talk the way you skip stones, both of us pretending the water is shallow.
He knows the year my favorite translator died and the reason a certain novel was banned in three countries.
At one point he mentions that the light in here is kinder in the morning, which is true, and which means he has stood in my shop on a morning I never saw.
I set the thought down somewhere and decline to look at it, because looking would end this, and I am nowhere near ready for this to end.
"You knew exactly where the poetry was last night," I say. "Other people wander. You went straight to it."
"I don't wander," he says, and lets it sit there, and does not explain, and the refusal to explain is somehow the most honest thing he has offered all night.
"Your grandmother had good taste," he adds, with a glance toward the corner where he stood the night before. "She underlined far more than she ever wrote in the margins. She was a woman who trusted other people's words more than her own."
I have never said that about Josie to a living soul. I am not certain I understood it myself until he handed it to me, and now it is the truest thing I know about her, offered by a man who spent ninety seconds with one of her books.
"You didn't come back for the shelving," I say. "Nobody crosses a city twice for a bookseller's feelings about sad endings."
"No," he agrees, and does not tell me what he did come back for, and lets the silence do the work a confession would.
"You wrote something today." It is not a question. His eyes have found the side of my hand. "There is ink there, the kind a person gets from writing longhand and no longer minding who notices."
I put the hand behind my back like a caught teenager. "It's a grocery list," I lie.
"It's a sad one, then," he says, with a nod at the way I am holding my own wrist, and I decide that I hate him, and that the hate is going to be a problem.
He turns the worn novel over and reads the last page first, the way I always do, and I watch him notice that the corner is already soft there, at the ending, from the hundred times I have opened it to exactly that spot. "You start at the end," he says. He does not bother to shape it as a question.
"I like to know what I am agreeing to," I say.
"So do I," he says, and sets the book down like a man who has just decided something, and declines, as usual, to tell me what.
Somewhere in all of it he has ended up holding the novel, and he sets it on the counter without dropping the thread of what he is saying. I ring up nothing at all. I am too busy losing an argument I am conducting entirely with myself.
He is old enough to be easy inside a silence, and he uses the silence like a palm at the small of my back.
When he asks a question he waits for the whole of the answer, which not one man my own age has ever once managed.
The seventeen years between us stop being a number and turn into a kind of gravity, and I have tipped toward it before I remember that I swore off tipping toward anyone.
I am twenty-four, and I have spent most of those years as the youngest person in any room that counted, talked over and talked down to and carded at the wine shop by teenagers.
He does none of it. He asks what I think, and then he actually waits, quiet and unhurried, like a man who intends to use the answer.
It is the most disarming thing a man has done to me in memory, and he has not so much as touched my hand.
Then, the way weather turns, he is done. "Lock up soon," he says, with a glance at the dark street that lands less like small talk and more like a man reading a danger I cannot see. He gives me the half-smile once more. Then come the bell, a breath of cold, and the empty doorway where he had been.
Birdie lowers her phone at last. "So," she says. "We are registering for china."
"He bought a book," I say. "That is the entire event."
"Margot. He looked at you like you were the last page of something he did not want to finish. I have three hundred hours of footage. I know a last page when I see one."
I want to tell her she is wrong. I want to say that a man who withholds his last name is a man whose last name is worth hiding, and that I have written enough dangerous men to recognize one buying a paperback off my sad-books cart.
I say none of it, because some traitor part of me has already decided it would like him to come back a third time, and that part is currently running the shop.
I send her home before she can settle on a venue. I lock the door, kill the front lights, and cash out a register that has had a very strange day, still wearing a smile I have no business wearing.
The shop ticks and settles the way it does after dark, and I stand in the middle of it replaying the whole hour, every parry, every place he turned my questions around like a key in a lock.
I interrogated a stranger and came away with three facts.
His name is Daniil. He translates. He lies with the easy confidence of a man who has had a great deal of practice.
It ought to frighten me. Instead I am grinning at a shelf.
After he's gone I find exact change tucked in the register I never rang up. A small, cold thought: how did he know the total before I said it? I shake it off.