6. Norah
Chapter six
Norah
Saturday is a good day.
Thirty-five books sold—a personal record for a non-holiday weekend. I’m choosing to focus on this exclusively and not spend forty minutes reorganizing an end cap of new releases requiring me to move approximately every book in it and then half of them back.
I used to love merchandising. Figuring out what arrangements, color combinations, and signage sent the neurons firing in customer’s brains.
How to trigger that impulse buy nerve. It was a game, and it was fun.
Lately, it feels like another job to finish before I can go home. When did it become that?
I also finally tackled the shelf signs in the back corner, the ones I’d been writing in pencil for three months because I couldn’t commit to the phrasing.
Embarrassing for someone whose job is largely about words.
Used a calligraphy marker this time. I stand back and admire my handiwork.
They’re good, but I’m not as pleased as I usually am.
I’m bored, and I need to be honest about it.
The good thing about Saturdays is that they run me.
Literally, up one aisle and down the other.
Browsers who want recommendations, a woman who needs something for her book club that isn’t depressing but also isn’t boring, a narrower category than you’d think.
A sweet kid with a moon-shaped face who wants the third book in a series we don’t have, and whose face when I find it on the back-order system makes the ten minutes worth it.
Mr. Clancy at three forty-five, right on schedule, choosing another legal thriller since he’s already done with the new Grisham.
A good day. A full day. I lock up at six and walk home and do not think about Silas Coulter at all.
Okay, twice. I think about him twice. Both times I redirect immediately and with considerable force, counting them both as a success.
My weekends are predictable. Saturday mornings, while Mark and Jesse man the shop, I go to the farmers market.
But only from April through October. Late fall through early spring, I concentrate on whatever DIY project has inspired me.
Mosaic lampshades, crewel pillows, painted furniture.
Whatever keeps me occupied when the weather is dicey, as it often is in those months.
But the farmer’s market is where my heart and spirits get a lift.
Tomatoes, because I keep telling myself I’m going to start cooking real food and tomatoes are the opening commitment to that intention.
Sunflowers for the shop counter because sunflowers are happy and happy people buy books.
And because they’re my favorite. A candle from the woman with the hand-poured ones, cedar this time, with a smoky, warmer note under the cedar that I hold up to smell a second time before I put it in my bag.
The market is the thing it always is on a Saturday—unhurried and loud in a pleasant way, full of people who are not in a hurry to be anywhere other than here.
I move through it with a coffee from the stand near the entrance and the contentment of someone who has built a life with room in it for Saturday morning farmers markets.
This is a good life.
I built it on purpose. I left the fluorescent lighting and the motivational signage, and I came to Larkin, and I met my silent partner Abigail, found this building for rent, and I built The Last Chapter out of stubbornness and a genuine belief that a bookshop done right is worth the risk.
Three years later it exists, it employs people, and it is mine in every way that counts.
The life fits.
I didn’t always know it would. When I left the corporate job and quarterly targets dressed up as purpose, I told myself it was a calculated risk.
The kind of thing people do in their early thirties when they’ve saved enough and are finally honest enough to admit that the version of themselves they’ve been living is not the version they actually want to be.
What I didn’t tell myself, because I wasn’t ready to hear it, was that I was lonely in that corporate life.
Lonely in the way of a person who has arranged their existence so efficiently around productivity that there is no room left in it for the unplanned or the serendipitous.
No room for the stranger who comes in looking for something they can’t name and leaves with what they had no intention of buying.
The Last Chapter fixed a lot of that.
Not overnight, not without the bad financial decisions and the months when I counted the deposit twice before I let myself relax. Not without my sister, Penny, saying I told you so in the most loving possible way when the reviews started coming in and the regulars started showing up.
But the shop gave me people. It has Mr. Clancy, his mysteries, and his absolute refusal to acknowledge that I have his name on a reserved copy before he asks.
It has my good friend and neighbor, Jewell, writing song lyrics on cocktail napkins.
And the satisfaction of matching the right book to the right person and watching their face when they realize it.
I stand at the sunflower stand for slightly longer than necessary, holding my coffee, and admit that even with all of that, I’m restless.
By Sunday afternoon, I’m antsy, even as I do all the normal things Sunday afternoons require. Laundry with an old movie on in the background. This weekend it’s The Shell Seekers, with Angela Lansbury. One of my favorites.
The windowsill plants have survived another week through what can only be described as stubbornness on their part.
There’s a stack of books on my nightstand that I’ve been meaning to get back to, but they remain untouched.
On to a biography I started two weeks ago and set down when it got to the chapter about the marriage, a subject I wasn’t ready for then and may not be ready for now.
I make it four pages before I put it down again.
Not ready.
I light the new candle instead, deciding to keep it at home until I get bored with it and then take it to the shop.
Fragrant cedar spreads through the living room.
Waves crash against the rocky Cornwall coastline on TV.
I sit on the couch with the windows open and finally stop pretending I haven’t been thinking about Silas.
For only a minute. That’s the deal. One minute. No jokes.
He came in and left with a tome he admitted he didn’t need and certainly will probably never read. He showed up at my coffee shop, walked me to work, manhandled my sandwich board outside and looked at my staff picks wall like it was a treasure map.
I like that he came back. I like that he wanted to see me.
I spend a few minutes muddling through that, but all that really is at the top of my mind is the dark stubble on his chin from missing a morning shave, and the slight curl of dark hair on his neck that I want to twist around my fingers.
Then I look at the clock.
One minute and forty seconds.
I’m choosing to round down.
I flip off Cornwall, pick up the biography, and try the marriage chapter again. I make it six pages this time before the first tear slips down my cheek. Progress.
On Monday morning, I breathe a sigh of relief that the weekend is over. I’ve been saved from my hot mess of a self, and I can get on with life. I leave the opening of The Last Chapter to Mark and Jesse, since Monday mornings are traditionally the slowest time of the week.
Once I’ve brewed my coffee and watered the plants, I put on a skirt, cotton tank, and strappy sandals, perfect for a steamy morning, and make a list of what the shop needs this week.
The ceiling fan over the register has been making a noise since last week.
I’ve been calling it a phase, but by Friday it had committed.
A new overhead fan is operation critical in weather where the archaic air conditioning system at the shop barely keeps up.
The big box hardware store on Clement Avenue opens at eight.
I add ceiling fan to the list that includes a run through Staples for counter pens, steno notebooks, and credit card machine tape. After I finish my coffee, I head out. Larkin is loud and bright and moving, and Silas Coulter is not on the list.
I fold the list, put it in my bag, and leave to go find myself a ceiling fan.