Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“Eleanor Ridley,” Eleanor lectured herself, her maiden name still feeling strange on her tongue after two decades of using her married name, “you are being such a ninny.”
Her friends would arrive for their first book club meeting any minute now, and Eleanor was inexplicably plagued by nerves.
She was excited, yes. She loved to talk about books.
She simply never ran out of things to say about them.
And she had gotten the impression that her new friends were a diverse group of readers, which would keep the conversation spirited.
But this was also the third time in a row that Eleanor had dusted the same spot on her side table, which was new, anyway, and so hadn’t had any dust to begin with.
Eleanor had hosted birthday parties, holiday events for Brian’s colleagues, PTA meetings. She’d organized fall festivals for Jeremy’s elementary school. She’d spearheaded a clothing drive for a family who had lost their home to a fire once. She was not a novice when it came to entertaining.
And yet, she was acting like a kid who was worried nobody would show up to her birthday party.
“A ninny,” she repeated, surveying her table of snacks.
The book they were discussing today took place in California wine country, so Eleanor had taken this as inspiration for the food and drink she’d provided.
She had olives, tapenade, and hummus, as well as different crackers, vegetables, and breadsticks for dipping.
She’d made an asparagus galette based on a recipe she’d found online and felt inordinately proud of the result.
For something sweet, she’d candied some walnuts, which she had made for a lot of parties, as they felt more exciting than store-bought sweets, in her opinion.
And there was wine, of course, as well as some sparkling water with strawberry and lemon slices in it.
She’d also put out the ingredients for martinis, as this felt in line with the olives she’d plated.
Everything looked great, but when her nerves threatened to bubble up again, Eleanor took a quick sip of her own glass of wine. For courage.
Miriam arrived first, right at the stroke of six, which was when they’d scheduled their club meeting.
“Hello, darling,” she greeted, giving Eleanor European-style air kisses. “I am so excited for our club! I have been simply in a tizzy all day. I barely stopped myself from showing up hideously early.”
Miriam’s expansiveness eased Eleanor’s anxiety.
“Next time… if we decide to do this again, that is, just come early,” she encouraged the other woman. “I’ve been driving myself to distraction this past hour for absolutely no reason at all.”
“I’ll try not to abuse the power of that invitation,” Miriam teased, handing Eleanor a plate of finger sandwiches. “I get a lot of activity into my days, but retirement can leave you with more hours than you expect.”
“I get that,” Eleanor said. “I mean, I was a stay-at-home mom whose kid went off to college. So I definitely get that…” She trailed off.
Things were different now. She would have to find a way to make a living, which was a highly nerve-wracking concept after twenty years of working in her home, raising her son.
Miriam seemed to know what Eleanor was thinking. She patted her hand.
“You’ll get there, honey,” she said reassuringly. “And in the meantime, you’ve got us to lean on!”
Eleanor grinned. Yes, her new friends were an undisputed high point of her new beginning, that much was obvious.
June and Diana arrived together moments later, Cadence only a minute or two behind them, seeming frazzled.
“Sorry,” she said, impatiently brushing a strand of hair out of her face.
“Got my drop-off coordination messed up.” The other women seemed to intrinsically understand that Cadence didn’t want to talk about her marital woes, and even if they hadn’t, Cadence made her point clear by pasting a bit smile on her face. “Are we ready to talk about the book?”
The women chatted about the book for a while. Miriam expectedly felt there was not enough romance, while Diana said she had almost solved the mystery, only to second-guess herself and talk herself out of her guess.
“You have to trust those instincts, Detective Diana,” June teased.
Gradually, however, their conversation moved away from their reading material and toward their lives. June told them a humorous anecdote about cleaning a house where every room was decorated entirely in one color.
“So there was the blue room, the red room, the yellow room, and all that,” she said. “The bathroom was pink. It was, uh, visually impactful?” she said, trying for tact while the other women laughed.
“Suffice to say, Eleanor,” she added, “you’ve done a much nicer job with the house.”
Eleanor wrinkled her nose. “Yeah, so far,” she said. She had really only managed to do up a few rooms. The kitchen was looking in decent shape, and this front parlor was looking nice… even if it was still a little empty. Her bedroom looked the best, but the rest of the house was still quite empty.
Eleanor sighed, waving an arm to show the scope of her space. “I just didn’t really understand how big a space it would be,” she said with a sigh. “Or maybe I didn’t understand how little space I would need as one person. The last time I lived alone, it was in a dorm room, for goodness’ sake!”
Diana, who had lightly touched on her own decorating struggles while Cadence jokingly recreated Diana’s lackluster reception to a painting from the gallery, nodded in commiseration.
June, however, looked thoughtful.
“You know…” She paused, sipping her martini as she gazed around the space.
“Spit it out, woman!” Cadence said.
June grinned and stuck out her tongue briefly.
“Hush, you. I was just thinking, the other day when I was picking Benjamin up from school, I was talking to one of the parents about how it’s such a pain to get all the way out to the bookstore in Eastover when you’ve got a kiddo who is obsessed with a certain series.
Obviously, no parent wants to discourage their kid from reading, so if they’re excited about a specific book, you want them to get it as quickly as possible.
And he and I both don’t want to necessarily order our books from a big online retailer…
we’d rather get them from an actual bookstore, where the kids can browse and maybe see something else they like. ”
She paused, arching her eyebrow meaningfully at Eleanor.
“Wait,” Eleanor said, shaking her head. “You can’t mean…”
“I can mean,” June said, nodding. “What if you took the downstairs space and turned it into a bookstore? It would be a huge boon to the community, and it would use up some of the rooms that you don’t know what to do with.”
Eleanor gazed around the room as if seeing it with new eyes.
“And I do need to find a way to make a living…” she added a bit hesitantly.
Miriam clasped her hands in front of herself, looking like a kid in a candy store.
“Ooh, and you could host private and public book clubs, do author visits, all those kind of wonderful literary activities that we currently have to drive for. I bet the teachers would all love their students getting local access to books. Oh, you could have story times!”
“Okay, okay, slow down, Miriam!” Cadence said with a laugh. She turned to Eleanor. “I do think it’s a great idea, though.”
Eleanor… liked the idea too, more than she was maybe ready to admit.
“I’d have to find a way to cordon off my living space,” she said slowly. “But the way this house was built… the kitchen and the stairs are connected. It could work.”
“And the living room, dining room, parlor, and that spare bedroom are kind of their own space, too,” Diana said, tilting her hands as if it helped her picture how the space functioned.
“My boutique is in a building that’s smaller, but similar.
That’s how I separated out the front space and the stock rooms. It could work for you too. ”
“The kitchen door could be my entrance, and the front door could be the customer entrance,” Eleanor said, a smile spreading across her face. It would be a lot of work, a lot. But the more she thought about it, the more she liked it.
As if sensing her growing eagerness, her friends began chiming in with more ideas.
“The windows in here would make it the perfect cozy reading space,” Diana offered.
“And you could build shelves along the back wall,” Cadence added.
“I demand a good romance section,” Miriam said decisively.
“We all expected that,” Diana said, throwing her arm affectionately around the older woman’s shoulders.
Miriam stuck out her tongue playfully.
“I could do this,” Eleanor said, needing to hear it out loud.
“I could put up a door between the kitchen and the stairs, and that would keep my area private. I could have the checkout counter in the dining room, near the door. I could even use the bedroom as event space, if people wanted to host things at the shop.”
She was already calling it the shop, like the decision was already made in her mind.
Diana grinned at her. “You totally could,” she agreed.
Eleanor realized that all her friends were looking at her expectantly. She laughed.
“Okay, I’m not going to commit to anything right now,” she said. “Let’s just eat some more snacks and I’ll think about it, okay?”
“You had me at ‘eat more snacks,’” June quipped.
Everyone laughed, and their conversation drifted back to other topics. Even so, Eleanor found her mind drifting back to her potential new business.
She needed a job, after all. She certainly had the space. It seemed like a wild idea, to think of herself as a business owner, as someone who ran a bookshop. And yet, a little voice in the back of her head kept chiming in with the same question, over and over.
Why not? Why not her? Why shouldn’t she be able to do it?
A grin slowly spread across Eleanor’s face. Why not her, indeed.