Book Lovers

SIX MONTHS LATER

THERE ARE BALLOONS in the window, a chalkboard sign out front. Through the soft glare on the glass, you can see the crowd milling around, toasting with champagne flutes, talking, laughing, browsing.

To the uninitiated, it might look like a birthday party. There is, after all, a little girl with strawberry blond waves—newly four years old—who has stolen a cupcake from the tower of them at the back of the shop, and now runs in dizzying figure eights around the legs of the adults, knocking into chairs and shelves, purple icing smeared around her lips.

Or the crowd could be celebrating her lanky older sister, with the straight, ashy bangs, who has finally, after some struggle, learned to read. (Now she spends almost every day folded up in the green beanbag chair inside the children’s book room with a book in her lap.) Or it could all be for the baby on the pink-haired woman’s hip. She crawled for the first time just nine days ago (albeit backward, and only for a second), and you’d think she’d won the Nobel Prize, from the screaming on her mom and aunt’s video call. (“Do it again, Kitty! Show Auntie Nono how you’re the most agile, athletic baby of all time!”)

There’s cause to celebrate the pink-haired woman’s husband too. After weeks of trailing along with the local Catch-and-Release Club, he finally caught something early that morning, while the mist was still thick across the river—even if it was just a very large bra.

The cupcake-thieving four-year-old darts through his legs and runs smack into the tall older man using the cane. She giggles as he rustles her hair. Someone pats his arm and congratulates him on finally retiring. “More time to clean the gutters at home,” he says.

Maybe everyone’s here to honor the woman with the sweet, crinkly eyes, who moves in a cloud of weedy jasmine—two of her paintings have just been accepted into a group show.

Or they could be celebrating that the shop hosting the party just had its most profitable month in eight years.

It could be that, after months of working freelance, the thick-browed man with a pout of a smile has just accepted a job offer at Wharton House Books, a position several rungs higher than when he worked there the first time. Or this could all have something to do with the small velvet box he can’t stop turning over in his jacket pocket. (There’s nothing inside it; she mentioned once that if she ever got married, she’d choose the ring herself.) Or that the ice-blond woman leaning against him has known for weeks already what she’s going to say. (She made a pro-con list, but only ended up writing his name under pro and possibly wear a piece of jewelry I didn’t pick out for life???? under con.)

The party in question might also be for the woman in the Coke-bottle glasses, clutching a champagne flute as she approaches the microphone in the center of the bookstore, a stack of slate-gray books arranged on a table beside her, a room of readers falling quiet, rapt, waiting for her to speak, to introduce this new story to a world that has been waiting for it.

“For anyone who wants it all,” she begins, “may you find something that is more than enough.”

She wonders whether what comes next could ever live up to the expectations.

She doesn’t know. You never can.

She turns the page anyway.