There was a couple in the far room whispering in fiction. He’d been pricing a stack of books he’d just bought from a composer, but now that Kate was gone he’d lost his concentration. He went down the aisle her friend had chosen and pulled out, one by one, the books he’d looked at. Each one was a decent book in a sea, he acknowledged with familiar shame, of mediocre books. He would have liked to have an intensely intellectual selection—no confessional poetry, no mass-market psychology, no coffee-table crap. But as it was, business was precarious. Most intellectuals were like the composer: selling, not buying. A few days ago, a woman had come in with swatches of fabric and asked him to find her books only in those colors. Last week a man had been looking for War and Peace, and when Mitchell explained that he was temporarily out of anything by Tolstoy, the man asked if he had it by anyone else. It was a terrible time for books.
“Hey, where are you?” She pulled on his sleeve. “I got it! Mushroom soup!” She held up two containers. She was smiling as wide as he’d ever seen. Her nose was red and dripping and beautiful. “It better be as good as you promised.”
Hadn’t she already eaten? Where was the guy in the green coat? How much did he owe her? Questions swarmed but stayed behind the tight knot in his throat.
There was always one stool behind the counter and another that he used to prop open the door in summer, which now stood by the coat rack nobody ever used. He’d once wanted the store to be a homey place, the sort of place where you come in and hang up your coat and stay awhile, but it never had been. He’d never given any customer the impression that he wanted them to stay awhile. Kate found this other stool and dragged it around back, so that the two stools were now side by side, with a cup of mushroom soup on the counter in front of each one.
She took a sip. Her eyes closed. “I would wait four years for this soup,” she said.
He felt as if he would burst. He’d read about this feeling in novels, but he was sure he’d never experienced it. Meeting his wife had brought him pleasure, or a sort of relief, the mystery of whom to spend his life with solved— or so he’d thought. But he’d actually been fairly content before he met her, talking on the phone with Aaron, eating tuna in his little room, reading from the stacks of books borrowed from the store he now owned.
Mitchell wished his cup of soup would never end.
They took a long lunch. Customers, as always, were irritating and disruptive. They were worse in this kind of weather. There was a focus that went out of people’s eyes. They often forgot what they were looking for and stalled motionless in the aisles. When an elderly woman finally made it out the door, Kate grunted, imitating the way he had responded to her gratitude for finding her a book.
“It was Middlemarch,” he explained.
“Which is a great book.”
“I know it’s a great book.” He was aware of how much like Paula he sounded when he whined. “But shouldn’t she have read it by now? She’s only a hundred and thirty-seven years old.”
“She could be reading it for the hundred and thirty-seventh time. Or she could be giving it to her granddaughter. Or great-granddaughter.” She seemed amused, entirely uninterested in changing him. He knew it was like that at first with anyone. He also knew it might mean that she didn’t care about him at all.
He tried to think of what it really was that had bothered him about the old woman. For once in his life, thought turned instantly to speech before he could stop it. “I miss Mrs. White.”
Kate looked up from her soup.
“An old woman who used to come in here.”
“What was she like?”
Mitchell hadn’t thought about the actual Mrs. White in a long time. When he thought about her now it was just a feeling, not a person, just a deep longing. He hadn’t known her very well. “At ease,” she used to say to him when she came in. She’d sit on the hard pink chair in science, reading Stephen Jay Gould. They’d shared a laugh once, when a girl a few years older than Paula moved swiftly through the store to the picture of Thomas Pynchon that hung on the back wall and burst into tears. It was the only picture of Pynchon available then, and not many people had ever seen even that, a reproduction of his high school yearbook photo, teeth like a donkey’s. “The only person who should cry over that picture is his mother,” Mrs. White had said.
Kate allowed him his silence. She didn’t try to reframe the question or ask another. Mrs. White would have done the same thing. What was she like? She was like you, he realized, watching Kate scrape out the last sip of soup with a plastic spoon.