“Just a moment,” I mumble to the clerk.
I abandon the chicken salad sandwich and hurry outside. I don’t see my wallet lying on the street—and I’d certainly notice it, because it’s red. I walk all the way back to where the woman was sitting on the ground with her sign and… she’s gone.
Well, the sign is still there. And the cardboard. But the woman and all her belongings are gone.
That bitch stole my wallet! No wonder she was walking so close to me.
I stand on the sidewalk, blinking back tears. I can’t believe that just happened to me. As if my day couldn’t be any worse, now I’ve had my wallet stolen by someone I was trying to help.
I’m not sure how much more I can take.
Chapter 4: The New Girl
The only reason Beatrice Muller met Marvin Donovan is that someone nearly pushed her into the train tracks.
Bea was in the subway station, waiting for the train that would take her uptown to her job as a salesgirl at Gimbels. As was a habit with her, Bea had been carrying a novel within her overstuffed purse that she’d gotten from the Gimbels bargain rack at the beginning of the summer. When the train showed no signs of arriving, Bea pulled the dog-eared paperback from her handbag and started to read, squinting in the dim light of the underground station.
When someone jostled her, the paperback flew out of her skinny fingers. To hear Bea tell the story years later, that paperback traveled twenty feet into the air to land on the tracks below. （In reality, it was probably more like two or three feet—tops.） Nineteen-year-old Bea let out an anguished cry. The book was irretrievable on the train tracks. Not only that, but it was her favorite book. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. The greatest love story of all time, in Bea’s opinion.
Bea stepped to the edge, hovering over the tracks, which were littered with food wrappers, coffee cups, and now her beloved paperback. She contemplated lowering herself down there to rescue it.
Then she felt a hand on her arm. She looked up and saw a young man in a white dress shirt. She had always appreciated a well-dressed man, and she also appreciated the way his black hair was combed neatly on his scalp and his green tie matched the exact vivid shade of his eyes. “Excuse me, Miss,” the young man said to Bea. “I’d like to replace that book for you.”
The man led Bea to a bookstore, which was a short two-block walk from the subway station. They chattered brightly as they walked, and Bea learned that the man’s name was Marvin Donovan and that his family owned a used bookstore, where he had worked since coming back from serving in the army.
When Bea walked into Bookland, she fell instantly and hopelessly in love. With the store and with the young man who had brought her there. She gazed dazedly at the rows and rows of books, wanting to sweep them all into her arms. Marv plucked a copy of Wuthering Heights from the Classics section of the bookstore, which then filled an entire bookcase and was not nearly as dusty. Marv later told Bea he knew exactly where it was because it was his favorite book as well. She tried to pay him the ten-cent price of the book, but he refused.
Bea was very late to work that day and it was her third tardy in as many weeks, so Gimbels told her not to come back. But it didn’t matter because when Bea and Marv got married six months later, she went to work at Bookland. It was her dream job. And Marv was her dream husband.
They kept that bookstore going through thick and thin. There were times when the books were flying off the shelves and other times when they went a whole day without a sale. More than once, they had to do things they weren’t proud of to keep the doors from closing.
But that’s a different story.
Over fifty years after Marv gave Bea her copy of Wuthering Heights—the one she kept in her nightstand at all times—Marv was shelving books in the sports section of Bookland when he felt a crushing pain in his mid-sternum. He fell to the ground and was cold by the time Bea got back from having lunch with their daughter.