“At Christmastime, they put up a big tree in the square.” Tito Micky pulled into a parking spot right in front of the bookstore. “It’s thirty feet tall, and they light it all at once. There’s Christmas carolers and a Santa Claus parade.” Santa Clowse parade. “We always take the boys and get hot chocolate. You’ll enjoy it.”
Joey felt a pang. Her first Christmas without her mother. She hadn’t even thought about that.
Her uncle opened his wallet and plucked out a ten-dollar bill, his fingertips brushing hers unnecessarily as he handed it to her. He pointed across the street to a sports bar called the Loose Goose. “I’ll meet you back here at three forty-five, okay? We have to pick the boys up at four.”
She had two whole hours to herself in a bookstore, with ten whole dollars to spend. She was so giddy, she was practically bouncing. They both got out of the car, and Tito Micky leaned against the driver’s-side door and lit a cigarette.
Standing on the sidewalk, Maple Sound was so different from what Joey was used to. Unlike Toronto, which was filled with people of all races and religions, and who spoke many different languages, Maple Sound was so … homogeneous. Her mother never did understand why her sister and brother-in-law had opted to move to a small town two hours north, away from the diversity of city life.
“You’ll be dog piss on white snow,” Ruby had said to Tita Flora back then. “You’re going to hate it there, and they’re going to hate you.”
Joey suspected that her aunt and uncle actually did hate it here, and would bet that Tito Micky would move back to the city in a heartbeat if he could. But Tita Flora seemed determined to stick it out, if only to prove her sister wrong.
At the moment, though, none of that mattered. When Joey stepped inside the bookstore, she took a long, deep inhale, and felt a genuine burst of joy. Every bookstore, everywhere, smelled the same.
It smelled like home.
* * *
Jason and Tyson were starving when they got home, and they headed straight to the kitchen to eat whatever snack their grandmother had prepared for them. Joey put the groceries away while Tito Micky headed straight back outside. The moment they walked in the door, Tita Flora had barked her displeasure at the giant pile of leaves her husband had left on the pond side of the house. He’d raked them that morning, and the leaves were supposed to be burned by the time she got home from work.
Joey skipped up the stairs with her two new paperbacks. The bookstore still had their two-for-ten sale, and the owner—whose name was Ginny—remembered Joey from her first visit with Deborah.
“Any luck?” Ginny had asked.
“I can’t decide,” Joey said, feeling shy. She had found two she wanted—another Stephen King book called Needful Things, and a book by Scott Turow, an author she hadn’t read yet, called Presumed Innocent—but with the sales tax, she wouldn’t have enough money for both. “Which one would you recommend?”
“Tough choice,” Ginny said with a smile. “So how about you get both, and I won’t charge you the tax.”
Today was Joey’s best day in Maple Sound by far. Oddly, she had Tito Micky to thank for that. All the upstairs windows were open, and she could smell the leaves burning outside. It smelled like a campfire, and it added to her happy mood. She pushed open her bedroom door.
Carson, the youngest boy who’d been left at home that afternoon because he was sick, was sitting in the middle of the bedroom floor. Clearly he was feeling better, because he had a pair of safety scissors in his small hand and was studiously cutting the cover off If Tomorrow Comes. And if that wasn’t horrific enough, in front of him was a large sheet of bristol board, on top of which lay six more snipped covers, all in a row.
No, not just laying on the board. There was a fat yellow stick on the carpet beside the bristol board that said ELMER’S. Her four-year-old cousin was gluing them down, and strewn all around were the books themselves, stripped of their covers, naked and exposed on the carpet like dead animal carcasses.
A white-hot rage unlike anything she’d ever felt before filled Joey’s stomach. This little asshole, who probably had a hundred toys to play with all throughout the house, who had never wanted for anything, who had never felt unsafe, who had never been forced to have margarine and stale crackers for dinner because there was nothing else to eat, was destroying her most precious possessions. Her paperbacks. The only things that had any value to her, other than her necklace.
She would have rather he destroyed the necklace. The necklace might have been forgivable.