He had chosen too.
She’d gone to live with her grandmother after that and had spent her Thursday afternoons with a therapist who specialized in children and grief. Not that it had done much good. Two parents gone in the space of a month, and both had chosen to leave her. Surely the fault lay with her. Something she’d done or not done, some awful, unforgivable flaw. Like a disfiguring birthmark or faulty gene, the question had become a permanent part of her. Like the scar on her palm.
After her parents’ deaths, the store had become her sanctuary, a place to retreat from the stares and whispers, where no one gave her sideways looks and snickered about the girl whose father had blown his brains out while she was blowing out her birthday candles. But it wasn’t only her father’s suicide that had marred her early years. She’d always been different, skittish and withdrawn.
A freak.
It was a label she’d earned on the first day of seventh grade, when she’d burst into tears after being issued a battered social studies textbook dripping with self-loathing. The echoes had been so bleak and so bottomless—so uncomfortably familiar—that she’d found it almost unbearable to touch the book. She’d begged the girl beside her to trade but had refused to say why. In the end, her teacher had issued her a different book, but not before the entire class had a good laugh at her expense.
Years later, the memory still stung, but she’d eventually come to accept her strange gift. Like the ability to paint or play the violin, it had become a part of her and was even a comfort at times, the echoes a standin for actual friends, who might judge or abandon her.
Ashlyn shook off the thought as she deposited her tote on the counter and ran her eyes around the shop. She adored every inch of its cozy clutter, the threadbare carpets and warped oak floors, the scent of beeswax mixed with lingering traces of Frank Atwater’s pipe tobacco, but as she eyed the stack of books waiting for her on the front counter, the shelves that needed dusting, the windows that were long overdue for a wash, she regretted not following through on her plan to finally hire someone to help with day-to-day tasks.
She’d nearly placed an ad last month, had gone so far as to write the copy, but ultimately she had changed her mind. It wasn’t the money. With the bindery business taking off, the shop pulled in more than enough to support a staff. Her reluctance had to do with preserving the sanctuary she’d built for herself, an insular world of ink and paper and familiar echoes. She wasn’t ready to let someone else in, even if it meant more free time. Perhaps especially if it meant more free time.
Ashlyn glanced at the old depot clock as she peeled out of her jacket and tossed it on the counter. It was nearly four and she had an hour’s worth of reshelving to tackle before she could change hats and head to the bindery. Today’s stack was especially diverse and included titles such as The Art of Cooking with Herbs & Spices, A Guide to Bird Behavior: Volumes I & II, The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott, and The Four Dimensions of Philosophy.
The varied interests of her customers never ceased to amaze her. If someone, somewhere, was interested in a subject, no matter how obscure, there was a book about it. And if there was a book about it, someone, somewhere, wanted to read it. Her job was to connect the two, and it was one she took very seriously. She’d grown up believing a person could learn absolutely anything from books, and she still believed it. How could she not when she spent her days in such rarefied air?
When the shelving was finished, she polished the counter and restocked the handouts in the rack at the front of the store, including the latest issue of the store’s monthly newsletter. The windows would have to wait for another day. After sixty years in business, the place was long past gleaming, but there was a warm patina to the scarred floors and overcrowded shelves that her customers seemed to appreciate, and perhaps even expect.
In the bindery, situated at the back of the shop, Ashlyn flicked on the overhead fluorescents, almost uncomfortably bright after the shop’s softer reading lamps. The room was small and cluttered, but there was an organized chaos to the clutter. On the right, just inside the door, sat the sewing frame, used to stitch pages together, and a rack of endpapers in various colors and patterns. The left side of the room was dominated by an ancient cast iron standing press, which had once conjured images of the Spanish Inquisition until Frank had shown her how it was used to press books.
A workbench occupied most of the back wall. Above the bench, shelves held the various tools of the trade: book weights, awls, sanding blocks, bone folders, an assortment of mallets and spatulas. There was also an array of less specialized supplies, household items like waxed paper, binder clips, and the old blow-dryer she used to remove sticky labels from garage sale finds. At the end of the bench, a glass-front case housed an assortment of solvents and adhesives, pots of dye and tubes of paint, mull and tape to strengthen spines, Japanese tissue to repair torn pages.
The sight of it all had intimidated her once. Now each tool felt like an extension of her love of books, an extension of herself. After her father’s accident, as Grandma Trina insisted on calling it, Frank had offered her a proper job. It was just dusting and emptying wastebaskets at first, but when he caught her hovering in the doorway of the bindery one day, watching with breath held as he painstakingly dissected a first-edition Steinbeck, he had waved her over and given her her first lesson in book restoration.
She had proved a quick study, and after a few weeks was allowed to help regularly in the bindery, handling less valuable books at first, then moving on to rarer and more costly volumes. Years later, book restoration had become an almost sacred vocation. There was something enormously rewarding about taking something that had been neglected, even mistreated, and making it new again, deconstructing it with the greatest of care, then putting it back together again, its spine straightened, its scars removed, its tired beauty restored. Each restoration was a labor of love, like a kind of resurrection, a broken and discarded thing given new life.
Today, her first order of business was to check on several pages from a volume of Tom Swift she’d left soaking in a large enamel tub, in hopes of removing the copious amounts of glue applied during an ill-advised do-it-yourself rebinding attempt. Glue could be a bit of a high-wire act, even for a skilled binder. In the hands of an enthusiastic amateur, it generally spelled disaster.
Using a small spatula, she reached into the water, gently teasing the mixture of glue and old tape from the edge of the top page. Not ready yet, but another few hours should do it. Once she got them dry, she would reassemble the text block, add new boards and endpapers, then re-emboss the repaired spine. It wouldn’t be cheap, but the book would leave the shop with a new lease on life, and with any luck, Mr. Lanier would know better than to attempt any future home repair.
When she was satisfied that she’d done what she could, she dried her hands and flipped off the overheads, her mind already wandering upstairs to her apartment, to her reading chair and the words that had already etched themselves in her mind.
How, Belle? After everything . . . how could you do it?
The words were still with her as she stepped through the door of her apartment and kicked off her shoes. Like the shop, Frank Atwater’s apartment had become a second home growing up. Now, it, too, was hers.