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“That’s good. Okay, I’ll look into it and call you back.”
“Thanks, Rhonda, I appreciate that.”
As I roll open the barn door, the bookshop looks different to me this morning. I used to picture it as the realization of one woman’s single-minded pursuit. Now I see the business as the fruition of a loving couple’s efforts. I see my own story differently now, too. I don’t suppose my dad ever imagined I’d read the transcript of his police interview, but a little faith in the mystical beyond allows me to believe he left those words for me to find, breadcrumbs in a fairy-tale forest.
On the physical plane of existence, meanwhile, I need Red Barn Books to provide me with a living. I sit down with a pad of paper to list all the things I have to accomplish by June first, but the doings of past decades are more vibrant in my mind than the events of coming days. Sam’s reaction to reading about the grandfather he never met makes me think of my own grandparents. We’re estranged because of how they treated my mom and accused my dad. Now I know their parenting was warped by the aftershocks of a genocide. I imagine my grandmother sent away like a package in the post while her family was left behind to be murdered. How could she not be damaged? She passed that generational trauma on to my mother, the sensitive girl with a dark storm in her brain who birthed a daughter she didn’t live long enough to raise.
Nana and Papa are nearly ninety now, the two of them living in a Miami retirement community. Instead of making a list, I find myself writing them a letter. I tell them what I know about Mom, what they don’t know about me, what I want to know about them. I invite them to write back, to call, to let me visit if they want. I fill so many pages, I put two stamps on the envelope just in case. Wanting to wing it on its way before I second-guess myself, I walk to my mailbox on Ridgetop Road and raise the red flag.
The hours of this day are slipping through my fingers. I make myself lunch, then head back to the bookshop, determined to get something done. I’m crossing the lawn when a bee buzzes by so close I instinctively wave it away. Then I stop, stunned into stillness, and turn toward the oak.
Something’s swirling around the hollow in the tree. I don’t believe it at first, but there’s no denying that aerial dance. Elated, I break into a run. A vigilant soldier zooms out to confront me. Motionless, I give the bee time to learn I’m no threat. It buzzes off so quickly, I wonder if it recognized me. That’s impossible, though, isn’t it? No more impossible than the presence of the bees themselves. The queen and her attendants, sequestered deep within the hive, must have survived September’s massacre. In repopulating her decimated world, her offspring have somehow inherited the knowledge I’m a friend. It makes me glad I’ve hired someone else to mow my lawn this summer; I’d hate to see what retribution those soldier bees would visit on Joe.
I pull over an Adirondack chair and sit beneath the tree awhile, awed by the miracle of a colony reborn. I’m thinking how content I’d be to spend the afternoon watching bees come and go when I get a notification of an online order. Reluctantly leaving the bees to rebuild their city, I go find the book and package it for mailing to a man in Maine. It’s a twenty-dollar history of ancient Rome that’ll net me half that after processing fees and postage. Looking at my year-to-date sales summary, the total is underwhelming, but at least the trajectory is on the rise.
So far this year, I’ve added hundreds of listings to my online storefront, but my prized possession, the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass that charmed me when I first set foot in this abandoned bookshop, still hasn’t sold. I must have priced it too high, I think, taking it from the bookcase where it’s featured face out. Looking at the engraving on the frontispiece, I see something of Sam in the casual cant of Whitman’s hips. Leafing through its pages, the opening words of his “Poem of Walt Whitman, an American” arrest my attention:
I CELEBRATE myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.
Suddenly, I’m crying, big sobs bursting out of my throat. Whitman never affected me like this before. Right now, though, I’m thinking about the unkind assumptions that drove a brother and sister apart. Though too late for reconciliation, the convergence of their stories at long last has given Sam cause for celebration. As for every atom belonging to me as good belonging to you? That’s a truth so vast it sums up all the world’s religions, and the whole of science, too.
My to-do list is forgotten as I lose myself in the poem. I’m dazed by Whitman’s lusty language, each image an explosion of color and feeling. An hour passes, maybe more, by the time I close the book’s embossed covers. I haven’t finished the whole poem—who could, in one sitting? Even so, the words that stirred Whitman’s heart 166 years ago have traveled through time to touch my own. That’s a miracle worth holding on to.
The value of Leaves of Grass is what convinced me Red Barn Books could be a viable business. I ought to drop the price and take what I can get for it. Instead, I deactivate the listing. A day may come when I’ll want to place these pages in the right person’s hands. Until then, I put the book back where it belongs: here, with me.
My phone’s ring snaps me out of my poetic revery. I pick up the device, smaller than a mass-market paperback but with more computing power than it took to send men to the moon. We should have stopped technology in Whitman’s time, I think; what more do humans really need than trains and typeset?
“I’ll have the McIntyre house ready to show at five o’clock,” Rhonda announces.
“You mean, today?”
Her voice gets even sharper than usual. “Didn’t you say Billy’s grandson was eager to see it?”
“He is, yeah.” It’s past three. I don’t know when Sam’s workshop will be over. “Can you hang on a minute, Rhonda?”
I send Sam a text he responds to right away.
awesome yeah 5 is perfect
“Okay, Rhonda, that’ll work out, thanks.”
“You know what road it’s on?” she asks.
“I do, but not the house number.”
She gives it to me, then says, “All right, then, we’ll see you at five.”
Who’s “we”? I’m about to ask when Rhonda abruptly ends the call.
I text Sam the address and ask if he wants to pick me up so we can drive down together. Instead, he shoots back:
Leaving soon okay if we walk from your place?
I give his text a thumbs-up. By the time I close the barn for the day, I’ve sold one book for twenty dollars and removed another worth twenty thousand from my online store. What George Hecht said in 1955 holds true today, it seems: Few fortunes are made in the book business.
