A Short Walk to the Bookshop

by Aleksandra Drake

  This plan comforted me enough to stop my tears.

  I checked my windows and door four more times that night. It was 6:30 when I fell asleep again in the cleansing glow of dawn.

  Chapter Two

  The next time I went to the bookshop, I was not getting groceries. It was sunny out, and the walk downtown (if that small collection of commercially zoned streets could be called a "downtown") was almost pleasant. I didn't even consider taking the car that day, because the sun was beaming directly overhead and casting everything in a lovely brightness that I had to stand in to properly appreciate. I had no other pressing errands to do that day. There was nothing drawing me out besides the siren call of undiscovered books.

  The Christmas bells gently announced Athena and me to the quiet store. It looked a little larger this time and I realized that it was the difference a bit of sun made.

  The owner was busy pulling a table into an open corner of the room. The corner that, last time, had only housed an old couch covered in mismatched throw pillows.

  "Hello, welcome to the bookstore," he said without looking up as he struggled to shove the table. It looked like a somewhat formal dining room table and It overwhelmed the back of the bookshop. When he did actually look up at me, his smile of recognition was more uplifting than I could have anticipated.

  I helped him pivot the table so it was situated evenly in the open space at the back of the shop

  "My name is Sparrow," I blurted. This man and the woman who worked mornings at the grocery store across the street were the only familiar faces in town so far. I wanted him to know my name.

  "Sparrow." He tested the word and I noticed a faint accent to his voice but I couldn’t quite place what it was. Then he smiled and offered his hand. "I'm Diedrich."

  "Did you bring a big lunch today or...?" I asked. My voice sounded weird in my own ears.

  He laughed. "No, it's book club this evening, so I have to lug out the table. Stephen said something about bringing a dessert this time and, if I didn't get the table out, it would surely be the first time he followed through with his plans." Diedrich had rolled his sleeves up over his forearms to bring in the table and I noticed, with an odd jolt, that he had beautiful hands and the lean muscles in his forearms shifted and strained as he gathered chairs to put around the table.

  "You are more than welcome to stay, of course, though I don't know if the conversation of a bunch of old men would be of much interest to you."

  "The book club is all male?" I asked. "Aren't book clubs usually...more stereotypically female?"

  He shrugged. "It wasn't on purpose. It’s just the two men, really. Hardly a club. More like old friends meeting up every three months to argue about who has better taste." He was fidgeting with his sleeves now, pulling them back down around his wrists.

  Just then the door opened to admit an enormous man who grinned widely as he strode forward.

  "Here for book club?" He boomed in lieu of introduction, looking between me and Diedrich expectantly.

  "Oh. No." I said. "I just happened to be--"

  "You should stay!" He insisted. "Stephen said something about peach pie and if he thinks I won't remember that he said it, well he's wrong. Plus we need some new blood. Especially since we can't get this one to join in." He jerked his head toward Diedrich.

  "You're not part of the book club?" I asked Diedrich.

  He was sitting in one of the chairs now, his elbow on the table and resting his head on his hand.

  "I supply the books." He said blandly. When I laughed, he smiled.

  "He’s an honorary member," The large man said "but we’ll wear him down eventually."

  Diedrich was smiling a little bit, but was also getting to his feet and edging back towards the cash register.

  "Ah, there he goes. We've lost him," Richard teased.

  I laughed, also feeling a bit like the way Diedrich looked. Like I didn't belong in this conversation.

  "Really though, you may as well stay if you are already here, right? There’s coffee in it for you if you do, and we need some fresh blood like I said. To liven up the place."

  Another man had entered the store and was approaching the table. His hair was mostly white, but still very thick and curly, making it hard to judge his age.

  "You've got to stop calling young people fresh blood, Richard. It makes them uncomfortable,” he said, sitting down.

  "Stephen. Don't sneak up like that."

  The newcomer, Stephen, crossed his legs and shrugged. "Who's sneaking? It's no one else's fault you've got tunnel vision any time a woman is around." He said it a bit quieter as if he was wary of me hearing it, but still in a joking manner. Then he turned to me directly.

  "Are you new in town? I don't think I've seen you at Church."

  Richard sat down and leaned back, lifting the forelegs of his chair off the ground, looking like an overgrown schoolboy. "Oh boy, here we go. I was only inviting her to the book club. At least I didn't open immediately with a dose of Catholic Guilt."

  "Oh, I don't go to church," I said, attempting a word in edgewise.

  "Don't tell him that, now he will really be on your case," Richard said. Stephen was laughing though and Richard was still smiling.

  They were the kind of friends who made anyone around them feel like friends too. Despite only knowing them for a few minutes, I felt specifically included in their banter. It wasn’t long until it was noted that Stephen had arrived empty-handed, and I got pulled in by the tidal wave of admonition that he had forgotten the rumored desserts. I suddenly found myself part of the group.

  "Well," I said, testing my voice against the cacophony. Instantly, the men went silent and my face went red. "You know, Diedrich went to pains to get this table in here, so why don't I run across the street and get some snacks?" I paused in the silence that followed my offer.

  "Since I'm here anyway," I added. Oh why did I open my mouth at all?

  "You don't have to do that." Stephen was saying but Richard was already getting his wallet out.

  "I'll buy a pie for the table," he said, dropping a twenty on the table.

  Diedrich and Stephen sort of shook their heads but when I picked up the cash, they both offered some as well.

  "Chips. Your choice which," Stephen said.

  "And bee-- wait, are you old enough to buy beer?" Richard asked, suddenly studying my face in an almost unnerving way.

  I scoffed, taking his offered bills. "Yes. But thanks."

  Diedrich, with a remonstrative glance at the others that didn't go unnoticed, offered to come with me and help me carry their orders. The admonition was clear in his voice but I didn't know how to respond.

  "Don't let them boss you around." He said to me as we stepped out of the shop.

  "It was me who offered to run to the store. It's alright."

  Diedrich smiled. "I know you did. But those guys...if you give them an inch they will take a mile."

  "You sound like you are speaking from experience." He didn't touch me but I could feel his hand hovering over my back protectively as we stepped off the curb and into the street.

  Athena trotted along side us, happily wagging her tail.

  "When I mentioned a book club in Richard's presence, it was in a vague and offhand way. I was just thinking aloud."

  "And he took it as a blood oath." I finished.

  Diedrich laughed a genuine laugh that was louder than his normal speaking voice. It felt good to make him laugh like that. It felt like an accomplishment.

  "You are absolutely right. Spot on."

  I picked up one of the shopping baskets when we walked into the market across the street, but he gently took it from me as we wandered the aisles.

  "Why don't you participate in the club?" I asked when the silence between us had lingered on for too long to be comfortable. The look on his face made me think he was more comfortable with silence.

  "Sorry," I mumbled. I felt like I was vibrating from the inside with the unaccustomed surge on en
ergy from socializing with a group of people, suddenly, without warning. My blood was coursing with the sheer terrifying adrenaline of it. But I had gone too far, stupidly asking a personal question of a stranger who now looked ready to crawl out of his skin.

  "I know it's childish," He said finally, shifting a strawberry and rhubarb pie from one arm to the other. I tossed a stack of paper plates in the basket.

  "I wouldn't guess you were the childish type."

  "Don't let the gray hair fool you. The truth is that I never properly learned how to get out from behind my mother's skirts when people talked to me. Only now I have bookshelves instead of my mother's legs."

  I remembered in a flash of vivid memory the first day of second grade when I was crying as my mom left me in the front of the school. Then I thought of the bookcases on both sides of my bed.

  "That's not so childish." I said, but I wasn't sure if he heard me.

  It wasn't until we were crossing the street back to Chapter One that he spoke again, with an airy casualness that made it seem like the seven minute silence between us had been imagined by me.

  "I do sometimes feel like the effort of repeatedly denying them may be greater than the effort being part of the group would take."

  The Christmas bells on the door jingled as we entered.

  "Uh oh, they were talking about us," Richard said as we walked in.

  "How do you know?" Stephen asked, starting to unpack the shopping bags.

  "They’re smiling conspiratorially,"

  "I’ll go to log books in the back. Let me know if you need anything." Diedrich said, but before he left he met my gaze with slightly raised eyebrows. He was both asking if I was alright with being left there and silently offering help if I wasn't.

  I pulled out one of the chairs and sat down, patting my knee for Athena to rest her chin on my lap in her usual way. Diedrich, satisfied, disappeared.

  Richard and Stephen had read The Death of Ivan Ilych and briefly discussed it, but Diedrich had been right about “Book Club” being loosely defined. The two men spent a considerable amount of their time together ribbing each other and explaining to me that, even though the book club was supposed to meet seasonally, this particular meeting had been scheduled for December and kept getting pushed back.

  “Richard decided that going on a date with a coworker was more important in December,” Stephen explained.

  “Yeah, well in January it was Stephen’s fault.”

  “I had the flu.”

  “Excuses, excuses.” Stephen winked at me.

  “You try working in a high school and see how likely you are to be healthy on any given day in the winter,” Stephen replied, leaning back in his chair so that the front two legs hovered an inch off the ground. He looked a bit like an overgrown high schooler himself.

  “Well, late February is still winter so…” I offered.

  “We will just have to choose a short book if we are going to have our normal March meeting. You’ll come next time too, right Sparrow?” Richard asked. I glanced at Stephen and he shrugged with a half smile.

  And so I was inaugurated into the book club.

  My hands were shaking uncontrollably as I walked home that evening. Twilight was falling fast and I wanted to run. There were eyes in every shadowy patch of underbrush. My legs trembled and my heart pounded as if I already was running.

  "Athena," I called in a shaky voice. She had been sniffing along happily, the darkness had no effect on her, but at my word she snapped to attention as if she had just clocked in at work. She was all business as she fell into step at my heel, her fluffy fur brushing warmly against my leg. She kept an eye all around us. I watched her, and the incessant need to look over my shoulder every few steps and break into a panicked sprint towards home ebbed as I observed her practiced watchfulness.

  It felt like a journey of a hundred miles, but finally I was sequestered in my home, with the door and windows locked, and the rooms and closets cleared and double checked.

  But still. My hands. They kept shaking. I put the kettle on the stove and buried my nose in the cardboard box of chamomile tea bags while I waited for the water to boil, but I couldn't quite come down from the dizzying heights of extended social interaction.

  Those men had been alright, as far as men went. They spent the evening talking about how reading The Death of Ivan Ilyich had turned them all into hypochondriacs and detailing the minor aches and pains they had which they were then convinced would one day be the cause of their ultimate demise.

  Somehow they made it funny.

  -----

  It was snowing faintly, but the waning crescent moon was occasionally visible through the clouds as Diedrich sat on his fire escape, calculating.

  It had been three years, four months, two weeks, and one day since his last cigarette.

  He could still taste it on nights like this when he breathed in deep, the damp coating his lungs like the health food version of a forbidden craving.

  His father used to make a coffee cake that was the envy of all of his school friends when he packed it in his lunch pail. Last summer he had seen a coffee cake that looked like it in a bakery window in Seattle. It was a vegan bakery. He should have known better. But it had looked so enticing.

  So he went in and bought the entire cake.

  Sitting on a bench overlooking Puget Sound, he had taken a bite of the impostor cake and wished immediately that he had never seen it.

  Maybe Sparrow had moved here from Seattle.

  Diedrich tapped his fingertips along the weathered kitchen chair he kept illegally on the fire escape, his blood racing for the memory of nicotine.

  She had that look. The look people get when they lived in a city. Kind of wide-eyed, like a rabbit or squirrel, ready to dash in to the undergrowth at any moment. The stare of someone who knows a lot and doesn't want to know any more.

  He would ask her if she had moved from Seattle the next time he saw her. He mentally added it to the list of things to say when it got too quiet. He could ask her if she ever had gone to the magic shop or if Left Bank Books was still open, though he knew it was.

  She had seemed to fit in at the book club. Strange though it was, what with her being the only woman and a generation younger than the rest of them. The guys seemed tickled to have a young woman there to show off to. She had said she would come back to the following meeting too, and had left with a copy of the book. Diedrich somewhat doubted that she would, however. The book they’d decided on was boring and grim, civil war history, which was ideal reading for old men, but not pretty young blondes. He’d noticed a wild spark in her eyes as she’d left. He hoped she would come back to shop, at least.

  Chapter Three

  The following Tuesday, Diedrich didn't expect to have many customers for at least a few hours. He was settled on the couch at the back of the shop near the coffeemaker, a book spread out on his lap. When he didn't know what else to read, he usually picked up something from the gardening section. He liked to skim through the text, but mainly he liked the flowers. He had no yard, and no space even for potted plants, but looking at flower gardens reminded him of the house he grew up in. His father had been an amateur horticulturist and loved attempting to raise the most finicky and difficult plants he could find, just for the challenge.

  Flipping through the pages created a small bubble of calm around him, a little haven in the midst of his day. With the large books spread out over his knees he felt like a kid again, but this time armed with a large mug of black coffee that steamed comfortingly in the corner of his vision.

  When the bells on the door jingled, he reluctantly laid the book open over the arm of the couch and stood up to greet whoever it was. Seeing Sheri standing there, her gray hair styled into soft waves and wearing an outfit that looked like it took more than five minutes to pull together, made him stop. He felt cold and he remembered Catherine's laugh. Catherine had had her mother's mouth, and the way Sheri's lips turned up in one corner in that unsure smile wa
s so familiar.

  "Hello Diedrich," she greeted, her smile widening but not taking another step nearer to him.

  "What brings you to the bookshop?" He reached his hand out to rest it on the nearest bookshelf, leaning slightly against it.

  "You know I like to check in on you from time to time. How are you doing?"

  Diedrich cleared his throat and turned his back on her. "I'll make you some coffee, if you like. You can come and sit."

  She followed him silently to the back of the store and perched herself on the edge of the couch, laying her patent leather purse against her matching patent leather shoes. When he returned with an additional mug of coffee, he noticed a large diamond gleaming on her ring finger.