The Bookshop Hotel

by A. K. Klemm

  He was taken aback. “Nothing. I don’t want anything, AJ.” Then he left the room. AJ felt relief and then guilt, then an unexpected wave of disappointment.

  She tossed the book aside and picked up another, a blue book on her nightstand called If These Walls Had Ears. It was a biography of a house, and she read tidbits of it when she wasn’t sure how to feel. It was the kind of book that reminded her to think outside her own life, outside her own generation.

  She held the book in her hands and stroked the photograph of the old house on the dust jacket. The house, like this old hotel, had such a rich and long history. Family, love, despair, loss, culture—it was a home.

  Granddaddy Jack had bought the old hotel from Wilbur Bartholomew James III in 1947, the year Maude was born. As a boy, James had seen the old building constructed by his very own grandfather. He’d grown up in it, seen it turned into a hotel by his father, and done his best to keep it alive through a depression and a war.

  After losing two sons in World War II, Mr. James was old and tired and happily sold the place to a young and wealthy Jack Walters, who had made his money writing popular little serials while working in the hotel lobby as a bellhop after coming home from the war himself.

  Wiltree, as they called the third Wilbur James, liked young Jack. When the newlywed said he had a baby on the way, a successful career as a novelist, and no longer wanted to work in the hotel, Wiltree offered to sell it to him instead of letting him quit.

  “I’d like to retire. This would be a great place to have babies, Jacky. I know.”

  Jack kept it running through the fifties and sixties, and sometime in the seventies, the place sort of died. Maude closed the doors when Jack couldn’t do menial maintenance on the place anymore. She was scared he’d fall off the roof while replacing shingles or trimming tree limbs. Jack spent most his time in the back room of the house he’d bought with his wife when they first got married and continued writing his hundred-and-seventy-five-page westerns. And the town started to wither.

  AJ lost herself in a paint chip on her bedroom wall. Hers was the only suite that hadn’t been repainted during the restoration. She liked the distressed look, and when she came to her room at night, it reminded her of the building’s history and gave her the drive to wake up the next day. This place had a legacy, and she couldn’t let it down.

  If these walls had ears, what would they tell her?

  “Matthew!” AJ got up and ran down the hall. He was standing shirtless in flannel pants, barefoot. “Oh.” She looked away.

  “AJ, you’ve seen me shirtless.” He found her bashfulness humorous. She was the one who had been married before.

  “Well, I had an idea.”

  “I’m going to bed. Get Ivy.”

  It was AJ’s turn to be taken aback. “I…”

  “Yes?”

  “I…”

  “You’re gonna have to say it, AJ. Just spit it out.”

  I need you, she thought, but the words wouldn’t come out. She just turned and headed up the stairwell alone.

  There was so much in storage on the hotel’s fourth floor. All the suites had been cleaned once through and bandaged a bit—but not quite restored—and then used for junk until further notice. Maude had wanted everything from the hotel out of the house and out of the garage.

  “If you’re opening up, this crap has to go. Daddy’s gone. I don’t have to store his memories anymore.” AJ’s grandmother was a hard woman, void of the typical sentiments AJ found present in other people’s grandmothers. Abigail Lacey had seemed more of a grandmother to AJ all these years than Maude.

  Then again, with Sidney off globetrotting, Maude had been more of a mother, or what AJ imagined mothers would be if they weren’t Sidney. Sidney had always seemed like more of a distant sister or cousin who tried to fit AJ into her busy schedule once in a blue moon.

  AJ had been angry at Maude for flushing Granddaddy Jack’s stuff out so quickly, so urgently. Now, she was grateful. The hotel’s entire history had been crammed into suite 3A. Her leg ached as she got to the last step and made her way to 3A’s door. She hadn’t been up there since Matthew helped her moved everything there, before Ivy had joined them. Had it really been over a year?

  The room was dusty, and AJ had to swat away more than a few spider webs and bugs. She needed to make a point to have these rooms cleaned once a month. She’d ask Ivy in the morning or call Amberlee Jones’s cleaning service. The door creaked behind her, and she jumped a little.

  “Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you.” It was Matthew. He was dressed now, looking a little less impatient than before. “What’s your idea?”

  “Do you remember when we were moving this stuff in here? Those boxes of guest books?”

  “Yeah. I think I set them…” Matthew started poking his way through the stacks and piles. “…over here.” He pulled the lid off a box.

  “That would’ve taken me all night.” AJ started making her way to the back of the suite, but Matthew held his hand up and swung the box into his arms. He carried it to the hallway and set it near the service elevator.

  “That’s only 1954 to ‘65,” he said. He fished his way back into the deep. “It looks like you’ve got a box of ‘65 to closing and three or four really old boxes. Oh, and there’s a whole box of just weddings.”

  “Bring the ‘65 to close and the weddings.”

  Matthew did as she asked, and once the boxes were in the service elevator, he asked, “So?”

  “To my room.” AJ could see he was frustrated with her, but she still wasn’t entirely sure why.

  “I want to hunt down the addresses of all the hotel’s guests and invite them to the store.”

  “Just invite them? Or have an event.”

  “A gala. A huge party. I want to meet the people who made this place possible.”

  “It would take a lot of time to plan.”

  “A summer gala, next year. That would give us plenty of time. We could decorate it like a June wedding.”

  “A wedding, huh?” Matthew looked down at AJ’s hand. The gold band there sat loose on her left ring finger.

  He carried the boxes to her room, grabbed a pillow off her chaise, and leaned against the back of a chair she’d brought back after estate sale hunting in the city. She loved buying weird furniture at those sales, and in the year since they’d opened, the bookshop had more of the eclectic feel of a bookshop and less of the hotel it once was.

  The café and Matthew’s suite had kept the look Granddaddy Jack had loved so much, but AJ and Ivy had peppered their space with more and more of their own unique tastes, and it had spread into the store.

  He liked the chair, but it seemed to remind him over and over again that AJ didn’t mind change, she just minded changing for him. He eyed the ring on her finger. That ring seemed to haunt him, and it seemed to haunt her, too. Why couldn’t she just take it off?

  AJ had a pen and paper in hand and her laptop on the floor in front of her. She opened the 1965-to-close box first, thinking that more of these guests would still live at their old addresses, and well, frankly, be alive. She’d start there. February 3rd, 1965, Daniel and Jane Litwin, 324 Kansas St. If the city and state weren’t included, did that mean they were nearby? The research began.

  After the tenth entry, AJ and Matthew leaned back and sighed. They’d been at it for hours, hunting down names on every search engine they could find. Some had been easy. A few were yet to be found. AJ had a crick in her neck. Matthew had his laptop open. He had designed a beautiful invitation for the gala and was just waiting on AJ to choose official dates.

  Matthew was good with a computer—he had designed all the shop’s websites and managed the online sales a lot of the time. AJ didn’t know how she could have done everything without him. How lucky was she that he, of all people, had answered her ad?

  “What was your wedding like?” Matthew asked, not so much because he was interested, but because she never talked about it. Don’t most women talk abou
t those things? Where they had finally found their dress, the colors, the video… He knew that’s what his mother did. AJ didn’t seem to carry remnants of her wedding or even her marriage, other than her ring and the books she read.

  “There were violets, lots and lots of violets. Kevin’s mom loves violets. She wore a purple dress. Violets and white lilies. The lilies were hard to find, ironic for a Lily Hollow wedding, I know, but they were a tad out of season. But she really wanted accent lilies.”

  Matthew raised his eyebrows. She sounded like she was describing someone else’s wedding, something she had observed as an attendee rather than the bride.

  “What did you want?” he asked.

  “Mmm?” AJ was puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, in your dream wedding, what did it look like?”

  “I guess I never really thought about it. A wedding isn’t just about the bride. It’s a marriage of two people. You can’t have some kind of template wedding where you just ‘insert groom here. You have to know who you’re marrying and what makes them happy. Kevin wanted to make his mom happy, so I just wanted whatever Mrs. Rhys wanted.”

  “And if you married again?”

  “It would have to be something that honored the relationship. Unique to us.”

  “So you’d marry again?”

  “Oh I don’t know. I guess I haven’t really thought about it.” She shifted in her position and rubbed her neck, pulling a few strands of hair around her fingers as she did so.

  “AJ.” He pushed the laptop aside and moved the papers to get closer to her. She leaned away from him at first, but he took her hand and pulled her whole body close. “AJ, I need to know.”

  His shoulder felt foreign, his build all wrong and completely different from Kevin’s. But it was nice. She couldn’t help but sink into his embrace. She hadn’t been aware of being held since Kevin, and she couldn’t remember the last time Kevin had held her.

  “Matthew, I just don’t know. I mean, I’ve only ever known myself with Kevin. I always thought I was meant for Kevin.”

  “Kevin’s gone.” Matthew just held her close, her bones poking hard into his shoulder. She was so stick-like, he thought.

  She pulled away from him. “We need to pick this stuff up and get some rest.”

  He began to pick up their research. AJ couldn’t help but look to the walls of her suite. If these walls had ears… if they had a mouth to speak all they’d heard, what would they say?

  “I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one.… Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil.… There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?”

  — John Steinbeck, East of Eden

  Kevin

  AJ and Kevin had gone off to college together, eighteen, wide-eyed, and in love. Naturally, the town of Lily Hollow imagined them the star couple of their university.

  It hadn’t quite been that way. Instead, they’d become casually distant. People who bothered to know them imagined they might be a couple, but no one really knew that for certain or took that for granted. They greeted each other casually and studied together like they had in high school, but they were mostly just comfortable friends by the end of their freshman year. Most days, AJ knew she would marry him, but others, she wasn’t even sure if they were together.

  At a bar for a classmate’s birthday party one night, Kevin walked into another room with a girl. He played pool, leaning over another girl with his hand on her hip, pretending to teach her angles. AJ wasn’t certain if she felt jealousy, relief, or neglect, but she immediately turned her attention to the guy across the bar she’d been trying to ignore all night out of respect to Kevin. In the five seconds it took for them to lock eyes, her respect for Kevin and any thought of him was gone.

  She felt her cheeks flush and suddenly felt hot and overwhelmed by the bar. She didn’t belong here. There were too many people, it was too loud, it was too warm, and her long-sleeved shirt was too tight. She got up and walked out. She remembered it being cool outside as the door to the bar thudded closed and the air hit her face. She was finally able to take in her breath.

  She heard the door crack open behind her, and there he was, that guy, with his lips on hers. He was taller than Kevin. Thinner, too. She didn’t know what to do with her hands, but he didn’t give her the chance to be uncertain. He boosted her up with one arm, and her feet were off the ground and her back was pressed against the cold brick.

  She pulled her mouth away from his. “I…”

  Then Kevin opened the door. “Get in the car, now.”

  In an instant, she was on the ground. The guy had released his grip. Kevin began to lead her to the parking lot, but the guy touched her wrist. “You alright?”

  “Mmmm, yes. He’s—”

  “Look at me. Are you alright?” The guy looked straight into her eyes.

  “She’s fine. Get in the car,” Kevin said again.

  As they were pulling out of the parking lot, she stared at the guy still standing on the stoop, through the car window. The streetlight glinted off his head. After that night, she often wondered what the guy thought he saw in Kevin, why he was so certain that she’d rather be with him than with her boyfriend.

  “Don’t do that to me, AJ,” Kevin said once they were on the highway.

  “Likewise,” she said. The girl he’d been flirting with in the bar flashed in her mind and turned her stomach.

  He lifted his hand off the steering wheel where a phone number had been scrawled. He spit on his fingers and rubbed it off. “Done.”

  “Thanks.”

  That was that. It was the only time she’d kissed anyone but Kevin, and he was gone in a flash. She didn’t even know his name.

  Later, AJ would realize what it was that guy thought he’d seen in Kevin. It was something she would later feel to her core. Kevin loved her, true, but Kevin loved her possessively, like a favorite childhood toy he doesn’t want anyone else to touch. On a day-to-day basis, if it’s out of sight, then it’s out of mind, but should anyone else show an interest… As far as Kevin was concerned, she belonged to him. Sometimes, it was a really sweet thing, but sometimes, when he was feeling especially insecure, it was a hard way to live.

  He put a ring on her finger the next week, and a year later, they were married. People they knew from college were mildly surprised, but no one really cared. The town of Lily Hollow, of course, threw a party. It was their own royal romance.

  It could be construed as a sad story—a loveless marriage—but it wasn’t. They loved each other. Even if it was an odd sort of love, they loved each other. They would have loved each other forever, despite all Kevin’s issues. Even if there were lulls in conversation every few months, she would do what she could for him, and he always did what he could for her. His ability to manage simply fluctuated in extremes.

  AJ read history books and imagined that this was what arranged marriages felt like. This was why it took so long for women to fight for the right to choose, because it wasn’t awful. Sometimes, it got lonely, but it was always mostly comfortable, and some days, it was even pleasant. He never cheated on her, and even if it wasn’t romance novel or Hollywood worthy, they had good sex. Sex was how they got through the lulls and the monotony.

  She was half asleep when she was remembering all this, and the memories came to her in a haze, like a dream. There was a tap on the door, and then Matthew opened it carrying coffee.

  “You slept in.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s ok.” He sat on the edge of her bed and handed her a mug. “Ivy’s downstairs, we’re fine. Take your time.”

  “I was up late getting shipments for the week ready.”

  “I know. I already dropped them off a
t the post office.”

  Online sales were what kept the store running when the citizens of Lily Hollow seemed to already own everything. Usually, the middle of the month when the book clubs were set until a meeting, the school kids were in the middle of a unit, and tourists weren’t touring was when those online sales came in handy.

  “What were you dreaming about?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You had this look on your face when I came in, and you’re typically pretty expressionless. I felt like I interrupted something.”

  AJ laughed a little. “I was kissing.”

  “Your husband.”

  AJ laughed a little louder this time, ashamed. “No, actually. Not my husband.”

  Matthew’s eyebrows rose as he took a bit of coffee. “Naughty, AJ.”

  Abigail

  It wasn’t long after that when Matthew left in the middle of the night. He didn’t want the ladies at Abigail’s to start gabbing around town, although he couldn’t keep Abigail from seeing him. The middle of the night for normal people was already morning for a baker.

  Abigail watched the man leave out the side door in the distance and sighed, but she kept her thoughts to herself. AJ and that young man were probably having a lovers’ quarrel and didn’t even know it. Abigail spied the boy throwing a suitcase in the car and admired his strong arms. Jack’s had looked like that once, before he grew old like she was now, before he withered away.

  Christmas would be here in two weeks. What a shame he was leaving now. AJ would need him most during the holidays. Or maybe she wouldn’t. What did Abigail know about anything anymore? The older she got, the more she realized she didn’t know as much as she ever thought she did, not about her life or anyone else’s.

  Ivy