The Bookshop of Yesterdays

by Amy Meyerson

  When my parents met, they were both living in New York in lives they’d retired before I was born. Mom was twenty with ironed hair and bright miniskirts. She was the lead singer of the Lady Loves, an all-girl band that had a residency at a club in the East Village where Dad represented the owner. When the owner had introduced them, Mom had looked at Dad’s extended hand like it was covered in mud. He’d followed her eyes down his suit and tie to his loafers.

  I enjoyed your set, Dad said, putting his hand away.

  You like rock? she said with the disdain only a twenty-year-old could muster.

  Jesus, Suzy. The guy’s trying to give you a compliment. Cut him some slack for fuck’s sake, the owner said.

  Fuck you, Harry. Mom grabbed one of the amps and stormed offstage.

  Don’t let her get to you, the owner said to Dad. Suzy thinks ’cause she’s a musician she has to act like an asshole every now and again.

  From the first time Mom spoke to Dad, that was it. He went to see the Lady Loves every Friday night. He liked to watch Mom sing, waiting for the moment when she forgot she was onstage, forgot her tough facade, and her face softened as the sweetness of her voice consumed her. It happened during every performance. In that moment, he saw that she was still young, that she hadn’t yet been hardened by life.

  There was nothing noteworthy about the night Mom sat at his table. After she finished her set, she pulled up a chair and tied her hair away from her face. Her features were small and girlish. She didn’t smile, but Dad could tell she wanted to.

  How many ties do you own? she asked Dad.

  The question startled him, and he adjusted the knot on his wool tie. He owned so many ties he rarely wore the same tie twice. No one had ever asked Dad about his collection. As far as he could tell, no one had ever noticed.

  About two hundred, he admitted.

  Why would anyone need two hundred ties?

  They wouldn’t.

  So why do you own so many?

  Dad didn’t know how to explain it to her. His parents and younger brother had died when he was in college. His uncles had been killed in the war before he was born. His grandparents were long gone. He had childhood friends, law school buddies, others at the firm, a steady stream of girlfriends, but no one he could count on to give him a birthday present each year, to make plans every Thanksgiving. So Dad bought himself ties for Christmases and promotions, a reminder that he could look after himself.

  It would be weirder if I owned two hundred pairs of shoes, he said.

  Mom giggled and ran off to help her band pack up. From the first time Dad made her laugh, that was it for Mom, too.

  * * *

  When I went back inside, Dad was sitting at the dining room table, trying to fold linen napkins into Mom’s perfect origami.

  “Here,” I said, taking them from his hands. I showed him how to fold it into three long strips, to tuck one side up and then the other into a perfect envelope.

  “You make it look so easy,” he said, and disappeared behind the island into the kitchen.

  Dad rummaged around the cabinets, banging pans as he put them away. I took out my phone and typed “Evelyn Weston,” stopping when I couldn’t think of anything else to add to my search. Several Evelyn Westons popped up with LinkedIn, Twitter and current IMDB pages. The Evelyn Weston I was looking for had died long ago, in an era before social media and the twenty-four-hour news cycle. I’d have to find out about her the old-fashioned way, by talking to people instead of devices.

  Dad returned with two wooden candleholders. The candles sat crookedly in the bases.

  “Turns out I’m not a whittler.” When Dad retired, he’d needed a hobby. He’d never been particularly handy. Anything more complicated than changing a light bulb had required the aid of a handyman. Now, suddenly in his mid-sixties, Dad was determined to become a craftsman. Mom had suggested he take a class, but Dad insisted that part of being a craftsman was being self-taught, so he bought books and magazines, watched YouTube videos. He started with a rocking chair, then quickly downgraded to a box. “Did I show you the bookshelf I made? I’m staining it now. If you didn’t know, you might actually think someone had paid for it.”

  “Did you know Billy’s wife, Evelyn?” I asked more abruptly than I’d intended.

  “Your mom told you about Evelyn?” He sounded surprised without being alarmed. Then again, Dad was good at containing his emotions. He’d had practice for years as a lawyer.

  “She said she named me after Evelyn, after her love of The Tempest.” I fudged it a little. If Dad thought Mom told me more than she had, he might tell me more, too. “Were she and Mom close?”

  Dad reached for the candleholder, worrying the wood with the pad of his thumb. “Since they were in kindergarten.”

  “They grew up together?” Dad nodded, his attention still focused on the unstable candleholder. “How’d she die?”

  He peered over at me. “Why are you asking?”

  “I didn’t know Billy was married. I’d never even heard the name Evelyn before today. Do you know how she died?”

  “Evelyn had a massive seizure.”

  “Was she epileptic?”

  “I don’t think so.” Dad looked through the French doors toward Mom in the garden, inspecting the soil beneath her rosebushes. “Why don’t you go see what’s taking your mom so long.”

  “She said she’d be in in a minute. What was wrong with Evelyn?”

  The oven timer went off, and Dad sprung at its chime. Of course he wasn’t going to tell me about Evelyn. He and Mom were a unit, inextricably close, and sometimes it had made me jealous how coupled they were. Of course, if Mom had a secret, Dad did, too.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  While the brick facade of Prospero Books looked just as I remembered, everything around it had changed. Sunset Junction, once little more than a relic of the old railcar system, had become a destination of its own, complete with cafés, a coffee bar, a cheese shop and boutiques. Every metered spot along Sunset Boulevard was taken. The sidewalks were lined with diners brunching under awnings, with couples pushing strollers.

  I stood outside Prospero Books, staring at the store’s old sign, repainted but otherwise the same. Prospero towered above the window, staff in right hand, a book in left, purple cape and white hair windblown behind him. The picture window looked the same, too, only it displayed titles by Lionel Shriver, Isabel Allende and Michael Pollan in place of the new releases of years before.

  The smell of the store hit me as soon as I entered. Freshly cut paper. White musk. Jasmine. Black pepper. Coffee beans. I’d forgotten the sound of the brass bell on the door, the corkboard in the entryway, now covered in flyers for personal trainers and Pilates classes. The store itself was smaller than I remembered. The ceilings not as high. The shelves more narrowly spaced. They were divided, then subdivided. Fiction into literary, popular, banned, historical, classic, feminist, LGBTQ, science fiction and fantasy, mystery, noir, foreign language and small presses. The lime green of the exposed brick walls still looked fresh. The mosaic tables still glittered blue and gold in the café’s bright light. I didn’t see Lee. I didn’t see any of the poets in trench coats sipping espresso, the pretty girls in overalls stalking the shelves. There were still pretty girls. They were skinnier now, without as much eyeliner. Every table in the café was still occupied, customers intensely typing on laptop keyboards instead of writing in notebooks. Everything buzzed with activity, the store still alive with the possibility of Prospero’s magic books.

  Against the far wall, the wild-haired, Dylan Thomas–reciting man from Billy’s funeral was inspecting a shelf, scratching checkmarks beside a list of titles. His T-shirt read Smile, You’re on Camera.

  “You were at Billy’s funeral?” I asked as I approached him. He glanced up from his clipboard. His crystalline eyes regarded me with little recognition. “You
read the Dylan Thomas poem? I’m Miranda.”

  He surveyed me with those candied eyes, their flit clinical rather than flattering. “The prodigal niece appears.”

  “That’s me.” I smiled in the way that usually made strangers think I was cute—never sexy, always cute—but he didn’t return the smile. I held out my hand. He shook it perfunctorily.

  “Malcolm,” he said as if I should have already known his name.

  The phone rang, and he released my hand to walk over to the desk.

  “Prospero,” he said as he picked up. His tone changed as soon as he started to talk about books. “White Teeth is out of stock. We can order you a copy.” He held the phone in the crook of his neck as he typed something into the ancient computer monitor behind the desk. The desk area wasn’t private enough to be the mess that it was. An overflowing bin of advance reader copies, unpacked boxes of books, a calendar with first names and publishers scrawled onto several dates. “It should be here in two days. Have you read On Beauty? It’s more like White Teeth than NW, but I think you’ll find... We have a copy... Sure, I’ll set it aside for you.”

  I wandered around the literature section, listening to Malcolm answer the caller’s questions about Zadie Smith, whom I hadn’t read. Book after book across the shelves I also hadn’t read, many titles I didn’t recognize, subsections of literature I hadn’t realized needed to be distinguished from each other. I couldn’t recall how they’d been organized when I was a kid. I never paid much attention to the adult books. Malcolm continued to talk about the stylistic differences between Smith’s older novels and her most recent one. I walked around the stacks, trying to determine why he would pretend not to recognize me when he’d clearly seen me at the funeral, when my eyes had locked with his. The teen section was now termed Young Adult, twice its former size, consuming the entire length of one of the interior shelves. I used to think that all of those books had been selected just for me, but as I scanned the YA titles, I saw only a handful of books I remembered.

  “Do you read?” Malcolm asked, reappearing at my side.

  “Mostly nonfiction. I’m a history teacher.” I waited for him to ask me what grade I taught or what type of history, questions that typically followed I’m a history teacher in polite conversation. “Where books are prized above dukedom,” I said when he didn’t ask me about myself. He looked confused. “That’s how we used to answer the phone when I was a kid. ‘Prospero Books, where books are prized above dukedom.’” I don’t know why I said we. I’d never answered the phone at Prospero Books before.

  “I’ve never heard anyone answer the phone that way.” He bent down to pull a copy of The Perks of Being a Wallflower stuffed incorrectly in the T’s. The cover was as lime green as the walls of Prospero Books.

  “It could have been taken right here.” I walked over to the wall and did my best to look like one of the young actors on the front of the novel. Nope, nothing from Malcolm, not even upturned lips. I’d never thought of my students as particularly generous but they always humored me with an eye roll at the least, acknowledging, if not appreciating, my effort.

  “I hate movie tie-in covers.” He filed the copy under C where it belonged.

  “I’m not here to close the store down, if that’s what you’re so worried about.” It was the most logical explanation for his coldness.

  “Who says I’m worried about anything?” he said indignantly, and I could imagine him as an adolescent, defiant and stubborn, likely too smart for his own good.

  “Billy used to bring me here as a kid. I know how important this place is,” I told Malcolm. He didn’t respond, focusing his attention on the toe of his dirty white sneaker as it pressed into the scuffed wood floor. The floorboards creaked under his weight. “Did Billy tell you he was leaving his store to me?”

  “His lawyer did. I didn’t know Billy had any living family.” He turned his focus toward the shelves, crossing his arms across his chest, gestures anyone who spent time with teenagers could recognize as evasion. The wiry man with bifocals who had sung at Billy’s funeral signaled to him from a table in the back. “Excuse me,” Malcolm said, and headed toward the café.

  “Did you know he had any family that wasn’t living?” I called to him. He shot me a funny look, like I’d asked him if he slept standing up.

  Malcolm kept his back to me as he leaned over the wiry man to review one of the many books open on the café table. I continued to reacquaint myself with the store, counting all the sections I’d never paid attention to before, the books I didn’t know, the colorful spines aching to be read. In the noir section, a caricature of Malcolm smiled from the shelf. His cheekbones were more pronounced in the drawing than in life, his unruly hair neater, his eyes kinder, less wary. A speech bubble floated on the drawing above his portrait. It described noir as LA’s lifeblood. Chandler, its Homer. Philip Marlowe, its Odysseus. I studied Malcolm’s picture, wondering what he wasn’t telling me. He was close enough to Billy to have read at his funeral. He’d avoided my eye contact when I’d asked him if he’d heard of me. He knew more than he was letting on about Billy’s living family, probably about his deceased family, too.

  Along the interior shelves, the history section was separated into World, American and Californian. The books were not only divided by region but organized by subject, alphabetically rather than chronologically. Most bookstores organized history books that way, as though history was a collection of discrete episodes rather than a fluid series of events that evolved over time. It reflected the misguided way we often taught history, the erroneous chaptering of the past. Jay often told me I was a hopeless romantic when it came to history. What else could I be? It was our past, something that shouldn’t be alphabetized.

  I bent down to browse the titles on the lowest shelf of Californian history, filed under seismology and earthquake history. Books on the 1906 earthquake, the San Andreas Fault, predictions and forecasts. Here, on this modest, ankle-level shelf, was the Billy of my youth. I pulled out a book on the Northridge earthquake. It was one of those nights everyone living in Southern California at the time remembered. Joanie and I were asleep, startled awake as books fell off the shelves. When my bedroom stopped shaking, Mom ran in, checking us for cuts and bruises before the room began to rumble again. The first aftershock ended, and Dad screamed that we had to get out of the house. We followed him downstairs where broken glass littered our hardwood floors. Joanie and I didn’t have shoes on, so Dad carried us through the living room. In our backyard, the fence hid the damage beyond our property, brick chimneys torn from our neighbors’ homes, electrical wires slithering down the street. Dad turned on the radio, and we listened as the reporters filled gaps of information. Dawn brightened the sky. The death toll rose. Mom made Dad turn off the radio. Joanie clung to me, her body shaking like the earthquake was inside her, but a warmth spread through me, an undeniable thrill. The earth had moved here, beneath my feet, and that meant Billy wouldn’t have to travel to some distant land to study the damage. He would stay here with us. That was the best gift Billy gave me as a child. Whenever the earth shook, I became excited once the confusion subsided. At some point, I’d stopped connecting that feeling to Billy, but it never went away. Even as an adult, I felt a guilty pleasure whenever the floor oscillated with the earth.

  At the center of the store, an oak table displayed the staff recommendations. Malcolm’s were The Sun Also Rises, Infinite Jest, The Maltese Falcon and Ask the Dust. A Lucia offered Roberto Bolaño, Gabriel García Márquez, Julia Alvarez and Junot Díaz. A Charlie displayed James and the Giant Peach, Hugo Caberet, two Lemony Snicket titles and an Edward Gorey picture book. Billy’s recommendations were all classics: Portrait of a Lady, The Grapes of Wrath, Tender Is the Night, The Age of Innocence. I’d expected Billy’s books to be classics, but classics of a different nature—Robinson Crusoe, The Three Musketeers, Sherlock Holmes. I imagined the assortment of American history books I would
have selected for my recommendations, the blurbs I would have written about the women of the Revolution and Lincoln’s steadfast cabinet.

  I flipped through the novels on Billy’s side of the table, unsure what I was looking for. The antique key Billy had left with Elijah was still in my pocket. It had to lead somewhere in Prospero Books, only I didn’t see any safes or antique cabinets it may have opened. Still, something in the store had to guide me to the other side of that keyhole. Billy’s recommendations were all untouched, save a series of numbers written in faint pencil inside the back cover of The Grapes of Wrath.

  I felt Malcolm lean over my shoulder to review the page.

  “Billy’s secret language with the books he resurrected from hospital thrift shops.” He lifted the book from my hands and held it closer to his face. Malcolm explained that the two numbers before the decimal indicated the quality of the book. The four after the decimal the date Billy had bought it, although they didn’t translate clearly into a year. The letter noted the month. The next series of numbers commented on the different aspects of the book—the edition, the imprint, the font—and the final letter the season where, if the book hadn’t sold, its price would be marked down.

  “Does it need to be so complicated?”

  Malcolm closed the book and returned it to the table. “It was how Billy liked it.”

  I ran my finger across Billy’s name on the card resting beneath his books. A sketch of his middle-aged face stared back at me. Slender nose, wide smile, hair perfectly coiffed. The smile was ripe with melancholy.

  “I’m not the enemy,” I said.

  “That remains to be seen.” For the first time, a smile flashed across his face, vanishing as quickly as it had materialized. He was kind of cute when he wasn’t glowering at me. “Come on. I’ll get you a coffee.”

  I waited at one of the mosaic tables while Malcolm journeyed behind the café counter, and started texting Jay. We were having difficulty connecting with the three-hour time difference. He had to wake up early for soccer camp, which meant that he went to bed while I was still having dinner with my parents. Other than our phone call after Billy’s funeral, we’d only sent text messages. I’d reported to him about my unexpected inheritance, the next clue, about my memories of Prospero Books. Sounds like a cool place, he’d said, then proceeded to talk about camp. He sent me a video of his players shouting they missed me and making kissy faces, as well as other equally gushy texts. While I was aware of the vulnerability it required to get a group of teenage boys to participate in a romantic scheme, I wished he’d asked me about Jane Eyre, about whether I was nervous to revisit Prospero Books. I snapped a picture of the bookstore and sent it to Jay, along with the message, Welcome to Prospero Books. He sent back a smiley face. It would have been better if he hadn’t responded at all.