She called his whole life a delusion and then asked for more pieces of him. He shook his head.
“It must have been hard to tell me.”
He looked around at his books, their patient welcome emanating from the shelves. Something literary about him; yes, Zac was right. He could stay here among the pages for months before he missed the company of people. People who fought and fretted and aged and died. Yet this woman before him—he’d miss her soonest.
He’d been unguarded once. Long ago now, but he remembered what it was not only to miss people after absence but to crave closeness every day, to live without a mask, to know folk who saw his true face and allowed him to see theirs. For a moment he’d wanted that again enough to take a risk.
A mistake.
He cleared his throat, set his hands on his knees. Tiana watched him.
“My wife, Sarah—she and I discovered this thing together, as she grew old and I didn’t. She never questioned if it were true because she witnessed it.”
And Ginny … aye, she’d witnessed it too, but bloodier and in the space of hours, not years. Nothing for her to doubt either.
“I should have realized the difficulty of proving myself,” he said.
Tiana studied him a long moment.
“What?”
“I’ve worked for you for two years, David. It feels like we’ve talked about everything by now, and I just never … you’ve always been …”
“Sane?” His lips twitched.
“I’ve been waiting for you to get agitated or something, you know, the way schizoids do when they’re challenged, when their beliefs are challenged.”
“Ah.” Smart woman.
“But that doesn’t mean I can accept something like this. It violates the order of creation. We’re born, we live, we die, and to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. Does that … scare you, maybe? That we’re going to die someday?”
If she only knew.
He shook his head, all words spent for now. He tried not to let it matter, but it did.
Tiana closed her eyes a moment then opened them to study him. “Coming back to work with me?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Once you’ve found somebody else, will you be letting me go?”
“I won’t look for someone else unless you want me to. Whether you continue at the store is up to you.”
“Oh.” She gave a long sigh. “Thanks. I mean … I want to stay.”
He saw her to the door, shut and locked it, watched her little Ford back out of his driveway and disappear past the view of his window. He shuffled to the terrarium and crouched at the glass.
“She doesn’t believe me,” he said to the turtle. “Shall I give up, then? Never mention it again?”
The turtle gave him a slow blink and pulled herself an inch toward him, then stopped.
“Aye, you’re right of course. One step at a time.”
He had to be ready for a full day tomorrow—customers, cataloging, and stocking. He took stock of his physical condition from the inside out and knew what he had to do whether he wanted to or not. He trudged to his room, set an alarm to go off in three hours, and climbed back into bed. In his dream, he wore the Union blue and beat his drum and stared across a dirty creek at a black woman washing clothes, her hair too short for propriety. She looked up and met his eyes, and while he searched his memory for her name, she pointed at him as if she knew him.
He found her name in his mouth, familiar, three delicate syllables that together held strength. As he drew breath to say it, Tiana shouted across the water, “Now I know you, Dorian Gray.”
TEN
A fine tension hung like smoke between him and Tiana the next day, but somehow there was no awkwardness. They didn’t avoid each other, didn’t blunder into each other’s sentences. Several times David looked up to find her studying him, and she didn’t look away even when he shrugged and resumed whatever task he’d been about. She asked questions as she always did—why he stocked those books there, why he priced one edition of the same book ten dollars higher than another. She didn’t mention yesterday. Neither did he.
Jayde showed up to her afternoon shift five minutes early, shaking David’s hand in a professional grip and apologizing for her poor first impression. She stood a little shorter than Tiana and wore her copper hair long and loose. As for the business-casual dress code, where Tiana emphasized casual, Jayde emphasized business. David clarified that a skirt and heels weren’t required every day, and she nodded toward Tiana’s boot-cut pants and the strappy flats David would always think of as Mary Janes.
“Tiana told me. But I like to work in good clothes.” She said it with a quick glance downward.
“Nothing wrong with that,” he said, and her shoulders relaxed a bit.
In an hour she more than demonstrated her ease with the customers. She’d be a fine addition to his little place, if she could learn that ease with him as well. David ground his teeth against the knowledge that, hidden under her classic wardrobe, bruises marred her skin.
Over the next week he was able to achieve almost a complete inventory of the backlog in the stockroom. Books in his hands: the most excellent of tactile pleasures. Varying cover stock, textured pages, deckle edges, and laminated dust jackets. He burrowed into his work the way his turtle burrowed into her favorite corner of the terrarium, thinking of human beings as little as possible until he got the first text.
NEW THREAD, ADDING DAVID.
It was Moira.
Yo. An unidentified number.
HOPE YOU ASKED HIS PERMISSION. BEWARE, DAVID, WE TAKE FREQUENT ADVANTAGE OF THIS TECHNOLOGY. Another unidentified number.
COOL. HEY DAVID. His phone recognized that one. Zac.
He texted back. HELLO. THANKS FOR THE ADD.
He quickly determined the first unknown had been Colm and the second, Simon. As he created the new contacts, his phone continued to vibrate with new messages. At first he thought they were making Thanksgiving plans, but the thread continued pinging his phone once or twice a day, random thoughts from any one of them.
He spent the weekend at a campground twenty miles north, bundled against the chill, fishing on an open, empty lake and drinking up the beauty around him. Out on the lake with no cell service, their absence was glaring. Strange that they’d fit into his thoughts so easily in only a week.
Monday found him back in his store, enjoying the new freedom to sequester in his stockroom. Tiana poked her head in long enough to let him know the coffee was ready. Otherwise, she and Jayde had left him alone. The hushed tones from the front counter hinted at a somber if not heated conversation.
David flicked out his pocketknife and opened a box that had been sealed with packing tape. He was nearing the most recent acquisitions now. He’d bought these books only last week. He sighed, and a settled feeling formed around him and the stock shelves. He could ask for no better work than this.
He closed the blade, shoved it back into the pocket of his khakis, and pulled open the flaps of the box. His thumb raked across one of the flaps, and he jerked his hand back. The slice in the pad of his finger gaped for a moment, raw pink tissue on each side before blood filled it. He suppressed the reflex to shake the sting away, instead clamped his other hand around his thumb and headed for the first-aid kit in the bathroom. Halfway across the store, his path intersected with Tiana’s.
“What’re you doing?”
“Box cut.”
“Is it really bad?”
“Nah. Need to keep blood off the books, though.”
Blood altered by a serum. If it dried, would its potency be destroyed, or … not?
“Maybe I should look at it,” she said.
“I’ll be fine.” His voice clipped, and she hesitated, brown eyes wide, measuring him. “Truly.”
“Is it bleeding that much?”
He removed his other hand, and only a drop ran down the inside of his thumb. “See, nothing.”
She sighed. “You were
holding it above your heart, like you’d amputated your finger or something.”
“Reflex.”
A minute later, he stood in front of the bathroom sink wrapping a Band-Aid around his thumb. Tonight he’d call Zac and interrogate the man—what his blood could do to someone else, whether any of the others had had to deal with this. He’d have asked before if his thoughts had been sharper then.
In the narrow hall outside the bathroom, Tiana waited for him. He cocked an eyebrow at her as he shut off the light.
“You really did need a Band-Aid.” Her mouth puckered as she studied his finger.
“You saw the cut.”
“But I thought by now …”
He showed her the stain through the bandage. “Bled but good.”
“Right.”
“What is it?”
“Nothing, only … I almost for a minute expected you to … heal.”
A glance toward the front confirmed Jayde stood behind the counter, ringing up a customer. David motioned Tiana down an empty aisle and lowered his voice as she had with that last sentence.
“Only mortal injuries.”
She blinked. “Right.”
“Forget it.” He tried to smile, then turned back toward the stockroom.
“Actually, I … I want to hear you out, if you don’t mind.”
To what end? He glanced up and down the aisle again and ran his palm over the book spines nearest him. Then he faced her. “I don’t age, and injuries don’t kill me.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. I get as tired, hungry, thirsty as anyone else, and I can be hurt.”
“Okay.”
The moment she believed him, he would know. He had to stop wishing for that moment. “Okay.”
“And back to work we go.” Her smile held warmth. She headed for the front of the store.
Somehow she both disbelieved and trusted him. He ambled back to the stockroom the long way, cutting down one of the children’s aisles and standing still a moment, taking in their thin glossy spines and the cluster of colorful chairs. Maybe the piece of Tiana that trusted him was the piece that still loved children’s fairy tales. Maybe that piece wanted him to be telling the truth.
“Manager to the front, please,” came Jayde’s brisk voice over the PA.
David headed there, checking his surroundings as he went. They didn’t page each other in a store so small, and her formality might mean an unruly customer.
No raised voices as he neared. Jayde was speaking casually. A man answered.
David rounded the corner and halted to keep from crashing into Tiana’s back. She stood in the middle of the main aisle, clutching a stack of books to her chest, staring, mouth open. David looked toward the counter.
Zac and Moira. Standing in his little shop, smiling and chatting with Jayde, who must not know who Zac was. Jayde shot a smug glance over her shoulder—no, that was full knowledge. Tiana’s fangirl gushing likely reached a higher pitch of enthusiasm when shared with a female friend.
Zac followed Jayde’s look, and his mouth tipped between a smirk and a smile as he spotted David. “Hey.”
David stepped sideways past Tiana, up to the counter, and shook his hand. “How did you find me?”
“You named your store Galloway Books.”
David laughed. “That I did.”
“It’s delightful.” Moira pushed her hands into her jeans pockets and turned a full circle on the braided rug in front of the checkout counter. “So vintage. I could curl up in a corner and sleep.”
“That’s a compliment?” Zac said, and she shoulder-bumped him.
“We’re being tourists for the week,” she said. “I want to see the dunes way up north, and the trees, if we’re not too late to catch their color.”
“I was just telling them, early October is best,” Jayde said. “But the little towns are still worth a look, if they dress warm.”
She was hardly keeping the grin off her face as Tiana stood frozen behind their group. Maybe normalizing Zac’s presence would encourage her to approach. She’d be mortified later if she didn’t.
“I’ve camped up there in the fall,” David said. “It’s good land.”
“We hoped you could help us plan an itinerary.” Mischief lilted in Moira’s tone. She’d guessed the source of Tiana’s petrifaction.
“How long are you here?”
“A week, ten days.” She fluttered her hand.
He had no idea what she did for a living, if she did anything. They’d all had over a century to buy, sell, and save through the ups and downs of the market, the end of the gold standard, rising inflation. Unless they spent stupidly, they should all be as well off as David was.
“We’re ready for lunch,” Moira said, “but we wanted to track you down first. Join us?”
“Sure.” He glanced over his shoulder.
Tiana had revived. She carried her stack of books behind the counter and stood sorting them, head ducked. If she had some reason to speak to Zac, she’d pop out of her shell in a moment, articulate again if not at ease.
David cleared his throat. “While I grab my coat, maybe Tiana wouldn’t mind showing you around the store.”
Her head whipped up at the sound of her name. “What?”
“You’re not busy, are you?”
“No, I mean, I was just …” She stepped forward, and her smile outshone the stuttering. “I’d love to show you around.”
“Good then. Moira, Zac, meet my store manager, Tiana Burton. Tiana, Zac and Moira are friends from out of town.”
“Nice to meet you.” She was already leading them down the first aisle of shelves.
When they disappeared around the corner, Jayde leaned over the counter toward him. “David!”
“Yes?”
“You know Zac Wilson, and you never told her?”
“Not until very recently, and I didn’t know they were in the state, much less coming here. There’s no setup, Jayde.”
“Well, good luck.” She shook her head, but a grin split her face. “She’s going to lose her mind the second you all walk out of here.”
“Then good luck to you.” He winked.
It was the most relaxed conversation she’d had with him since he met her.
He grabbed his coat and keys and stood waiting at the door until Tiana finished her tour. She brought them up to the front, laughing at something Zac had said.
“Thanks for the tour,” he said.
“Anytime.” Definitely a blush there.
“You have a beautiful place,” Moira said to all three of them.
David opened the door for her then held it for Zac, because why not?—but Tiana said, “Um, Zac?”
He turned and put his hand out to keep the door open. “Yeah?”
“I believe in angels. And I’m glad one was sent to you.”
The smile he gave her was the one he’d given the waitress at Denny’s. He recognized devotion and didn’t scoff at it—truly didn’t, or David would have seen it in him after the waitress walked away.
“Thank you,” he said.
Tiana nodded. Zac walked outside, and her gaze found David’s.
“Are you going to explain any of this?”
If he could find a way that didn’t reveal Zac and Moira, though she wouldn’t believe him if he told her. Then again, Zac had survived a fall into Marble Canyon. Tiana might hold enough pieces of the puzzle to solve it on her own.
“Later. I’ll be back in an hour, maybe two.”
“We’re fine,” Jayde said. “We’ll close up if you decide to hang out with them longer.”
He left them to retell each other what had just happened.
He offered his Jeep Cherokee rather than use Zac’s rental car. Moira rode shotgun and Zac hopped into the back. David pulled around to exit the little parking lot and caught Zac’s gaze in the rearview mirror.
“Did you choose a restaurant yet?”
“We thought we’d ask the local,” he said.
“What’s the quirkiest place around?” Moira was sitting forward in her seat, eyes trained out the windshield. “What a sweet little town, David. I see why you settled here.”
“Settled being a relative term.” He turned left. Quirky … hm.
“How long have you been here?”
“Three years. The store does quite well, for its size.”
“It’s a delightful setup, and so organized. I’ve been in used-book stores where I couldn’t find a thing. Books stacked everywhere, I wanted to pull my hair out.”
David chuckled. “I pledged never to allow Galloway’s to devolve into chaos. Tiana says I’m orderly enough to be a drill sergeant.”
“Or at least a soldier.”
He glanced away from the road to meet Moira’s eyes. “Zac told you?”
“We don’t tell each other’s stories,” she said. “But it’s in your bearing. Your posture, your watchfulness.”
Not the first person who’d noticed, of course, though usually those who pointed it out were soldiers themselves, like the redheaded bodyguard at Marble Canyon. David nodded.
“How many wars?”
“Five,” he said, flexing his hands on the wheel.
“Ending with?”
“Vietnam.”
Moira’s hand brushed his arm then drew back to her lap. “That’s a long record of service.”
A frown tightened his mouth as he tried to decide what to do with her words, with … her respect. It filled something deep in his core, a hidden well he hadn’t known was empty. He cleared a lump of gravel from his throat.
“Thank you,” he said.
“I’m grateful you made it home every time.”
He brushed a hand under his eyes. “I—” His voice broke. Curse it. He cleared his throat again. “If you don’t want classic diner fare, I’ll take us to a Mongolian grill. Assemble your bowl and they grill it in front of you, hit the gong if you approve of the service—that type of place. About as quirky as we get around this town.”
“Sounds perfect,” Moira said.
“Sounds like a chain,” Zac said.
“Oh, go to Paris, Zachary.”
Over lunch, David talked more about himself in an hour and a half than he had in four decades. Zac and Moira’s questions seemed endless, but he held up until Moira asked if he had any living family.
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