First, Last, and in Between

by Jamie Bennett

  And here came the tears, unstoppable now. Darn it!

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Gaby said sympathetically, and I tried my best to dial it down. I also had to look down, because I didn’t want to trip on the sidewalk as we walked away. “Gravy, I never thought of you as a crier, but sometimes real estate is so emotional,” she commented. She rubbed my back as I took a shaky breath and her phone rang, for the fiftieth time since she’d come to meet me this afternoon. “I just have to take this really quick,” she said, and held the sparkly phone to her ear. “Gaby Carter,” she announced briskly, and swiveled a little to conduct her transaction.

  At least someone’s business was going well. Real estate had started to boom as August rolled in and people listed the summer cottages they had enjoyed for one last season. Gaby was on-call constantly. She had assured me that the bookstore building would sell quickly, too, with its prime location on our main street and with the parking in the back. Our little town was actually experiencing a bit of a renaissance—there was even a new owner for Art’s Market, where previously a woman had found a rat in a carton of oatmeal. There was a new sandwich board on the sidewalk in front of the sliding door which bragged, “Under NEW, RODENT-FREE Proprietorship!”

  And now there would be a new owner for Holliday Booksellers, too. Gaby would help me sell the building that my grandfather had bought and that I had tried to salvage as I also frantically tried to salvage the business, doing anything and everything to keep my head above water. Tea party story hours for kids? Check. Romance book clubs with complimentary wine? Check. Social media campaigns, sandwich boards of my own, coupons? Check, check, check. Practically begging people to buy from me? Check on that, too.

  No matter what I did, the books stayed on the shelves, the kitschy souvenirs I’d thought the summer tourists would appreciate stayed in their display case, and I stayed broke. The bookstore had slowly sunk around me, and nothing I did could keep it afloat. And now, it was over. While Gaby was occupied with her call, I walked back to press my nose against the shop window, to take one last look. My initials were carved into the wood counter near the cash register, with the date of my birth; in the cozy spot next to the steps up to the biography shelves, my dad had read Trixie Belden books to me until I could read them for myself. There were so many memories, so many wonderful memories in this place…

  “Hal? Let’s go, ok? It’s time.”

  I pulled my forehead off the glass and turned to see Gaby off the phone and tapping her foot slightly. Yes, she was very sympathetic, but I had been saying goodbye for over an hour. “Right. Coming,” I answered.

  She started questioning me about how I was going to off-load the inventory of books, because although we were offering everything in the interior for sale along with the shop, probably the buyer of the building would have new ideas for what to put in the space. After all, why would someone want to run another bookstore there, when the previous one had just gone belly-up?

  Belly-up. A failure. Yes, that was what my family’s legacy had become. I looked at the sky again to combat a fresh round of tears. It was over now, and there was no point to this emotional breakdown. I had to look forward and not back. I needed to get a handle on my future so I could answer pertinent and pressing questions like, “How will I pay for the two mortgages on my house?” I tripped on a tuft of grass and that brought me back to more immediate problems, like staying upright.

  “Gravy!” Gaby was shaking her head and frowning as she read something on her phone. “Sorry, I have to head back to the office. Shep—I mean, my boss is telling me that a buyer’s agent wants me to fax her something! Faxing? Who still does that?” She paused the rant to ask, “Are you ok now?”

  “I am,” I lied, and she believed me. She gave me a hug and rushed away on her pink, patent leather wedges back to the gleaming car painted with the Sterling Standard Realty logo on its door. I waved back and plodded off in my tennis shoes to my dad’s ancient Bronco, whose door only had a big dent and some scratches.

  Once upon a time, I’d worn nice shoes to work too, and nice little dresses and blazers to go along with them. I’d carried a (faux) designer, (faux) leather bag which held a sleek, steel water bottle and my clean gym clothes, because I’d worked out like a demon. My phone had been the latest model and didn’t have a broken screen covered in tape to keep the glass from cutting me as I swiped, like the one currently residing in my purse. And this purse was itself an old canvas tote bag with stains where I’d spilled coffee on it, and was not even close to the former (faux) leather.

  Once upon a time, I’d gone out at night, doing things other than running down the driveway to chase raccoons from the garbage cans. I had been upwardly mobile, too, and I didn’t mean how last week I had climbed on the roof of my cottage to try to coax a TV signal from the giant antenna my grandpa had installed there thirty years prior.

  That was when I had discovered some problem areas among the shingles. And a tragedy had barely been averted when I’d slipped on a leaf and almost took a header back to ground level.

  I looked down at my old jean cutoffs and my dad’s college t-shirt, at the jagged scratch on my pale leg. I noticed that I was only wearing a singular sock because I hadn’t found two clean ones, and I frowned. Yes, things had changed a lot since I’d left Chicago and moved home to Michigan. And nothing, not one thing, had changed for the better.

  “Hi, Hallie!” Martha called from the door of her grocery store when I drove slowly past, and I waved. I had asked her for a job at the NGS, a second job to supplement my lack of income from the bookstore, but she didn’t have any room in her budget to hire me. She was getting ready for increased competition if the other grocery store in town really was keeping the rats out of the food now. I had asked at the library, too, since I did know books, and also at the gas station and garage, but I didn’t actually know anything about cars. I had applied to just about every place in town to try to get a cash influx to keep Holliday Booksellers open, and I had come up empty.

  That was how I currently felt, too: empty. Empty and totally disbelieving that this was actually the end, even after I had initialed and signed Gaby’s contract and she had put the “for sale” sign in the window under the gold lettering. Even after I sat for a while in the parking lot at the library (where there was a good Wi-Fi signal) and checked the Sterling Standard Realty website on my cracked phone screen and saw the store listed there. I went through all the professional pictures she’d had taken that made it seem bigger, brighter, and better than the dark, cramped, and cozy reality, reading all her suggestions for what else the building could become (knitting shop! Insurance sales! Restaurant/café!) and I still had a hard time thinking it was real.

  It was just hard to understand how I could have let things slip away from me. That just wasn’t who I was! I was supposed to have returned home to fix everything, riding in as triumphantly as when I had waved goodbye to my dad and ridden out, after I had graduated as valedictorian at our high school and left for college in the big city to make my mark. And I had been on my way to making it, I felt, when I had dropped everything and headed back here to this corner of northern Michigan, back to my dad and the tiny town where I’d grown up, back to the place I hadn’t thought I would ever permanently put my feet again. I’d had things to prove, to myself and to everyone else, but I hadn’t done it yet.

  That was what I was still mulling over a few hours later, sitting on the porch at my great-grandparents’ old cottage on the lake and well into a large piece of cake that I was eating with my fingers. Because, ok, it had been a while since I had done the dishes so forks were scarce, and also cake with fingers was where I was emotionally at the moment. Yes, I was crying and eating dessert with my hands, alone except for a raccoon that I could hear scrabbling in the darkness close by. It was probably giggling about how last Saturday night, I had fallen face-first on the driveway after failing to chase it away from my garbage and had scratched up my leg and stomach. Grace was not my middle nam
e but there was no reason for mockery by animals. I picked up a rock and threw it as hard as I could toward a stand of pine trees to scare it off.

  There was a satisfying thud as I thought I hit a tree trunk, but that noise was followed immediately by: “Ow! What in the hell was that?”

  I leapt up, my dessert falling off my plate and onto the deck at my feet. “Hello? Who’s there?” I yelled back. Oh no, that had been the last of the cake!

  A large, shadowed figure stepped out of the trees where I had flung the rock. “Did you just throw something at me?” It was a man, and he was rubbing his shoulder like it really hurt. “Did you just throw a rock at me?”

  “No!” I protested. “I threw a rock, but—what are you doing on my property, anyway?”

  He stepped forward and I saw that he was absolutely huge. Huge and blonde, and really, really frowning. “This is my property. I just bought the Feeney place.” He pointed back over his shoulder.

  I knew the house, of course, but I hadn’t known that it was for sale. The Feeney place was a horrible monstrosity that had been thrown up a few years before, when some people from downstate had razed what had been the Solomons’ cottage. The sweet 1920s architecture had given way to Lib and Ron Feeney’s huge, hideous, style-free dream house. My dad had mocked it endlessly.

  “You’re trespassing,” I told the big man flatly. “This is my house. Those are my trees. This is my property.” Maybe I wouldn’t have the bookstore anymore, but I had this cottage.

  He kept rubbing his shoulder. “Couldn’t you have said that, instead of throwing a rock?”

  “I didn’t hit you on purpose. I thought you were a raccoon!”

  He looked down at himself, at his long, broad body. I swallowed. No, he didn’t look much like a small, furry animal. “I didn’t mean to trespass,” he said. “If I am. The realtor told me that these trees are mine.”

  “Nope,” I answered. “Mine.” I felt a surge of fierce possession and stepped toward him angrily. I thought of who would soon possess my store. Probably some other jerk from downstate, like this guy, who wouldn’t care at all about our town or anyone in it. Just like the frowning man didn’t currently care about the trillium plants he was trampling beneath his feet. “You summer people can’t come up here and flash a wad of money and think that everything belongs to you, and then ruin it. You can’t have it all. Not everything has a price!”

  Even in the semi-darkness, I could see his eyes widen. “I’d been wondering about my neighbors,” he said. “Nice to meet you, too.” He shook his head. “We’ll probably run into each other again, and if we do, no rocks, please.”

  I nodded curtly. I had just realized that I was now standing in the cake I had dropped. “I really didn’t mean to throw it at you. I’m sorry about that. And you are trespassing.”

  He shook his head a little more and turned back into the trees—my trees. I could see a cell phone screen illuminate and then move higher, like he was trying to hold it up to get a signal. That was probably what he had been doing, wandering around to try to use his phone. Good luck on that! There was no service out here, not unless you went into town. I chortled inwardly until I looked back down at the squished frosting and chocolate crumbs beneath my tennis shoes. Darn it.

  With the cake gone, I moved to my dad’s old bottle of scotch. He’d liked to have what he called a snort now and then, sometimes to celebrate, but more when he’d missed my mom. I hosed the frosting off the porch to keep the raccoons from sniffing around and then poured a small snort for myself. My parents’ wedding picture hung next to the cabinet where we kept the meager liquor supply, and I looked at them, so young and happy.

  “Cheers, you guys,” I told them, and they beamed back. I took a breath that caught, so I swallowed about half my drink. When it stopped burning in my throat, I told them I was sorry. “I wish I could have saved it,” I whispered, then I finished what was in the glass. I wished that very hard as I poured another snort and wandered into my room to lie in my bed and cry.

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