by Amy Meyerson
The windshield wipers were still on, screeching as they fanned the dry glass. It was a horrible sound. Nails across a chalkboard. A body being dragged. I didn’t turn them off. I kept listening to their shriek. Jay was right. I’d never mentioned Prospero Books before. I hadn’t even thought of it when I got the copy of The Tempest in the mail. I’d never asked Mom why she loved the play, never connected my name to Billy’s bookstore. I’d never even thought enough about Billy to realize he was grieving the entire time I knew him. Mom and Dad were hiding something about Evelyn, about Prospero Books, but what right did I have to know their secret when I’d never really cared before?
While Jay may have been right about me, he was equally wrong about Prospero Books. The answer wasn’t to shrug my shoulders and say, Oh, well, all good things must come to an end. Jay didn’t understand and he wouldn’t. Only, it wasn’t Jay who could help me save Prospero Books.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The café had emptied and repopulated in the time I was gone. Ray the screenwriter was still there, dutifully clocking his nine-to-five. The other writers’ tables were now occupied by teenagers talking loudly as they drank mocha lattes. At $5.50 a pop, I calculated how much the store made off the teenage girls, the customers who took their afternoon fix to go. The café was indeed profitable, but like Elijah said, there was only so much you could make off lattes and blueberry scones.
I sat at one of the empty tables and opened the binder Elijah had given me, filled with spreadsheets of the store’s finances. I wasn’t sure what I was searching for, some glimmer of hope that might reveal how to turn a profit. All I saw were losses at the end of each page, numbers in red that ranged from two thousand dollars around the holidays to eight thousand dollars in August. Even during the most festive of times, Prospero Books was still depressed.
My phone buzzed. I opened a text from Jay, a photo of a donkey with a quotation bubble that read, What an ass! When I didn’t write back fast enough, he followed with, Will you ever find it in your heart to forgive me?
When you went to the trouble of finding that picture, how could I resist? I wasn’t sure the tone was right over text or if he knew me well enough to intuit my sarcasm as apology accepted, so I quickly added, Already forgiven.
The older man from Billy’s funeral sat at the table beside mine, humming as he cleaned his bifocals with a handkerchief. The tune was buoyant, absent of the forlorn timbre his voice had had when he sang at Billy’s funeral. Between his white goatee and wire-framed glasses, the broken capillaries across his cheeks, he was the perfect picture of an aging and eccentric intellectual, of someone who would have been Billy’s friend.
I introduced myself as Miranda, Billy’s niece. He introduced himself as Dr. Howard.
“I liked your hymn, at the funeral.”
“I’m afraid I hardly remember it. When there’s whiskey flowing, my glass is never empty.” Dr. Howard tapped his head and jotted something into his notebook.
“You were close with my uncle?” I asked.
“He taught me the art of science. I taught him the art of poetry. I’m afraid neither of us entirely understood the other’s medium, but we shared an affinity for passion.”
I closed the binder of spreadsheets. “Do you remember any specific books Billy liked about science? Something about the muscular system or muscle fibers? Or anatomy?”
“Anatomy was far too pedestrian for our Billy. He gave me a biography of Charles Richter once. I’m afraid I found it dreadfully boring.” A biography of Charles Richter. That didn’t have anything to do with muscles and fibres and exceptional height. It didn’t fit with The Tempest, Jane Eyre, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, either. They were famous works of literature. Classics most readers would know. Not the biography of a seismologist, famous for scaling magnitudes of destruction.
“How long have you been coming here?” I asked Dr. Howard.
He counted on his fingers. “Half a score at least.”
“So, you didn’t know the original owner?”
“Lee?”
“No, Evelyn. Billy’s wife.”
“I didn’t realize Billy was married.” Dr. Howard tugged at his long goatee contemplating this fact. “‘For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams/Of the beautiful Annabel Lee/And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes/Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.’”
“That’s lovely,” I told him. “Did you write it?”
“Oh, how you flatter me. I fear you’ve never felt love if you don’t know Annabel Lee. Worry not, you’re still young.” And when he saw my embarrassment, he chuckled. “It’s Poe, dear,” he explained. “Edgar Allan Poe. How he loved his wife, the beautiful Annabel Lee.”
The beautiful Annabel Lee. The beautiful Evelyn Weston. Even if Dr. Howard didn’t know about Evelyn, he understood that Billy’s essential passion wasn’t for science. But there was another person at Prospero Books who had been close enough to Billy to have read at his funeral, someone who knew what poems he liked, someone who might have known about the woman buried beside Billy at Forrest Lawn.
Malcolm was stationed in nearly the same position I’d left him in that morning, reading. My chair skidded on the floor as I stood from Dr. Howard’s table. I waved goodbye, and he winked back at me before reaching for one of the hardbacks open on his table. I grabbed the financial binder and headed toward the front desk. It was time to find out what Malcolm was keeping from me.
He jumped when I dropped the binder on the desk, as though I’d snuck up on him.
“If you can get the next ten people who walk through that door to each buy a book, I’ll give you a raise.” I smiled. Malcolm coughed more than laughed at my attempt to be charming, shooting me an uneasy gaze I was beginning to recognize. “Are you this suspicious of everyone you meet or is there something special about me?”
“Something about you, I suppose,” he said, his tone not entirely unfriendly but not quite friendly, either. He closed the advance reader copy he was reading and put it beneath the counter. He folded his hands and leaned against the desk, bracing himself for whatever was about to ensue.
“Did Billy ever talk to you about Evelyn?” I asked.
“Evelyn who?” His expression remained neutral as he kept his gaze fixed on mine. He had a good poker face.
“Evelyn Weston.”
He shrugged, the name seemingly unfamiliar to him. Maybe Malcolm hadn’t heard of Evelyn. Dr. Howard was the closest thing the store had to an old-timer, and he didn’t know who she was. Still, I could see in Malcolm’s fidgety fingers, in the way he startled each time he saw me, that if it wasn’t Evelyn, he was certainly hiding something.
“Did Billy ever put on any games in the store? Maybe a scavenger hunt? Or a treasure hunt? Something interactive? Or with puzzles?”
“Not that I can think of. Why?” He continued to regard me with his big, cautious eyes. His irises were like gemstones, their facets catching the light and shimmering. An animal instinct kicked in, and I felt intuitively that I shouldn’t tell Malcolm about Billy’s quest.
“No reason.” I angled the folder with the financial numbers toward him. He thumbed through spreadsheets of Prospero Books’ financial data, monthly gross margin, occupancy expenses, operating costs and, a number in red at the bottom, net income—better termed net loss.
“Did you know how bad it is?”
Malcolm picked at a piece of loose skin on his thumb. “Billy never let me look at the finances.”
“I thought you were the manager?”
“I take care of the day-to-day stuff, ordering books, meeting reps, taking inventory, making sure the café’s up to code. Billy always took care of the money.” He tugged harder at the loose skin until it tore off, creating a bead of blood.
“Did Billy give you a budget for books?”
“We buy a few copies at a time. If it sells out, we’ll order mor
e from a wholesaler.” He sucked on his bloody finger, then realized I was watching him and hid his hand beneath the desk where I couldn’t see it.
“How could you even afford to buy books?”
“You don’t have to pay them back for a month or two, sometimes even three. If they don’t sell, we’ll send them back.”
“But sending them back costs money, too?”
“Yeah, it costs money, too.” Malcolm pulled the binder toward him to take a closer look at the spreadsheets. “You got this from the lawyer? That guy’s been pressing Billy to close for years. You can’t trust anything he says.”
“His sole purpose is to offer advice,” I argued.
“He’s an illiterate hack. He has no appreciation for the written word.”
“The law’s a profession of the written word. Do you know what most lawyers want to be? Writers.”
“Not divorce lawyers. That guy sucks the money out of people’s bones.”
“So why’d Billy trust him?”
“Because Billy had a hard time giving up on people.” Malcolm’s expression changed, suddenly apologetic. Even if he didn’t know about Evelyn, he knew about the people Billy had given up on. He knew about me. “It was easier to stay with him than find a new lawyer. The devil you know sort of thing,” he tried to recover.
“Sure, the devil you know,” I said.
Malcolm abandoned our conversation for the computer and began to sort through the store’s emails. I wasn’t sure why he was pretending to know less about Billy’s past than he did or how exactly that gave him the upper hand. I didn’t know why I was gauging his actions like we were in a power struggle. If nothing else, being a teacher taught you to be collaborative, a team player. A bookstore seemed like a prime place for a communal spirit, especially when it was a bookstore that we both loved, a bookstore we both didn’t want to see fail.
I left the financial binder with Malcolm, hoping he’d review the numbers when I wasn’t around, that in privacy he’d seriously consider the doom they foretold. I didn’t know enough about the bookstore to know how to save it. I needed his help, but as I watched Malcolm commune with the oversize computer monitor, refusing to look at the binder I’d left open on the counter, I wasn’t certain we’d be able to work together.
* * *
Traffic west was light, somehow making my parents’ house feel farther away. When I walked inside, Mom was on the couch, watching a network procedural.
“Miranda,” she said like she wasn’t expecting me. She paused the show on an attractive lab technician leaning over a microscope and squeezed my arm as she walked past me into the kitchen. “I’ll fix you something to eat.” There was never the question of whether I was hungry.
I sat on a bar stool at the kitchen island, watching Mom cut peppers and cucumbers.
“Where’s Dad?”
“Where do you think?” She motioned toward the garage, now Dad’s wood shop. A steady grind churned from behind the closed door.
I watched Mom’s calm, pretty face focused on the blade of the knife as it sliced through the cucumber’s flesh. A picture of domesticity, elegant and poised, as though this was any other trip home, as though I hadn’t just come from her dead friend’s bookstore.
“Why didn’t you tell me Evelyn opened Prospero Books?”
Mom glanced up at me, perplexed. “We talked about this the other day.”
“You told me the store was named after her. You never said that she opened it.”
“I didn’t mean to confuse you.” She arranged the cucumbers on a plate and found a Tupperware dish of yogurt dip in the fridge. “I made it with dill, how you like it.” She scooped out the dip and placed the plate before me. I searched her face for the glint of a lie, but she looked like Mom, patient and loving, always prettier than I was. I felt the same ambivalence I’d experienced with Malcolm, the tug-of-war between my instincts telling me something was off and my desire to trust what was plain before me. I’d always trusted Mom; then again, I still hadn’t told her about Billy’s scavenger hunt. She was avoiding me, but I had started to avoid her, too.
“The store’s in trouble. The finances are a complete mess. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
She looked surprised. “Aren’t you going to sell it?”
“How can I sell it? Billy left it to me.”
“Honey, no. That’s not fair to you.”
“I’m not going to quit my job or anything, but I can’t let it go bankrupt.”
She capped the yogurt dip. “You can’t clean up Billy’s messes, trust me,” she said to the inside of the fridge.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
“Nothing.” Mom shut the fridge and turned to face me. “It’s been a really long day. My assistant double-booked appointments and I’ve been putting out fires ever since.” She found the remote and hit Play on the television. “I need to decompress, okay?”
Only, her next day was equally long, just as draining. Then the day after that, she claimed a headache, followed again by another stressful day. After four days of returning to my parents’ home to find Mom vacantly staring at the television, I couldn’t take it anymore. Not her secrecy. Not mine. Not her sadness, either.
* * *
“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather be here where you have your own room?” Mom said when I told my parents I was going to stay with Joanie.
“It’s too much, driving to the east side every day. It’s easier if I’m over there,” I said.
“But doesn’t Joanie live with her boyfriend? Isn’t that a little intrusive?”
“Susan,” Dad said. “It’s what she wants to do.”
“I’ll be home Sunday, for our barbecue,” I promised.
“Do you know how long you’re staying?” Mom asked.
“Not yet. Another week or two? I want to be back by the Fourth.” Some couples looked forward to spending their first Valentine’s Day together. Others, New Year’s. Or Christmas. For me, it was the Fourth of July. To hold Jay’s hand as we watched the fireworks from the lawn beneath the Museum of Art’s steps. To walk back to our apartment in the balmy night, passing revelers drunk on American beer and too many hot dogs. Even if July 4 was an arbitrary selection for our nation’s birthday, the day Congress had approved but neither signed nor consecrated the Declaration of Independence, I still loved the Fourth of July, especially in Philadelphia.
“Well.” Mom forced a smile. “We’re happy to get you for as long as we can.”
As I repacked my suitcase, Mom stood at the threshold of my childhood bedroom, watching me fold a sundress.
“You know you can always come back. If sleeping on Joanie’s couch gets to be too much, we always have your room here for you.”
“If it gets to be too much, I’ll probably stay at the bookstore,” I said, gingerly placing the dress on the top of the other clothes I’d already packed. “There’s an apartment. Billy lived there.”
“Billy lived above the bookstore? And you’d want to stay there?”
“It’s convenient.” I didn’t tell her that the apartment gave me chills every time I stepped inside. Partially, it was that Billy had lived there until he died. Mostly, it was that picture of Evelyn, her ominous beauty, the way it forced me to confront a version of Billy I didn’t want to know.
“And you’re still thinking about keeping the store?” Mom asked.
“At least until I find someone I can trust.”
“Just remember you have a whole life. I would hate for you to jeopardize everything you’ve built over a failing bookstore.” She tapped the doorframe before pushing her body back into the hall. “We’ll see you Sunday night?” She smiled as though she didn’t recognize the threat her words belied.
* * *
Joanie and her boyfriend had recently moved into a bungalow a mile from Prospe
ro Books, up the hill from the reservoir. A small grove of fig trees separated their rental from the landlords’ home. Joanie said I could stay with them as long as I needed, and if she still lived alone in her bunker in West Hollywood, I would have planned on staying with her for my entire visit, but their one-bedroom was small for two, let alone three, people. Plus, they were in that honeymoon phase where they kissed each other every time they walked into or out of a room, not yet annoyed by each other’s television and dishwashing habits.
I wanted to be in that honeymoon stage, too. Instead, I was on the opposite coast from Jay, communicating in bursts of texts when we could steal a few minutes. When we finally managed to connect again on the phone—Jay half-asleep, me on Joanie and Chris’s porch, shivering in the cold night—we talked about picnics on the lawn at Independence Hall and the bocce games we would play at Spruce Street Harbor Park, the lineup for the free concert on the Fourth of July, our first summer as a couple, filled with humid nights and fireflies and memories we would build together. Jay didn’t ask about Prospero Books. He didn’t ask about Billy. In turn, I didn’t ask him what he thought fibres and muscles and brains meant. I didn’t tell him about the store’s finances, to try to make use of his background in economics. Besides, it had been years since Jay studied microeconomics and, despite his current profession, he’d never been much of a student. Instead, Jay said he wished he could warm me up when my jaw started to rattle. I told him he would get to soon, even though nights in Philadelphia stayed hot and I wouldn’t need his body heat to increase my own.
In the morning, Joanie was getting ready to audition for a staging of The Three Sisters. She painted a heavy coat of black eyeliner on her upper lids and wore a loose beige dress woven from all-natural fibers.
“Are you sure you don’t want a little more color?” I asked as she stepped away from the mirror to evaluate her appearance.
“Sensuality is natural. You don’t want to look like you’re trying too hard.” Joanie gathered her bags—she packed for a vacation every time she left the house—and I followed her outside as she walked to her car. The morning was brisk but the sun bled through the fog, etching dark pools in the hollows of the fig trees. Mornings in Los Angeles smelled mildly floral and peppery. I’d forgotten how wonderful that smell was.