some new books when a woman walked up to me at the counter. “Excuse me. Where is your coffee?”
“We don’t sell coffee.”
“I mean, where’s your café?”
“We don’t have a café.”
She looked at me like I had just told her the Earth was flat. “No café?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Really? And you call yourself a bookstore.” She turned and walked out.
“Did you hear that?” I asked Wendy.
“Books or coffee,” she said.
CHAPTER eighteen
Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.
—James Payn
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 8
Sunday was quiet. I had worked until closing on Saturday, so I was exhausted from the twelve-hour shift. I didn’t run, but took a long bath and read most of the day. It snowed a little and I went out for coffee and to pick up some sushi, but that was about it. I thought of calling Dylan, but decided I’d wait for his call so that I didn’t seem too eager. I’d seen too eager scare men away.
I went into work Monday. There weren’t any customers in the store, and Wendy was changing the window display again.
“Looks like Saturday night was busy.”
“It was,” I said. “How does it compare to last year?”
“We’re up twenty-one percent over this time last year. It’s our third growth year in a row.”
“That’s good.”
“Really good,” she said. “We’re on track for this to be our best season ever.”
“Looks like Bob left a little too early.”
“Robert,” she said. “He hated it when people called him Bob.”
“What does it matter?”
“It matters to me.” She walked back to her office.
* * *
Grace came in a little after lunch.
“How are you today, Noel?”
“Well, thank you.”
“How’s your adjustment to Utah coming?”
“Slowly.”
“Sometimes these things take time.”
“Which I have plenty of. May I help you find something?”
“I’m looking for the book Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari.”
“I think we have that.”
“You do. It’s right over there.” She walked directly to the book, took it from the shelf, then sat down in one of our armchairs to read. Twenty minutes later she brought the book over to the counter. “I’ll take it.”
“Very good.” I scanned the book’s barcode.
“Brava. You’ve learned how to use the cash register.”
“Wendy taught me. I’m not much help if I can’t sell books.” I put the book in a sack along with a flyer for our Black Friday book signings. “Wendy told me you’ve bought a book every week for twenty years.”
“That sounds about right.”
“That’s nearly a thousand books.”
“I’ve purchased at least a thousand books,” she said.
“Where do you keep them all?”
“I don’t,” she said. “I have a system. The great ones I keep in my library. The good ones I give to the public library. The bad ones I burn in my fireplace for wasting my time.”
“You burn them?”
“I have a little ceremony in my living room fireplace. It’s like my personal literary inquisition.”
“How many books have you burned?”
“Many.”
“How many books have you kept?”
“Few.”
After she left, I went to Wendy’s office. “Grace came in.”
“Every Monday, one p.m.,” she said, still focused on her computer. “Like clockwork. What did she buy this time?”
“Sapiens.”
“She’ll like that. The Guardian listed it as one of the best brainy books of the decade.”
“Is Grace smart?”
“Smart, rich, pretty…”
“Has she ever told you what she does with books she doesn’t like?”
“She burns them.” Wendy pressed a key on her keyboard, then looked back at me and smiled. “She’s a book snob.” She lifted an envelope from her desk. It was identical to the one I’d received before. “This came for you in the mail today. Looks like another letter from your secret admirer.”
I took the envelope from her outstretched hand. “Thank you.” I walked back out to the front of the store and opened it.
Dear Noel,
The greatest story you will ever write in your life is your own, not with ink but with your daily actions and choices. Do not worry about perfection, it doesn’t exist, it never has. All authors erase, all authors follow false paths that end up as crumpled paper in the trash basket. In the end it is not what you write but what you claim that is your story.
Tabula Rasa
Dylan called that night and asked me out for Wednesday. I almost thanked him for the letter.
CHAPTER nineteen
Either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing.
—Benjamin Franklin
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 11
Wednesday evening Dylan picked me up a few minutes after I got home from work. We went out for Chinese at a restaurant called the Mandarin about fifteen minutes north of Salt Lake. The place was popular. Dylan told me that the wait was