Parked beside the cemetery wall, only two hundred yards from Adam’s statue, I decide I’m still not ready to confront his marble doppelgänger from any closer proximity. Not yet, at least. Better to drive back to town and have a cup of coffee at Nadine’s, settle my nerves, then ride out to the groundbreaking and try to figure out which of my fine fellow citizens acted on the nearly universal desire to silence Buck Ferris.
Chapter 8
My daily sanctuary is a bookstore/coffee shop called Constant Reader, which is nestled between two large buildings on Second Street near the bluff. Bienville has had five bookstores during the modern era, none of which survived more than fifteen years. A big chain store in the mall hung on until a couple of years ago but finally gave up the ghost. After this grim record, Nadine Sullivan wisely opened Constant Reader only two blocks from Battery Row and one block from the Aurora Hotel, the art deco grande dame of Bienville, which serves as the primary downtown landmark of the postbellum era. While the Aurora is currently shut down for renovations, nearly every tourist coming up from the riverboats or walking the bluff still passes Nadine’s door, and most step inside for coffee and a muffin, if not to buy books, those musty relics of the twentieth century.
Nadine is eight years younger than I, but like me, she attended St. Mark’s Episcopal. She was far enough behind me that I barely knew she existed, but she graduated knowing a fair bit about me. Neither of us could have known that decades after high school, a common experience would make us close friends. The daughter of a traveling pharmaceutical rep who left town permanently when she was nine, Nadine became a highly successful personal injury lawyer in Raleigh, North Carolina. Married at twenty-seven, she divorced at thirty-one, with no children to fight over. After winning a huge settlement against a drug company, she was planning to open an indie bookstore in Charleston, South Carolina, when her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Nadine moved home for what she thought would be a brief nursing period, but her mother rallied under her care and lived two more years. (Though my father has not rallied, this similar experience made Nadine and me natural confidants.) During the period that Mrs. Sullivan was ill, Nadine ran a weekly book club for her and a few close friends. So no one was surprised when, after her mother died, Nadine purchased a nineteenth-century pharmacy building downtown, restored it, and opened Constant Reader. Only tourists and newcomers refer to the store by its official name. Natives call it “Nadine’s place” or simply “Nadine’s.”
In the five months since I’ve been back, Nadine has hosted book signings by some of the finest writers in the South. She was one of the first to recognize the genius of Jesmyn Ward and Angie Thomas, and she’s also hosted small concerts by famous musicians she came to know while living in the Carolinas. Nadine is the kind of person who effortlessly pulls people into her orbit. Her gift for dealing with people can’t be attributed to any identifiable personal style, but rather to the vibe she radiates. Nadine Sullivan simply settles your soul, the way being around a baby does. Not that she has any childish quality; I know for a fact that she was a shark in the courtroom. But that’s difficult to imagine now. There is a purity about Nadine, a clarity in her eyes that—combined with a lack of any detectable tendency to judge people—invites the world in on its own terms. That said, her store is not merely a shelter for those in need of sympathy or conversation. Her author parties and musical events are webcast live to tens of thousands of followers, and she does good business mailing autographed books and CDs all over the world.
Most mornings, I drop by the store about 10:15, after the old men have finished bitching about “libtards” and the walking ladies have scarfed down their power waters and muffins. Nadine usually brings my coffee over herself, then lingers to chat for a couple of minutes, depending on how busy she is. Most days she remains on her feet, catching me up on any local gossip worth hearing. But some days she sits and sounds me out on events she’s thinking of scheduling, or just talks about the world in general. We’ve told each other