The Bookseller (2 page)

I am speechless. Then, reminding myself that I am, after all, asleep, I smile at the boy. I lean down and give his shoulder a squeeze. I'm just going along with this dream now. Why not? So far, this is a pleasant enough place to be.

“Take me to your father and Missy,” I say, grabbing the child's soft, plump hand.

W
e walk down the hall and go up a half flight of stairs. At the top is a girl's bedroom, with carnation-pink walls, a little white wooden bed, and a low bookcase filled with picture books and stuffed animals. Sitting upright in the bed is an equally angelic child, a female version of the boy who holds my hand. Her expression is forlorn and her cheeks are flushed. She is about the same size as the boy. I am terrible at deciphering children's ages, but I'd guess they are around five or six. Twins?

“Mama's here!” Cherub Boy says, climbing onto the bed. “Missy, Mama's here and you're going to be fine.”

Missy whimpers. I sit next to her and touch her forehead, which feels distressingly warm under my hand. “What hurts?” I ask her gently.

She leans toward me. “Everything, Mama,” she says. “My head especially.”

“Did Daddy take your temp?” I can't believe how easily these words, these motherly actions, are coming to me. I feel like an old pro.

“Yeah, he's washing the ther-mon-eter.”

“Thermometer,” Cherub Boy corrects her. “It's a ther-
MOM
-eter. Not a ther-
MON
-eter.”

She rolls her eyes at him. “Mind your own beeswax, Mitch.”

Lars appears in the doorway. “One hundred one-point-six,” he reports.

I am unsure what that means. Oh, I know it means her temperature is 101.6 degrees Fahrenheit. But I do not know what it means in terms of medication, bed rest, staying home from school.

Because I do not have children. I am not a mother.

I
don't mean to imply that I never wanted children. Quite the contrary. I was one of those little girls who loved baby dolls, who fed them pretend bottles and changed their pretend diapers and pushed them around in a tiny doll-size pram. An only child, I begged my parents for a sibling—not because I wanted to be a big sister, but because I wanted to be a little mother to somebody.

For a long time I thought I'd marry Kevin, my steady during college. He left for the Pacific theater in '43, along with just about every other young man who hadn't already gone. I remained faithful to him—girls in those days did that, remained faithful. Kevin and I exchanged letter after letter. I sent him care packages of cookies, socks, shaving soap. In my sorority house, we stuck thumbtacks on a map of the South Pacific, marking our soldier boys' progress. “It's hard to wait, but it will be worth it when they're home,” we girls told each other. We sobbed into our hankies when we got word that someone's fellow wasn't coming back. But we also sent a little silent prayer of gratitude to heaven that it wasn't
our
fellow, not this time.

Much to my relief, Kevin returned from the war intact and seemingly unchanged, eager to resume his studies as a premed student and attain his goal of becoming a doctor. We continued dating, but he never did pop the question. We were invited to wedding after wedding, where everyone asked when it would be
our turn. “Oh, you know, someday!” I'd say, my tone overly gay and nonchalant. Kevin simply changed the subject whenever it came up.

Year after year passed. Kevin finished medical school and began his residency; I worked as a fifth-grade teacher. But as far as our relationship went, one year was as static as the next. Finally I knew I could no longer put off an ultimatum. I told Kevin that unless he wanted to make our relationship permanent, I was through.

He sighed heavily. “That's probably for the best,” he said. His good-bye kiss was brief, perfunctory. Not a year later, I heard he'd married a nurse from the hospital where he worked.

W
ell, clearly, in this dream world, none of that—those wasted years, Kevin's callous rejection—matters at all. In this world, I landed myself a winner somewhere along the line.
Good for you, Kitty
, I can hear my Delta Zeta sisters congratulating me.
Good for you.

The thought strikes me as absurd, and I stifle a laugh. Then I put my hand to my mouth, mortified. This is a dream; nonetheless, there is a sick child here. I ought to behave appropriately. I ought to be suitably, maternally troubled.

I look up from Missy's bed, and my eyes meet Lars's. He's staring at me with admiration and—could I be reading this correctly?—
desire
in his eyes. Do married people truly look at each other this way? Even in the middle of a kid-has-a-fever crisis?

“What do you say?” Lars asks me. “You always know what to do when these things happen, Katharyn.”

Do I? How interesting this dream is. I glance out the window at what appears to be a winter morning, the windowpane frosty and snow falling lightly.

And then, suddenly, though I cannot explain it, I
do
know exactly what to do. I rise and walk across the hall to the bathroom. I know precisely where on the medicine cabinet shelf I will find the tiny plastic bottle of St. Joseph's Aspirin for Children. I pull a paper cup from the dispenser attached to the wall and run a bit of cool water into it. Opening the bathroom's linen closet, I remove a facecloth, hold it under cold water, and squeeze it out.

Walking purposefully, I carry the medicine bottle, facecloth, and cup to Missy's room. I apply the cloth to her forehead, gently pressing it against her warm skin. I hand her two aspirin tablets; these she swallows dutifully, using the water to chase them down. She smiles gratefully at me and leans back against her pillow.

“Let's let her rest now.” I settle Missy under the covers and fetch several picture books from her shelf. She begins paging through
Madeline's Rescue
—a volume in that delightful children's series by Ludwig Bemelmans about a Parisian boarding school student named Madeline and her eleven classmates—the house covered in vines, the girls in two straight lines. Missy's fingers trace the words on each page as she sounds them out in a whispery, throaty voice.

Lars comes forward and takes my hand. We smile together at our daughter, and with our adorable son beside us, we quietly leave the room.

B
ut then, as suddenly as it happened, the dream is over.

My bedside alarm clock is ringing sharply. I reach over, eyes shut, and press down hard on the button that stops the alarm. I open my eyes, and the room is yellow. I am home.

G
oodness,” I say to myself. “That was quite the dream.” Stiffly, I sit up in bed. Aslan, my yellow-hued tabby, is curled up next to me, purring softly with his eyes half closed. I named him after the lion in C. S. Lewis's novel
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
—an extraordinary book, especially if one adores children's fantasy stories. I read each Narnia novel as it came out, and I've read the entire series at least half a dozen times since.

I look around my bedroom. The windows are bare, stripped of their curtains and shades. Masking tape still frames the woodwork. My bed and nightstand are the only pieces of furniture in the room; before I began painting yesterday, Frieda and I moved the bureau and hope chest to the living room, to make space and keep splatters off the furniture. The room smells of paint, but the color is extraordinary—it's the exact color of the sun on a bright day. It's just what I'd hoped for. With a satisfied smile, I rise and don my robe, padding across the newspaper-covered floor.

Heading to the kitchen to make coffee, I stop to switch on the radio that sits on one of several scratched, tag-sale bookshelves that line my living room, overflowing with books and journals. I twist the knob to turn up the volume and tune the dial to KIMN. They're playing “Sherry” by the Four Seasons, which I've been
hearing constantly on the radio this week—I'd put money on it topping the Billboard chart this weekend.

I place my percolator under the kitchen faucet and fill it with water, then pull a can of Eight O'Clock Coffee from an upper cabinet and begin measuring it into the stainless-steel top chamber of the percolator.

“
. . . Out tonight . . .
” I sing along under my breath as the song on the radio fades away.

“And now here's an oldie but a goodie,” the disc jockey says. “Does anyone out there remember this one?”

As the next song begins, my hand freezes, my fingertips holding the coffee scoop and hovering midair over the percolator. Rosemary Clooney's voice fills my small duplex.

“Now that's just plain eerie,” I say to Aslan, who has wandered in to check whether his morning dish of milk has been set on the floor yet. I finish pouring the coffee and switch the percolator to On.

The song—I remember now that it's titled “Hey There”—dates back at least seven or eight years. I don't remember the exact year it was so popular, but I do remember humming it often in those days. I haven't thought about that song in ages. Not until I heard it playing in my head, in my dream last night.

I recall my dream man's eyes, piercing and blue, like the water in a postcard from some exotic locale. I remember thinking that I
ought
to have been frightened, but I was not. Did I look at him with stars in my eyes? I suspect one could say I did.

Well, but how could I help it? The way his eyes gazed into mine. He looked at me as if I were everything to him. As if I were his whole world.

That, to me, was without a doubt exotic. No one, not even Kevin, has ever looked at me like that.

And the way Lars spoke!
Katharyn, love, wake up. You must
have been in some deep sleep, love. You always know what to do, Katharyn.

No one, here in the real world, says such things to me. And certainly no one addresses me as Katharyn.

There was a brief period, some years ago, when I toyed with calling myself Katharyn. This was right around the time when Frieda and I opened our bookstore. With a new career and a new decade of life—I'd turned thirty a few months prior—I felt it was time for a sea change. Despite my general dislike of the unwieldy
Katharyn
, I could think of no better way to bring about a grand change of character than to alter my name. Perhaps, I mused, I needed only to get used to it.

And so I charged forward. I had personal stationery printed with the name “Katharyn Miller” on it. I asked Frieda and my other friends to call me Katharyn. I said my name was Katharyn when introducing myself to customers, to the other shopkeepers who we were just getting to know on our little block of stores on Pearl Street. I even asked my parents to use my given name—which they, albeit reluctantly, did. They have always been overindulgent with me.

Frieda was not so easy to push over. “Kitty suits you,” she said. “Why change?”

I shrugged and said that perhaps it was simply time to grow up.

I even used that name when introducing myself to potential suitors. It felt good, a fresh start. A chance to be someone new. Someone a bit more sophisticated, a bit more experienced.

Nothing happened with any of those fellows—a random first date here and there, but no second ones. Apparently, changing my name was not going to automatically change my persona, the way I'd hoped it might.

A few months later I placed the remaining “Katharyn Miller”
stationery in the dustbin and quietly went back to calling myself Kitty. No one commented.

I
take my coffee to my desk, which faces my two living room windows. I open the curtains. Seated here, I can look out onto Washington Street. It's a sunny, warm September day. The postman is coming down the street; I wave as he fills my mailbox and that of the Hansens, who own this duplex and live in the other half of it. After the postman leaves, I go outside to get my mail and my
Rocky Mountain News
morning paper.

Lars, Lars
. . . I am still running the name over in my mind. Lars who?

And where have I heard that name before?

I go back inside, glancing at the newspaper headlines. President Kennedy gave a speech at Rice University yesterday, promising a man on the moon by the end of the decade. I'll believe it when I see it. I cast the paper on my dining table, planning to read it over breakfast.

My mail contains only a few items. Besides several bills, there is an advertisement with a coupon for a free car wash—not that that would do me any good; I don't even own a car—and a postcard from my mother.

I smile at her note. My parents have been in Honolulu for the past three weeks and will be there for about five weeks more. It is a huge trip for them, the biggest they have ever taken away from Denver. Their fortieth wedding anniversary was this past June, and the trip is a celebration. My uncle Stanley is a chief petty officer at the Pearl Harbor naval base. My parents have been staying with Uncle Stanley and Aunt May in their apartment off-base, in Honolulu.

This trip is a wonderful event for them, the experience of a lifetime, but I could see why they—especially my mother—wouldn't want to be away from home any longer than two months. My mother is committed to her work in the Unwell Infants Ward at Denver General; she has been volunteering there for almost as long as I can remember. (“The oldest candy-striper on the planet,” she cheerfully calls herself.) My dad worked for the Colorado Public Service Company for years, assembling electrical meters for homes; he took early retirement last year, at age sixty. Dad spends his time puttering around the house, reading, and going golfing with his cronies twice a week, even in the winter, as long as there is no snow on the ground.