The Green Man (10 page)

“Leonard talks too much.” She began hunting through the cupboards. “What happened to those cookies I bought?”

“You ate them.”

“All of them?”

“Yup.”

“That can’t be true. You must have had some.”

“Not one. They had coconut in them. I’m allergic. I eat coconut, my throat closes, I die.”

“Really?”

“Uh-huh.”

Emily stirred the tea in the pot with a spoon – just in case it wasn’t strong enough already – and poured it into the cups. She took the mismatched cup and saucer for herself and gave the other to O. What she really wanted, O suspected, was to light up a cigarette. Cigarettes calmed her, and talking about the readings had obviously touched a nerve.

“Why do you always do that?” asked O.

“What?”

“Mismatch your cup and saucer like that?”

“Just to be perverse, I suppose.” She fiddled with the handle of her cup, scratched her neck, and ran her fingertips over the skin. It was red and angry looking. Likely
a reaction to all the chocolate she’d been eating since trying to cut out the cigarettes. But this wouldn’t be a good time to bring that up.

Emily sat staring at her cup. She had dropped down into one of the mind chasms she regularly fell into. After a couple of minutes, she clambered back out.

“When I was young, there were coffeehouses where poetry readings regularly took place. There were small magazines, where new work was published, small presses devoted to publishing poetry. None of them made any money, of course, but that wasn’t the point. I don’t think any of us ever expected to make a living at it. We were happy just practicing the craft, carrying on an honorable tradition.”

While she talked, she turned the cup around on the saucer.

“It was exotic to be a poet in those days. There was excitement in the air. People were bursting with ideas, eager to break new ground. It’s not like that now. Poets are an endangered species. They don’t appear on the WWF list, but they’re every bit as endangered. I don’t know how anyone even begins to write poetry these days, or how they keep at it. It’s a lonely business – you don’t write poetry in an office pool; you write it alone. But where are the supports now? Where is the audience? They simply don’t exist.”

O had heard enough. “Maybe that’s why the Green Man readings were so important,” she said. Emily looked up at her. O swallowed hard and went on.

“I mean, if it’s true that poets are more isolated than ever, aren’t they even more in need of supports like that? And if the people who provide them grow discouraged and give up, don’t they just become part of the problem?”

She’d said more than she meant to, and far more bluntly than she should have. You could have cut the silence with a knife.

Emily rose from the table and took her cup to the counter. Disappearing down the hall, she came back moments later with her sweater and her purse. “I’m going for a walk,” she said. “I shouldn’t be long.”

Translation:
I’m totally ticked off with you, and I’m going out for a cigarette
.

O sat at the table for a while, rehearsing her apology for being impertinent as her tea grew cold. An hour later, her aunt still hadn’t returned.

As she waited, O slipped off the elastic from the bundle of mail that had been delivered to the shop that morning and went through it. Junk mail and bills. Then, at the bottom of the pile, a letter addressed to her. It was from her father. She retreated to her room, where she could read it undisturbed.

He thanked her for her letter and was glad to hear she was doing well and adapting to living with Emily. He reminded her that Emily might be a little crusty on the outside, but that she had a heart of gold underneath it all.

O read happily along, hearing the sound of his voice in the words and missing him. In her letter to him, she’d mentioned that, though he was in Italy, Emily had recently seen him staring in the shop window one afternoon, looking not as he did now but as he’d looked as a boy. She also mentioned seeing the same boy on the wall.

When she wrote the letter, she’d wondered whether she should mention it at all. She didn’t want him thinking they were both losing their minds. So she’d just tossed off a couple of sentences at the end, making light of the whole affair. His response surprised her.

She folded the letter and tucked it away in her journal. The room had begun to fill with shadows. A sense of strangeness lay over everything. She had the sudden awareness of things existing not only in space, but also in time. From the pictures on the wall to the paperweights on the dresser, from the books on the shelves to the curtains in the window – everything was steeped in time. The door that separated past from present had, for some reason, opened here. She wondered what else might slip through.

The spell was broken by the sound of Emily returning from her walk. She called up the stairs to say that she’d
picked up a tub of ice cream from one of the shops down the street and it was melting fast.

O realized this was Emily’s way of saying she was sorry for the wedge that had come between them. She hurried downstairs, and soon they were sitting together at the table, basking in the bliss of Chocolate Delight.

T
he call that was to change everything came a week later, while O was on duty at the shop. It was Saturday, and Emily had gone off in the car to do a sweep of the local yard sales, searching for treasures. The panic O had first felt at being left alone in the shop had diminished to a vague unease.

Good-weather days were as bad for the book business as bad-weather days. And today the weather was sunny and warm. Across the street, Tiny, the owner of the Mind Spider Tattoo Parlor, was sitting shirtless outside his shop, catching some rays while he read the latest Gothic romance he’d picked up at the Green Man.

Tiny was a pretty scary-looking guy, as were many of those who frequented his shop. He looked as if he might have been a biker in a former life; but, in this one, he was a total pussycat. He and Gigi had taken Emily under their wing and watched out for her. They both dropped by the shop on a pretty regular basis.

Tiny made quite a sight. His upper body was completely covered in tattoos. He was a big man, so he was wearing a lot of ink. Between that and the piercings, he attracted a fair bit of attention from passersby. He waved in greeting as O dragged out the bargain bins and rolled down the awning.

The bookshop was definitely in better shape than it had been when she first came. She’d spent the last several days clambering up and down the ladder, hauling armloads of books for Emily to weed through, giving the shelves a good cleaning while they were empty, then putting the books that had passed inspection back into place.

The rejects were consigned to empty boxes – some for the bargain bins, some for the rehab hospital, the rest for Goodwill.

It was hard for Emily to part with her stock, even things she knew had sat untouched on the shelves for years. But, as the days went by, she began to relax her standards a little. So far they had filled close to two dozen boxes. Suddenly there was space on the shelves for the books that had been multiplying on the floor.

Much was still to be done, but today it was simply too hot to bother. The shop was like an oven. The least exertion caused streams of sweat to start pouring down O’s face. She sat at the cluttered desk, cleaning and pricing a stack of paperbacks Emily had left for her, sipping on a
can of iced tea. It had been refreshingly cold when she first opened it an hour ago, but now it was warm and sweet, with a disturbingly chemical aftertaste. The fan, ancient and definitely lacking the Safety Association stamp of approval, sat on the windowsill beside her and blew the warm air halfheartedly around. Even the music drifting from the radio seemed weary with the heat.

She sprayed a little Windex on a cloth and wiped down the covers. Then she fanned through the books to check for markings and for anything that had been left behind. After erasing a few light pencil markings, she wrote the selling price on the first page. Generally, they charged half the initial price of the book. She set the books aside for Emily to check later, before they were put up on the shelves.

The night before, O had started working on a poem. A few random lines came to her as she lay down to sleep. Words often decided to come then. She tumbled out of bed, sat at the desk, and wrote them down. She crossed some words out, tried others and crossed them out as well. A pool of light shone on the page. She felt the silence pressing in like darkness all around. She pierced it with the pen, and words trickled out.

Now she took the folded piece of paper from her pocket and looked at the poem in the clear light of day. She called it “Garden Sculpture.”

She changed a word here, added another there. With a little fiddling, she was able to find a way past the impasse she had reached the night before.

Something in the musty, dusty perfume of the Green Man inspired poetry. Perhaps it was because this was a place where poetry had happened, and happened over a good many years. It was a place the muse knew and visited with some regularity – even if no one else did.
The phone rang. It was an old phone. Emily preferred her machines old. New things made her nervous. As if to compensate for its age, the phone had a very virile ring. It had just launched into a second one, when O plucked up the receiver and stopped it short.

“Hello. Green Man bookshop.”

“Hello. May I speak to Emily Endicott, please?” It was an older woman’s voice. Very proper, with the whisper of an accent O couldn’t place.

“I’m sorry, she’s not in at the moment. May I take a message?” She grabbed a scrap of paper and a pencil.

“Yes. This is Lenora Linton speaking. Miss Endicott doesn’t know me, but I should like to speak to her about a personal library I would like to sell.”

“I see.” Just what they needed – more books.

“I’ll leave my number with you. She can call and arrange a time to see the collection, if she’s interested.” She gave a local number.

“There’s just one more thing. Time is of the essence in this matter. The collection must be sold within a month.”

“I understand,” said O. She glanced up to check the calendar for when that would be. There was a bare space on the wall where the calendar should have been. Emily must have taken it down for some reason. She wrote
Must be sold in a month’s time
on the piece of paper, along with the rest of the information.

“Very well, then. I look forward to hearing from Miss Endicott at her earliest convenience. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye,” said O, but the phone had already gone dead.

She put down the receiver and stuck the message to the arm of the lamp, where Emily would be sure to see it.

She had just turned back into her poem, when the bell above the door chimed. She glanced up to see who the first customer of the day might be. Her heart gave a little flutter. It was him – the boy she’d seen browsing through the bargain bins last week. Now here he was inside the shop, and she was alone with him. She thought she might faint.

He was younger than he’d seemed the first time she saw him. She realized with a shock that he couldn’t be much older than her – sixteen, seventeen at most. He was very good looking, but not in your typical buff, blue-eyed, chisel-chinned, fashion-model sort of way. No, he was more exotic than that, with a smoldering edge to him.

He wore black pants and a black jacket over a white tee shirt. His backpack hung from one shoulder. He had a cool rumpled look about him, his hair all this way and that, like he’d just tumbled out of bed.