The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend (14 page)

She tried sorting the books into different piles to see what gaps there were and to work out what she still needed to order online, but it was impossible not to get lost among them all.

She spread them out around her as she worked, opening them at random, laughing, talking to Amy, getting caught up in the best parts of her favourite authors and finding countless new gems.

When a sudden rain shower started lashing at the windows, she barely noticed, surrounded as she was by the voices of hundreds of stories waiting to be discovered by the readers-to-be of Broken Wheel.

It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.

I may be sitting here at the Rose Terrace Nursing Home, but in my mind I'm over at the Whistle Stop Cafe having a plate of fried green tomatoes.

Dear Sidney, Susan Scott is a wonder
.

We are in camp five miles behind the line. Yesterday our relief arrived; now our bellies are full of bully beef and beans, we've had enough to eat and we're well satisfied.

At the stroke of eleven on a cool April night, a woman named Joey Perrone went overboard from a luxury deck of the cruise liner M.V.
Sun Duchess.
Plunging toward the dark Atlantic, Joey was too dumbfounded to panic. I married an asshole, she thought, knifing headfirst into the waves.

Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.

Sara tried to save a pile of books that she herself wanted to read, but there were too many of them, and she realised that she would just have to go through them, one by one, once they were in place.

That evening, she reluctantly went to bed in her own room. She slept uneasily a couple of metres away from the books.

When she woke the next morning, she was full of expectation. She made a brief stop in the kitchen for coffee before returning to Amy's room, ready to get back to work.

She stopped in the doorway. Somehow, she had expected to see Amy's room as it had been – the pretty, muted colours of the thick patchwork quilt spread across the bed, the calm serenity of the books awaiting her. But now the room had an air of chaos to it, a chaos that she herself had created the day before.

The bedspread lay crumpled beneath a collapsed pile of books. Several of the shelves were completely bare; dusty marks the only clue that books which had stood there for years had been taken away. At that moment, of course, the majority had made it no further than the floor, where they lay spread out in a fan shape, a clear space in the middle where Sara had been sitting. The empty boxes Sara had left leaning against the bed had fallen down during the night.

It was only a feeling, and one she cast off almost immediately, but standing there, in front of the ravaged bookcases, she couldn't help but wonder whether this really was what Amy would have wanted. Each time Sara had entered this room, it had been as though she was somehow stepping into Amy's world, a kind of timeless, parallel story where everything was still as it should be.

Just then, though, it felt like Amy's presence was waning, as though her spirit was being disturbed along with the dust, whenever Sara moved her books.

She'll be coming with them to the bookshop
, she told herself, but she couldn't shake the niggling feeling of doubt.

When Tom came by later that afternoon, full boxes were stacked along one of the walls, and the bedspread had been smoothed out. Sara had also dusted the shelves, though that had been a mistake. It felt like she had been trying to wipe away Amy herself. She had been forced to put a couple of books back after that.

Tom said nothing about the empty bookcases or about Sara sitting in the middle of the floor, surrounded by books and with an uncertain, almost teary look in her eye. He leaned against the door frame and watched her in silence.

She wanted to ask whether he thought Amy could see them now, or whether she was, in some way, helping them in their project, and what he thought she would make of the madness if she was, but she didn't dare.

Eventually, he gestured towards the boxes, and raised a questioning eyebrow.

She nodded. He bent down and picked up two boxes, but didn't carry them away immediately. He stood there looking at her instead, as though he was about to say something. The heavy boxes made the muscles in his tanned arms seem even more prominent, which made Sara think of something other than books for the first time in two days.

‘Tom,' she said hesitantly, making him pause once again. ‘Nothing,' she said. ‘Be careful carrying them. Books are heavy.'

She could have sworn that she saw a flicker of amusement on his lips as he disappeared down the stairs.

Men
, she thought.

Her years in the bookshop had taught her that moving books was more a marathon than a sprint, and that it was always the men who exhausted themselves first. Not that any of the men who had worked in the bookshop had ever listened to her.

Or any other men, for that matter.

The night before the shop was due to open, Sara stayed on alone.

‘So, Amy,' she said. She was standing by the window, through which the yellowish light from one of the town's remaining street lamps was casting a ghostly glow over the entire shop. From where she was standing, she could almost see Jimmie Coogan Street. The thought made her smile to herself.

It had taken three days to paint the walls, bring in the furniture and the bookcases, fetch the books and put them out on the shelves. Tom had managed to collect just enough bookcases to satisfy Sara, but when there had been no more room on the shelves, she had put the remainder of the boxes in the little cubbyhole for future use. She was probably the only person in town who thought there ever would be a future, but she would show them.

The deep sunshine-yellow counter was the first thing you saw when you entered the shop. Sara thought that it made it seem like you were stepping into some kind of magical shop; what, she asked herself, wasn't possible with a yellow counter?

Aside from the bookshelves, which Tom had painted white, nothing matched. The walls were a rich shade of yellow which seemed to catch the daylight and spread it throughout the room. They didn't match the counter, but that didn't matter. It was a happy colour, and most of the walls were covered by the bookcases anyway. In the window, there were two mismatched winged armchairs, one of them in a faded green pattern and the other dark blue. Between them she had placed a small, round, cedar-wood table which clashed with the floor. The entire thing looked more like a family home, one where everything had been collected down the generations, or else a young couple's home, where they hadn't had the money to buy new things. She liked the idea of both.

George, Caroline and the others had stopped by earlier to inspect the results, but now she was finally alone. There was nothing left for her to do, but she didn't want to leave.

So she spun slowly round in the middle of the floor. She smiled. Her bookshop was ready. Perfect in its own way.

‘Do you think we'll be happy here?' she asked Amy.

Amy didn't answer. Perhaps she hadn't quite found her bearings yet.

‘Don't worry,' said Sara. ‘We'll spread books and stories in Broken Wheel together.'

JOHN WAS MAKING
coffee in the kitchen. Tom was standing by the window in the living room, looking down onto Main Street, but he could hear the methodical sound of cups and saucers being placed onto a tray with precision.

Strictly speaking, kitchen was an exaggeration. It was more like a cupboard, with a tiny counter and two hotplates. The fridge was outside, in the living room.

It was funny to see how little had changed in his apartment. The living room had the same brown-striped wallpaper as the first time Tom had visited with his father, when John had only just taken over the hardware store and the living space above it. It still smelled strongly of old age. The scent of old furniture and clothing must already have been there when John moved in.

But what really struck him was how little it had changed over the past few weeks. The entire town had been affected by Amy's death, but these walls, this ceiling, they looked just as they always had. Maybe that was the reason John so rarely left home these days.

Recently, Tom tried to come over a few times a week, as though his presence might prevent John from tumbling over the precipice he seemed to be standing at the edge of. He had the feeling that the only reason John hadn't jumped was that he hadn't quite managed to work up the necessary energy yet.

Maybe the reason the apartment hadn't been affected by Amy's death was that it had never been anything to do with her. Tom hadn't been inside for years, maybe even decades before Amy's death. He had always seen John at her house.

That evening, the lights in Amy's shop were spilling out onto the street below him. Sara must still be there, even though the shop was as ready as it would ever be.

‘Do you have anything against all of this?' he asked, loudly enough for John to be able to hear him in the kitchen. ‘Sara living in Amy's house. This whole bookstore thing.'

‘A bookstore,' John said somewhere behind him. It sounded like a question.

‘Yeah.'

‘With Amy's books?'

‘Yeah.'

The clink of sugar lumps could be heard from the kitchen, as John filled up the sugar bowl. Neither Tom nor John took sugar in their coffee, but it was part of the ritual.

‘I like her,' John eventually said. He came out from the kitchen carrying the tray with the cups of coffee and a plate of biscuits neither of them wanted. ‘She seems happy.'

He placed the tray on the little side table, but Tom stayed where he was.

‘Happy?'

‘But she's not going to stay.'

Obviously she wasn't going to stay. ‘Do you know why she came here? Did she tell … did Amy tell you?'

‘I don't think it's right to try to keep her here.'

‘God, no,' he said, with more feeling than he had intended. But then he turned to John, asking. ‘Why isn't it right?'

John handed him a cup of coffee rather than answering. Something in his movements suggested he had no intention of doing so. Tom's eyes wandered down Broken Wheel's empty main street while John continued talking behind him.

‘There's not enough of a future here,' said John. His voice was insistent, as though it was absolutely imperative that he make Tom understand. It was the first time since Amy had died that Tom had seen him engaged with anything.

Of course. Tom understood, but he didn't agree. He wondered whether there was really any future anywhere, whether people were happier in the bigger cities where they were constantly on the hunt for that new job, that new house, that new wife. From what he had seen of the world so far, he didn't see that people in Broken Wheel were any less happy than you could expect to be anywhere else.

‘If there aren't any jobs then the young people and the families won't stay, and if the families don't stay then there aren't any new young people, and there's no town without young people. Old people die. Eventually, there'll just be people like me left.'

‘Not a bad basis for a town,' said Tom. ‘Plus, we've got young people.'

‘Not many,' said John. ‘And they're growing up. Lacey and Steven might be our last.'

‘Jen's kids are going to get older.'

‘They'll move.'

Tom was silent. John looked down at the empty street as though it was proof. Sara came out of the shop. She just stood there, perfectly peaceful, as if she had no reason in the world to hurry.

John walked over to the window. ‘The fact is,' he said, ‘Broken Wheel is dying.'

 

 

 

 

Broken Wheel, Iowa

July 2, 2010

Sara Lindqvist

Kornvägen 7, 1 tr

136 38 Haninge

Sweden

Dear Sara,

John came here from Birmingham, Alabama, at the end of the sixties. He came with his mother and his siblings. I don't know if his father stayed behind in Alabama or whether he'd cleared off long before. He might already have been dead by that point. John hasn't ever talked about his father. He actually talks very rarely about Alabama at all. Only once did I manage to get him to talk about it, but I was forced to get him drunk first.

Back then, Birmingham had the dubious honor of being an almost international symbol for racial segregation and state-sanctioned racial violence. When the desegregation of schools was put into effect after the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown
v
. Board of Education of Topeka, pictures of children in school uniforms being sprayed with water cannons – by the police – spread all over the world. Buses were set on fire, churches were bombed, people were lynched and burned to death. People called the town Bombingham for a while because of the white population's terrorism against the blacks. And Martin Luther King wrote his famous Letter from Birmingham City Jail.

It's funny, the way we talk about terrorism nowadays as though it's only Muslims and Arabs threatening our society. I'm afraid my understanding of terrorism was shaped long before September 11. It was the fear, the arbitrariness, the violence that affected people indiscriminately – even those who said they didn't want to get involved or had no intention of fighting against segregation. For me, terrorism is still the image of white men, people active in society, standing over the charcoaled, lynched body of a black man, looking pleased with their work.

John says I think about historic injustices too much. Maybe he's right, but it's just that it doesn't
feel
historic to me. We never seem to be able to accept responsibility for them. First, we say that's just how things are, then we shrug our shoulders and say that's just how things were, that things are different now. No thanks to us, I want to reply, but no one ever seems to want to hear that.