Liddy laughed. “Get thee behind me, Satan. I’m sticking with the same old, same old, but thanks for asking.”
“You got it.” He turned to prepare her coffee, and she tried to remember his name. He was the grandson of someone in town, but she couldn’t remember whom. When her drink was ready, he handed over her order. “So it’s my last week here before I go back to school. You gonna miss me?”
“Of course I will.” She smiled as his name bounced back into her head. “Remind me what college you go to, Ryan.”
“University of Connecticut,” he replied.
“Oh, right. Well, good luck this year. Come see us over your winter break.” She paid for her coffee and winked as she turned to leave. “Go Huskies.”
Once outside, Liddy stopped on the sidewalk to take a few sips of her coffee. Regular medium blend. Half-and-half. One artificial sweetener. “Perfect, as always,” she murmured. “I will definitely miss that boy.”
The light was green at the three-way corner where Front, Church, and Cottage Streets merged, so she hustled across toward her destination. It was a perfect end-of-summer morning, sunny but cool with the promise of a decent beach day that afternoon. She knew crisper weather was ahead and for a moment wished she could take the day off. Just this one before the days grew shorter and cooler and there’d be no more hours spent lounging on the beach until next year. But her list was endless, and if she wanted to open the new-and-improved bookshop by the time Alden Academy—the private school that stretched along the harbor not far from the center of town—reopened for the fall term, she had to use every day to the maximum. She’d wanted to bring the shop back from the dusty, dingy, poorly organized state it had been in when she’d bought it, and she’d already made great strides toward that end. Her goal was to open the first Tuesday in September, and that date was just around the corner. Before she knew it, it would be Labor Day, and the next day cars would be pouring into town from all over New England to drop off the sons of the families who could afford the steep costs associated with a tony prep school like Alden.
Liddy unlocked the door to her shop, pausing to catch a quick glimpse of her reflection in the front bay window. She was a tall woman who carried a few extra pounds on her large-boned frame. Her salt-and-pepper hair hung over her left shoulder in one big, fat, long braid. She’d be hard pressed to deny her age, though the lines on her face weren’t that bad, and her wide-set eyes were still crystal blue. She wore old, bright-yellow J.Crew rubber flip-flops, a faded light-blue T-shirt with URI (in honor of her alma mater) in white on the front, and a pair of olive-green cargo pants, which she’d bought online months ago. Once they’d arrived, she’d decided something even remotely trendy didn’t suit her usual style (most days that being aging flower child), and she’d meant to send them back. But the pants slated for return were forgotten in the midst of the hullabaloo over the summer with Maggie moving back to Wyndham Beach and Liddy discovering the reason Maggie hadn’t married Brett all those years ago (oh, the deliciousness of the drama!). Since Liddy was stuck with the pants, they’d become an integral part of her gardening, cleaning, painting, all-things-messy go-to outfit.
Once inside, she turned on the overhead lights. They were neon and harsh, but there wasn’t much she could do about them. Maybe she’d replace them someday, but the estimate she’d received from the electrical contractor was mind-blowing, so she’d moved that item to the bottom of the list. Earlier in the week she’d lowered the front window shade and decided to leave it down. The natural light would be lovely and welcomed, but no need to let the entire town know what she was doing until she was ready to show them.
For a very long moment, she stood at the front of the store, remembering a time when trips to this shop had been so routine she’d barely registered their importance. Now she lamented the irreclaimable beauty of those lost days, when they’d walk from their home, Jessie’s hand in hers, her daughter chatting endlessly about whatever popped into her mind, Liddy hardly listening to half of what Jess was saying. How many times had she replayed an argument with Jim or the plot of the previous night’s favorite TV show in her head while Jessie had been sharing a story she was making up as they ambled along? The memory turned Liddy cold inside. She’d give anything for one more sweet morning walk with her child.
She could almost see an enthralled Jessie sitting on the story rug in the children’s section at the back of the store, eyes wide as she listened to an animated Alma Jo Lattimore, the late wife of the previous owner, read aloud at Tuesday morning story time. Liddy closed her eyes, and for a brief flicker in time Jessie was running to her, face shining, clutching the book she’d desperately wanted. All those books purchased over the years remained in the bedroom of Jess’s apartment in the carriage house behind Liddy’s home, the old structure she and Jim had renovated to give their daughter a place of her own. As a struggling artist, she couldn’t afford to rent an apartment but needed space where she could live and work with some degree of privacy. Jessie had created her best work in her three years there, work she’d stockpiled without having shared with anyone. Neither her boyfriend nor her parents had seen her last paintings, which, in retrospect, offered only the most subtle hints of the pain she’d been hiding from everyone.
Liddy blinked away the memory and tucked it back into the corner of her heart where she kept such things, and forced her feet to move. She had plenty of time to look back when she was home alone, but right at that moment there was work to do.
She dropped her handbag on the counter next to the ancient cash register, a beautiful relic from another time: a bright-red 1950 National Cash with the Coca-Cola logo above the keys. Carl Lattimore, the son of the previous owner, had assured her it still worked but admitted his father had used a five-year-old Casio for all transactions in the store. She still hadn’t decided what to do with it. Liddy patted the vintage machine as she walked past. It had long since been dubbed Big Red, and she’d expressed surprise that Fred Lattimore, who’d owned the shop for as long as Liddy could remember, hadn’t taken it with him.
“I thought about bringing it home,” Carl had told her. “But I’m afraid seeing it will remind my dad of the bookstore, and he’d take off, thinking he needed to go to work. Alzheimer’s is a terrible thing, Liddy. The register needs to stay in the shop. Everyone in town knows Big Red.”
So for now the antique remained on the counter, which itself showed its age.
“Yeah, well, showing one’s age isn’t a crime,” she muttered as she looked around, feeling overwhelmed, not for the first time in the course of the store’s renovation.
She’d been as aware as the next person the town’s only bookshop had room for improvement. Lots of improvement, from its physical appearance to the selection of books it offered and the way they were displayed. Fred Lattimore’s decline had begun sooner than any of his store’s patrons had realized. Of course, they knew he sometimes—okay, frequently—forgot to order the latest books from their publishers, which meant if you were really craving that new tell-all autobiography or women’s fiction or thriller, you had to drive to New Bedford to a brick-and-mortar store or order online. Once inside Fred’s store, the books had been arranged with seemingly no thought to how customers might find them. His random shelving had made locating a particular title somewhat of a scavenger hunt. There were those in town who had grown tired of trying to think like Fred. Of course, older residents had forgiven him his idiosyncrasies—“Oh, that’s just Fred’s way”—but more often than not, over the past two years, even Liddy (who thought she’d cracked Fred’s shelving code) had often left without a book in her hands.