The women chatted about the book for a while. Miriam expectedly felt there was not enough romance, while Diana said she hadalmostsolved the mystery, only to second-guess herself and talk herself out of her guess.
“You have to trust those instincts, Detective Diana,” June teased.
Gradually, however, their conversation moved away from their reading material and toward their lives. June told them a humorous anecdote about cleaning a house where every room was decorated entirely in one color.
“So there was the blue room, the red room, the yellow room, and all that,” she said. “The bathroom was pink. It was, uh, visually impactful?” she said, trying for tact while the other women laughed.
“Suffice to say, Eleanor,” she added, “you’ve done amuchnicer job with the house.”
Eleanor wrinkled her nose. “Yeah, so far,” she said. She had really only managed to do up a few rooms. The kitchen was looking in decent shape, and this front parlor was looking nice… even if it was still a little empty. Her bedroom looked the best, but the rest of the house was still quite empty.
Eleanor sighed, waving an arm to show the scope of her space. “I just didn’t really understand how big a space it would be,” she said with a sigh. “Or maybe I didn’t understand how little space I would need as one person. The last time I lived alone, it was in a dorm room, for goodness’ sake!”
Diana, who had lightly touched on her own decorating struggles while Cadence jokingly recreated Diana’s lackluster reception to a painting from the gallery, nodded in commiseration.
June, however, looked thoughtful.
“You know…” She paused, sipping her martini as she gazed around the space.
“Spit it out, woman!” Cadence said.
June grinned and stuck out her tongue briefly. “Hush, you. I was just thinking, the other day when I was picking Benjamin up from school, I was talking to one of the parents about how it’s such a pain to get all the way out to the bookstore in Eastover when you’ve got a kiddo who is obsessed with a certain series. Obviously, no parent wants to discourage their kid from reading, so if they’re excited about a specific book, you want them to get it as quickly as possible. And he and I both don’t want to necessarily order our books from a big online retailer… we’d rather get them from an actual bookstore, where the kids can browse and maybe see something else they like.”
She paused, arching her eyebrow meaningfully at Eleanor.
“Wait,” Eleanor said, shaking her head. “You can’t mean…”
“I can mean,” June said, nodding. “What if you took the downstairs space and turned it into a bookstore? It would be ahuge boon to the community, and it would use up some of the rooms that you don’t know what to do with.”
Eleanor gazed around the room as if seeing it with new eyes.
“And I do need to find a way to make a living…” she added a bit hesitantly.
Miriam clasped her hands in front of herself, looking like a kid in a candy store. “Ooh, and you could host privateandpublic book clubs, do author visits, all those kind of wonderful literary activities that we currently have to drive for. I bet the teachers would all love their students getting local access to books. Oh, you could havestory times!”
“Okay, okay, slow down, Miriam!” Cadence said with a laugh. She turned to Eleanor. “I do think it’s a great idea, though.”
Eleanor… liked the idea too, more than she was maybe ready to admit.
“I’d have to find a way to cordon off my living space,” she said slowly. “But the way this house was built… the kitchen and the stairs are connected. It could work.”
“And the living room, dining room, parlor, and that spare bedroom are kind of their own space, too,” Diana said, tilting her hands as if it helped her picture how the space functioned. “My boutique is in a building that’s smaller, but similar. That’s how I separated out the front space and the stock rooms. It could work for you too.”
“The kitchen door could be my entrance, and the front door could be the customer entrance,” Eleanor said, a smile spreading across her face. It would be a lot of work, alot. But the more she thought about it, the more she liked it.
As if sensing her growing eagerness, her friends began chiming in with more ideas.
“The windows in here would make it the perfect cozy reading space,” Diana offered.
“And you could build shelves along the back wall,” Cadence added.
“Idemanda good romance section,” Miriam said decisively.
“We all expected that,” Diana said, throwing her arm affectionately around the older woman’s shoulders.
Miriam stuck out her tongue playfully.
“I could do this,” Eleanor said, needing to hear it out loud. “I could put up a door between the kitchen and the stairs, and that would keep my area private. I could have the checkout counter in the dining room, near the door. I could even use the bedroom as event space, if people wanted to host things at the shop.”
