OLDEST INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORE IN THE SMALLEST STATE.
Our street-facing family shop, known to locals as “the Nook,” occupies the ground floor of a white bay-windowed house that’s on the National Register of Historic Places because of its Revolutionary War connection. A private living space is on the second floor—an apartment that’s accessible around back via an exterior flight of rickety wooden stairs above a three-hundred-year-old cobblestone alley. Mom and I lived here with Grandma until I was in sixth grade, but since Grandma Diedre and Mom doa lot of bickering every time they spend quality time together, we stay with Aunt Franny when we come to town, which isn’t often.
Still. The quaint shop looks the same.
Generations of Saint-Martins all lived in this one building.
A large, paned window holds a display of books about ships, and over the recessed doorway, a wrought iron mermaid holding an open book juts horizontally from a pole over the sidewalk.
“Salty Sally,” Mom says cheerfully to the mermaid, earlier anxiety left behind. “Mermaid boobs looking perky, as always. Guess we’re stuck here together again. At least for the time being.”
Pushing open the shop door, I’m engulfed by scents of old and new paper. Musty foxing on parchment. Ink. Worn leather. Orange wood polish. It smells inviting, and the New England folk music playing over the speakers is familiar and haunting; my Grandma Diedre collects recordings of traditional sea shanties and local broadside ballads.
Back during the Revolutionary War, this building housed both the Beauty post office and a printshop—I come from a long line of people who worship the printed word—which not only published the local newspaper but also seditious leaflets urging the rebels that lived in our Crown-supporting Loyalist town to “rise up against our redcoat overlords.” Several of those leaflets are framed on the walls, and the original eighteenth century printing press crouches in the middle of the shop, now used as a prop to display books about Rhode Island history.
The shop appears empty of customers as Mom and I circlearound the old press and head toward the shop counter. Behind the register, lounging on a stool that squeaks loudly when she moves, is a nineteen-year-old community college student with her mother’s long legs and her late African American father’s warm brown skin. Her nose—which is dusted with the same pattern of splotchy freckles that all the Saint-Martin women have inherited—is buried in a historical romance paperback with a pirate on the cover.
Evie Saint-Martin.
“Credit card only. No cash. We close in two minutes,” Evie says in a bored voice from behind her book in the same way a spooky butler would sound answering the door in an old-dark-house horror film. A ceramic cup of tea steams at her elbow, her own private fog machine.
“I need to pay half in a sock full of pennies, half in a check that looks like it’s been dug out of a trash can,” I say.
She lowers her paperback until big eyes outlined dramatically with Cleopatra-style makeup peer at me from beneath thick bangs that have been chemically straightened and smoothed with a flat iron.
“Cousin,” she says brightly, her grin broad and slow as she pulls me into a hug over the counter. We nearly knock over a display of mermaid-topped writing pens near the register. She grasps my shoulders and pulls back to look me over. “See? This is why you should post more selfies. I had no idea your hair is longer than mine now. You should let me snip-snip it into something strangeand beautiful,” she says, eyes twinkling like a mad scientist.
Evie cuts her own hair. She’s strange in a very good way and a million times cooler than me. And though her parents moved back and forth between Beauty and a couple hours away in Boston, causing us to miss some time growing up together, we’ve developed a long-distance friendship over the last few years.
She shoves me softly. “Can’t believe you’re here. Thought you’d be arriving after dark?”
“We downloaded an app to avoid police radar,” Mom explains, sliding around the counter to wind long arms around Evie. “You’ve never lived until you’ve been in a U-Haul going eighty in a fifty-five zone.”
“It was terrifying,” I inform my cousin. “Seriously thought the Pink Panther was going to disconnect and fly off.”
“How you and my mama are sisters is a complete mystery, Aunt Winona,” Evie says as she leans around Mom’s shoulder to peer out the front window. “Um, you know you’ll get ticketed if you park there without a permit. Massive fine.”
Mom groans. “Ugh. Beauty. Nothing changes—even the Nook’s counter stool still squeaks. What the hell am I doing back here again?”
“Saving up for palm trees and white, sandy beaches,” I remind her.
“And saving me,” Evie says. “Grandma Diedre left too many instructions—the store window has to be changed out to her exact list of boring books every month, because God forbid anythingchanges around here. And even though I’ve counted everything a hundred times, the safe has somehow been $6.66 short for two days, because the vengeful spirit of the town is smiting us for selling fiction with dirty words in a town settled by puritans and yachting fanatics.”
“Ah ha! Knew it!” Mom says. “I wasjustreminding Josie that this place is built over an actual portal to hell, and everyone who lives here is a minion of the dark lord.”
A creaking floorboard near the old printing press makes us all turn our heads at once. A boy about my age stares back at us—atme.
Big, black Doc Martens. Black leather jacket. Dark waves of hair eddy and swirl around his face like fog circling a lamppost, overlapping a network of scars that mark one side of his face and forehead. Part of his eyebrow is missing. A tiny black cat is tattooed on his hand between his thumb and forefinger.
Carrying a book, he grips the strap of a brain-bucket style motorcycle helmet with the wordsLUCKY 13curving around the back in a wicked font. He squints at me through a fan of black lashes—first at the camera case hanging around my neck, then at my face.
He stares at me like I’m the ghost of his dead dog. Like he’s surprised to see me.
Like we’re old friends … or enemies.
I feel as if I’ve just been asked a question in a foreign language, and I’m struggling to pick through a tangle of words, syllable bysyllable, searching for meaning.Whoareyou, and what do you want from me?
A funny feeling sprouts in the pit of my stomach. Suddenly there’s a word puzzle in my head, and the blanks are slowly filling in, and it’s dawning-dawning-dawning on me what the answer to the puzzle could be. Because as much time as I’ve spent away from Beauty, the last five years, I did spend my childhood here. And during that childhood, I had a best friend. But I haven’t seen him since I was twelve, and he was twelve, and …
