On the lastThursday of October, Mae sat alone in the ADU and opened her planner. The rainy claws of November and all the gloomy months to follow inched closer, day by day. Even the weekend whale-watching visitors to Greyfin Bay had started to lessen; the weekdays were even quieter. Folks in the IGA were starting to share holiday plans.
And Bae Books was ahead of schedule.
There was nothing truly holding Mae back. She still had orders she was waiting on—she’d learned each vendor and publisher had its own quirks, requirements, and wait times. She still needed to work on signage, still had gaps where she wanted to fit more local merchandise.
But the bookshelves were done. The repairs and major remodeling were done. Dell had a security system installed last week. She had a business license and an inventory system. She had a lawyer and an accountant. She had a business bank account and a credit card reader.
She knew she’d have to hire at least one or two employees, but there were still a lot of unknowns to fill there. She’d chatted this week with Liv about Karizma, a local high schooler who currently worked weekends housekeeping at the Fin Inn, who also found herself pregnant at seventeen. From what Liv knew, Karizma loved to read.
Mae thought working weekends and a few days after school at a bookstore would likely be less physically demanding than housekeeping for a pregnant person, so she hoped to meet with Karizma soon. Send out a wider call when she knew how much help she might actually need. But for now, as the off season loomed on the horizon, Mae thought she could handle a quiet opening on her own. She already spent all of her days at 12 Main Street anyway.
Mae examined her planner. Sipped from a mug of tea.
And eventually, finally, she clicked open her pink pen and circled a date just under a month away, right before Thanksgiving, before holiday shopping truly began.
“November 21st, Jesus,” she whispered. “See you then.”
* * *
On Halloween, Dell was carrying in Bay Books’s mail when his phone rang.
Five seconds into the phone call, Mae thought perhaps they had both been transported to a movie set. An alternate dimension where everything happened in slow motion, a scene she must have seen somewhere else before: the way Dell’s eyes went blank, his knuckles turning white as he gripped the phone. The way the flyers and envelopes fell out of his other hand, fluttering to the floor like a slow dance.
Mae was afraid to speak when he hung up.
“Georgia had a stroke,” he said. And, before Mae could respond, blinking down at the phone in his hand: “She’s alive. She’s okay. For now.” His eyes were no longer blank when he finally looked up at Mae, where she was barely breathing, frozen behind the counter. “My mom had a stroke.”
On a Friday afternoon, three weeks before Bay Books’s opening day, Dell bought a one-way ticket to Michigan.
twenty-six
Dell had forgottenthe colors of Michigan in the fall.
There were colors in Oregon, yellows and oranges and an occasional red, but not like this. Even at the tail end of the season, the trees of his home state knocked him out.
There wasn’t a direct way to fly into the UP, at least not if you didn’t have your own prop plane. And Dell might have been milking the fruits of his previous real estate boom life for the last several years, but even he wasn’t Luce County Airport rich.
Still, Dell tried to savor the long drive north from Detroit: the lakes and the colors, the peaceful flatness and occasional rolling hill. Told himself he was comforted by the trees, even as he drew farther north, as the branches became more bare. He wondered, distantly, if the UP would have snow. He hadn’t thought to look at the weather. He hadn’t been able to think about much from the second he’d gotten the phone call. He remembered Mae’s eyes, the way she’d cautiously held out a hand in the store after he’d hung up; the way she’d held him in bed before he had to get up at 3 a.m. to drive to PDX. He remembered the drive to Portland, long and alone and dark.
But all of it, the last twenty-four hours, were a bit hazy. The memories blurry at the edges, like he had only been half there.
The only thing he truly knew was that Georgia was in the hospital.
He stopped once at a Culver’s for some food—lunch or dinner or something else, he couldn’t say; a rest stop or two when he needed it. But mostly he pushed on until he reached the Mackinac Bridge, and then a bit further than that. Until he was actually home. Until he was at that hospital.
And only when he locked the rental car with a beep, only when he walked through the whooshing automatic doors, only when he cleared his throat to actually speak to another human for the first time in hours did the haze go away. When he was being led to his mother’s room, he was strikingly, solidly awake.
Dell knew most folks hated hospitals, but there was something about them that soothed him now. Hospitals had taken care of him after he’d been shot. The doctors and nurses and assistants had been kind as his brain and body attempted to adjust to a new life. This hospital was keeping his mother alive. This hospital was holding his mother safe.
Someone else was in charge.
Someone else was going to help.
Maybe he only felt this strange comfort inside these sterile spaces because he and Georgia had been on the lucky side of things. And from the scraps of information he remembered from the phone, Georgia had been extremely lucky. She’d been at the grocery store when she collapsed. Amelia Hawkins had called 9-1-1 from the bakery department straightaway.
Except then the nurse opened the door, and Georgia was asleep.
“The doctor will be in when she can to give you an update, but her vitals are good,” they’d said, and then they were gone, and it was just Dell and Georgia. And she looked so fine, other than the oxygen hooked up to her nose, the IV in her arm. She looked so peaceful. Maybe she was okay. Dell wanted to take her home.
