“Yeah. Her friend was in here. Um, her name starts with a G. Grace, maybe… But Crystal didn’t stay for long.”
“Okay, thanks.”
Bette walked out to her car and slid behind the wheel.
Grace… Bette searched for the friend in her mind. Someone that Crystal met at the bookstore, at college, maybe at Hospice House. Impossible to say. Crystal had a thousand friends, and she made them everywhere. Bette often joked that Crystal couldn’t get a tank of gas without making a new friend.
Bette drove to The Reader’s Retreat, a used bookstore on Pearl Street. She parked and pushed into the dimly lit space, which smelled of coffee, incense, and old books.
The shop’s owner, Freddie, had fallen in love with Crystal the moment he’d seen her despite being thirty years her senior, married and with six kids. Theirs was a love affair that existed only in Freddie’s mind, and he wasn’t afraid to say so. Crystal worked the third weekend of every month at the store in exchange for free books.
Freddie sat in an overstuffed chair; a box of books balanced on the scarred coffee table before him.
“Bette,” he said, smiling and blowing a layer of silt off the book in his hand. “If I wasn’t just thinking of you not ten minutes ago. Lookie here.” He stood and shuffled behind the heavy oak desk where an ancient typewriter sat on next to an equally ancient cash register. Freddie’s was the only business in Lansing that refused to accept credit cards.
He held up a copy of On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin.
“It’s a fourth edition. Impeccably cared for. Look at that binding. Not a single crack.”
Bette nodded, barely looking at the book over which she normally would have salivated.
“It’s beautiful, Freddie, but I’m looking for Crystal. She was supposed to meet me almost two hours ago and never showed. Has she been in today?”
Freddie stared at her, not believing her lack of reaction to the treasure in his hand. When she continued to wait silently, he set the book on his desk and returned to his chair.
“Not so much as a crimson hair has passed through that door in two weeks. She’s been busy with that new flame, I’m sure. A sword to the heart, I might add,” he said, clutching his chest as if mortally wounded.
2
Then
Crystal watched Professor Meeks stride into the auditorium, his smile easy, chatting with a student who followed him like a duckling after its mother.
“Welcome to Poetry 101,” he announced, striding to the blackboard behind him. “I’m Professor Meeks, and I’ll be the guy trying to look like a beatnik up here at the desk all semester, or so I’ve been told.”
The class laughed.
“Truth be told, had I been born in the age of the beatniks, I would surely have joined them. Instead, I’ve been blessed with the lot of you.”
He started to go through the syllabus outlining the poetry they’d focus on that semester.
Meeks seemed to be in his early thirties. His sandy brown hair brushed his shoulders, and a neatly trimmed beard covered the lower half of his face. He was handsome and looked the part of a shaggy poet. Crystal imagined him sitting at a scratched wooden desk drinking scotch and pouring his soul into a tattered notebook before collapsing into bed, exhausted.
He’d have only a shred of passion left for teaching, but he’d stretch and warp it until he could cast a luminous veil over every student in the room.
He wore dark jeans and a t-shirt covered with a wrinkled-looking blazer. As he spoke, his hands flew nearly as fast as his lips, and the students in the room watched him, rapt.
Crystal had read both of Professor Meeks’ poetry chapbooks, crying during each as she’d sat at her favorite coffee shop listening to Christmas music and missing her mother. Poetry and memories of her mother walked hand in hand in Crystal’s life. The poetry could be unrelated, about seagulls or lemons, and still she’d find the words curving into the shape of her mother’s smile or softening like her hands.
Meeks wrote about abandonment, fear, travel and love. It was the love poems that had struck her like a bell deep in her ribs. The reverberation continued for days after she’d read them. She’d been excited to meet the man who’d put the heart’s longings, the sheer magnitude of them, onto a one-dimensional page.
When his eyes fell upon Crystal, he paused, his sentence cut in half, the silence stretching out long and empty.
He ducked his head, breaking the stare, and chuckled.
“Sorry folks, lost my train of thought there.”
As the lecture continued, Professor Meeks kept his gaze averted. Whenever he drifted toward the right side of the stadium seats where Crystal sat, he’d pause as if realizing his mistake and shift his eyes left.
When class ended, Crystal made her way to the front of the room.
Up close, she saw thick dark lashes fringed the professor’s blue eyes.
“Professor,” she said.
He glanced away from the boy he’d been talking to, and his smile faltered as if he’d been struck silent for a second time as he stared at her.
The student glanced at Crystal as well and then back at the professor.
“I’m just nervous,” the boy said, tugging on the collar of his gray polo shirt. “I’ve never read any of my poems out loud. My girlfriend says Open Mic Night is the perfect time to share, but… " He grimaced as if the mere suggestion brought him physical pain. “I’m sick at the thought of it.”
The professor smiled and put a hand on the boy’s arm.
“Forget the crowd, Ben,” Meeks said. “Choose one person. Better yet, bring your best friend or your girlfriend. Bring the person you can read the poem to and mean every word. Read to them and only them.”
Ben swallowed a big shaky breath and nodded.
“Okay,” he said. “Bring one friend. Thanks, Professor.”
He nodded and headed from the room, continuing to mumble the advice to himself.
“Hi,” Meeks said, returning his gaze to Crystal. “And you are?”
“Crystal Childs.”
She held out her hand, though it seemed an awkward thing to do suddenly.
He grinned and shook it.
“Lovely to meet you, Crystal Childs.”
Their hands lingered together, warmth coursing from his hand into hers. She gazed at him, their eyes, like their hands, lingering overlong.
He forced his eyes away as if with great effort and stared down at the desk where he shuffled papers together. “Are you looking forward to Poetry 101?”
She heard him trying to sound casual, forcing an ease that didn’t flow into his limbs. He looked stiff, awkward, as if he suddenly wasn’t sure what to do with his body.
“I’ve been excited to start this class for weeks,” she confessed. “I read Musings in the Morning Light and Long Drives.”
He studied her, as if surprised by the admission.
“I must admit, it’s rare that a student reads my work before the semester starts. I try not to force my own poetry on my classes. My goal is to teach you the greats.”
“It was…” she murmured, “great.” And it had been. She thought of the poem titled Her, a long list of words that described a mother present in the flesh, but never in the heart.
He took a step back as if the space between them had grown too small, though it hadn’t changed.
“Thank you. I’ve been writing poetry for twenty years, and I still stammer when someone comments on my work. That’s the beauty of it, though. The vulnerability. Of course, your experience of my poetry has nothing to do with me at all.”