We'd been dating for two months, and you'd have thought the twinge of excitement I got from noticing the curls of her hair lying across her forehead, dimples angling at the edges of her smiling mouth, nearly invisible blond down under her ears waving slightly with my breath on her face, would have faded a fraction by now, but it hadn't in the least. More than once she'd had to snap her fingers under my nose to drag me out of reverie. You would think I'd get used to her beauty from moment to moment, while we made love in her small bed or when I watched the side of her face in the glow of coming attractions at the movies, but the draw never lessened. She stared at the ketchup-covered kids without seeming to notice just how stressed and besieged their parents were. She remained a romantic constantly frustrated by my grip on reality, however tenuous it might be at times.
"So?" she said, as sweetly as she could, yet failing to keep the hints of anxiety and anger out of her voice. "You were supposed to give it some thought. You told me we'd discuss it over dinner. This is dinner."
"Or a Pollock retrospective."
"Well, in either case, we should talk."
"You're right."
I attempted picturing it again. The refrigerators humming all day long, filled with tulips, roses, and daffodils, the bell over the door jangling every two minutes. First editions of Wilkie Collins, James Agee, H. P. Lovecraft, and Sartre toppled against paperback originals of David Goodis and Sheldon Lord, everything piled in the corner while plant-growth mix got kicked into the carpeting. Novels smelling like manure.
"A combination flower shop-bookstore?" I said.
She gave this slight sigh of exasperation that ended with a low, sensual growl deep in the back of her throat. I tried to get her to do it as often as possible. "Did I say that?" she asked. "Give me some credit, Jon."
"I do."
"I said there's plenty of empty space at the fringe of the shop, facing Fairlawn. We could set the bookstore up there; it would have its own entrance, plenty of room, and the businesses would be exclusive. Have the two stores side by side. The rent is cheap. There's lots of pedestrian traffic downtown. It would be adorable."
The cuteness of her suggestion scared me. My store in Manhattan, full of scarce and uncommon books-a great many mysteries since Anna had cultivated my love for the field while nurturing her own tastes-could be considered a number of things: quaint, impressive, atmospheric, well-furnished, all of that, but never adorable. Katie failed to grasp the concept that while there might be room for a bookstore amidst the flora, shelf space was only the minimum of the room I needed. Most of my back stock remained in a storage area twice as large as my store itself. She'd been in Felicity Grove for three months, since her late aunt had bequeathed her the flower shop, and she hadn't quite come to the realization that nobody read much in this town.
Of course, the entire conversation simply provided a front for talking about deeper issues. We were both frustrated that we didn't spend enough time together, but I hadn't worked my ass off to build a reputation as a book dealer and antiquarian in a city rapidly being overtaken by superchains only to toss it all and return to a place I'd spent years getting away from.
"What do you think, Anna?" Katie asked.
"It's an appealing notion," my grandmother said. "And certainly there's an inherent charm. Felicity Grove could certainly use an antiquarian bookstore." Despite being in a wheelchair, she always managed to walk the balance beam between intent and interest. She never came down on some of Katie's more impractical business ideas, but never let me be a pure realist, either. "However, you must be cautious about entering into a business partnership like this, Katie."
"Of course," Katie said stiffly.
"Look, last week I sold a copy of Emerson's MayDay, Ticknor and Fields, eighteen sixty-seven, in a clamshell box, signed by Emerson, for twenty-four hundred dollars. You think I'm going to get that from anybody in the Grove? I'll have to start buying books on longhorn sheep and large-mouth bass."
Oscar nodded. "Those field books would do well for you, Johnny. I know, I sell racks of them, too. Back stock at least a couple dozen copies of The Whitetail Deer Guide: A Practical Guide to Hunting America's Number One Big-game Animal. I sell a couple of them a week, and don't mind the competition if you start pushing them, too."
"I appreciate that."
"Jonathan, dear," Anna said. "Your superiority complex is showing."
"That's just sauce."
The jade gaze had more heat in it now, Katie's eyebrows arching a little so that her forehead showed a lovely crease of irritation, none of this really about the store at all. "You can continue expanding your mail order business. That's where you make most of your sales, anyway."
"I'd have to spend nearly as much time in the city buying and trading stock, Katie."
Oscar nearly body-checked me out of my seat this time. He might've been seventy, but he had the kind of muscle that was hard-earned and would never disappear or turn to fat. He got me into a friendly headlock. "You can always come in with me if you like, Johnny. I keep my eye out for men like you who show real initiative."
Now he was starting to get a tad pushy with his need to impress. He glanced at the animal heads like he wished they'd come back to life again and attack the women so he could sprint into action and kill them with his butter knife. I tried to imagine the quail or moose running rampant and endangering lives, but couldn't quite make it.
"Well, it was just a thought," Katie said.
Oscar whispered something in my ear that I didn't hear because Katie was on the verge of either letting it go for tonight or possibly crying. Anna noticed and poured more wine, making small talk. Katie didn't have any. She hadn't had a drop of any kind of liquor for two weeks; she'd started eating more vegetables and staying away from smokers. Shafts of moonlight washed against her back, slender shoulders covered with freckles shrugging as if to loosen her neck and dump some of the stress. The shadow of Panecraft fell across my hand as I reached for her wrist. We interlaced fingers. She grinned and let it go for the evening. "I've got the tulips you wanted."
"Thanks, I know how difficult they are to get this time of year."
"Difficult, but not impossible. Not if you try hard enough."
Maybe that was a dig, maybe not. We kissed, and the cool softness of her lips played against mine, her breath in my mouth like ten thousand spoken and unspoken words. Shifting toward each other, we kissed again, more passionately, and it hurt for me not to throw down a credit card and grab our coats and rush back to her place to hold her tightly beneath her aunt's thick blankets.
We heard him at the same time.
Staring into each other's eyes, she frowned, puzzled: a sudden odd, distant humming and gasping stalked nearer, the sound of splashing outside coming closer and closer like a child leaping loudly into every puddle. We knew the noise.
Katie said, "Surely not this far from town."
Clearing her throat, Anna told me, "Jon, I think you should . . ."
"Oh boy," I said.
The door burst open in a flurry of black motion, wind and hail rushing inside with icy streamers twirling.
"I am Crummler! I am here!"
Impossible. He almost never left his shack at the cemetery, and when he did he went no farther than Main Street. To get this far he would've had to walk for hours-who would ever give him a ride? Always in action, even now with the ice crystals so heavy in his wiry beard and hair that his face appeared frozen in place, Crummler erupted into the room with a ballerina's bounce. His coat trailed behind him like a black and ghostly shroud trying to catch up. He smelled of the cemetery, which was only slightly better than Oscar's after shave. His customary mania at once seemed lessened and heightened, internalized so that he twitched even more wildly than usual, blinking in the bright lights, shivering in the freeze.