We got the first real snow of the year on Thursday, and Jess did a thing I didn't understand until later, which is becoming the pattern of my whole apprenticeship here: she does a thing, I don't get it, and then three hours later I get it and feel like I've learned something they don't teach you anywhere.

Harold Ames does not browse. Harold Ames arrives.

It started raining Wednesday afternoon, the serious kind, the kind that comes straight off the water and means it, and at about half past three Mrs. Lessard came into the store to wait it out.

Reagan had a job on Friday, and he took it more seriously than I take most of mine.

There is a book that has lived in my front window for eleven months, and I have decided to tell its story before I lose my nerve and mark it down.

By the second week of August, I had developed a system for tourists. This is not something Jessica knows about.

A man came in Saturday and asked me to recommend a book, and I have been thinking about it ever since, because I got it so wrong and then so right that I'm still not sure which part to be proud of.

I am not proud of Wednesday. I'm going to tell it anyway, because a person who only tells the flattering stories is a bore, and because it involves the single most humiliating thing that has happened to me in my own place of business, and those you have to get out in the open before they fester.

A box came Monday with somebody else's books in it.

There is a light bulb over the history section that has been out since roughly the Truman administration, and on Monday I decided, with the reckless energy of a woman who has had two cups of coffee and no customers, that today was the day.

I bought a vacuum cleaner. This is the whole story, more or less, but the whole story turns out to be bigger than the vacuum, the way these things do.

On the first warm day of spring, Jess takes the long way home and finds a few quiet hours that belong entirely to her.

There's a woman who comes in every Tuesday and I have never once spoken to her, and Jess says that's exactly right and I should keep it that way, which took me a while to understand.

Jess left me to close on Friday, which she does now, which still feels like being handed the keys to something I'm not old enough to hold.