Snow Day

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.

The snow started around ten. Not the fussy kind that can't commit—the real kind, fat and fast and serious, the kind that means business by noon. And by eleven the street had gone quiet. That's the thing about snow in a town like this. People don't come out. The tourists are long gone by December, and the locals have the good sense to stay by their own fires, so a snowy day at R&C is about the deadest a store can be while still technically being open.

I figured we'd close early. That's what a store does when nobody's coming. You cut your losses, you go home, you make cocoa.

Jess did not close early. Jess made a pot of coffee, put on the lamps—all of them, the warm ones, so the whole shop glowed—and settled into the chair by the window with a book she wasn't really reading, and she said, "Put another log on, would you, Sarah," like we were expecting company.

We were not expecting company. I said as much. I said, "Nobody's coming in this."

"Somebody always comes in this," she said, and turned a page she wasn't reading.

I thought she was being romantic about it. Jess gets romantic about the store; you've maybe noticed. I figured this was one of those, a bookseller's fantasy of the cozy shop in the snow, lovely and doomed and losing money by the hour. I put the log on anyway. It's her store. And I sat, and the snow came down, and Reagan slept in front of the lighthouse book, and for about an hour it was the deadest, warmest, most pointless-seeming shift I'd ever worked.

Then the bell rang.

It was old Mr. Pike, snow on his shoulders, stamping his boots on the mat. He didn't want a book. He wanted—I could see it the second he came in, though I couldn't have named it then—he wanted the inside of somewhere. He lives alone up past Prospect. A snowy day is a long day when you live alone up past Prospect. He came in and Jess said "afternoon, Gordon" like she'd been holding his chair, and poured him a coffee he hadn't asked for, and he sat by the fire and they talked about nothing, the snow, the roads, his late wife's opinion of exactly this kind of weather, and he stayed forty-five minutes and bought a two-dollar used mystery on his way out that I don't think he wanted either.

And then a young mother came in with a small boy who needed somewhere to be that wasn't the house, and the boy sat on the floor with Reagan and a picture book while his mother thawed. And then two women who'd been out walking in it, cheeks red, laughing, wanting to stand somewhere warm and talk before they went their separate ways.

Somebody always comes in this.

Jess knew. That's what I finally got, sitting there watching the store fill up slow with cold people looking for warm—she knew the thing the sales figures don't. A bookstore on a snowy day isn't selling books. It's selling inside. It's a lit window on an empty white street, and it says, to anybody out there in it, there's a fire and a dog and a chair and nobody's going to ask you to buy anything. And that's worth more than the day's take, and it doesn't show up anywhere you can count it, and if you close early to save money you miss the entire point of having the store at all.

We didn't sell much Thursday. We warmed up half the town.

I've decided that's the job. Not the books, exactly—the inside. The books are just the reason we're allowed to keep the fire going. Jess would never say it that grandly; she'd just tell me to put another log on. But I'm twenty-two and I'm allowed to think about it grandly for now, and I'm going to, while it's still snowing and the lamps are still lit and somebody, any minute, is going to come in out of the cold.