The Recommendation

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.

He was from away. You can tell. It's not the clothes exactly, it's the way people from away walk into a bookstore like it's a store, briskly, on a schedule, whereas people from here walk in like it's a room in their own house they haven't been in for a while. This man was brisk. He had a ferry to catch, he said, and he wanted "something good for the ride," and he said it the way you'd order a coffee, like the good books were behind the counter and I just had to reach for one.

Jess was in the back. This was my mountain to climb alone.

So I asked him what he liked, which is what you're supposed to do, and he said, "Oh, I'll read anything," which is what they always say, and which is the least true sentence in the English language. Nobody reads anything. Everybody has a shape they like and can't describe. Your whole job is to find the shape.

I tried. I asked about the last book he'd loved and he couldn't remember one, which told me something sad and also useful. I asked if he wanted something fast or something slow and he said fast, definitely fast, he wasn't a "sit and think" type, and he was proud of this, the way some people are proud of not liking vegetables.

So I handed him a thriller. A good one, tight, the kind that pulls you down the page. Sure thing. Ferry candy.

He turned it over, read the back, and set it down. "Read it," he said. Not unkindly. Just—no.

I tried again. Another thriller. "Saw the movie."

A third. He made a face I've since decided to call the away-face, polite and closed, the face of a person who has decided the bookstore has failed and is now just being nice about leaving.

And I panicked, a little, and I did the thing Jess does that I've watched her do a hundred times and never understood until right then. I stopped selling him a book and started paying attention to him. He was tapping the counter. He kept glancing out the window at the water. He'd mentioned the ferry three times now, not because he was rushed—he had plenty of time—but because the water was the thing on his mind. He wasn't buying a book. He was standing in a bookshop in a strange town at the edge of the sea, a little unmoored, wanting something he couldn't name.

So I didn't give him fast. I gave him slow. I gave him a quiet, salt-smelling novel about a man who moves to a town by the ocean and doesn't do much of anything, the kind of book I'd have bet money he'd hate, and I said, "This one's not fast. But you're on the water for a couple hours. Maybe you don't want fast. Maybe you want something that goes at the speed of the boat."

He looked at me. Really looked, for the first time, like I'd stopped being a shelf and started being a person.

"At the speed of the boat," he repeated.

He bought it. He didn't even read the back.

I don't know if he liked it. He was from away; I'll never see him again; that's how it works with the ferry people, they pass through you like weather. But he stopped being brisk on his way out. He stood in the doorway a second and looked up Water Street toward the harbor and then he said, "It's a nice town, this," to nobody, to me, to the street, and then he was gone.

I told Jess about it later, expecting her to say I'd done it wrong somehow. She just smiled and said, "You found the shape."

I did. I found the shape. And the strange thing is I found it by giving up on being right and starting to be curious instead, which she's been trying to teach me since I started, and which I finally learned from a man whose name I'll never know, on a Saturday, about two hours before a boat.