The Regular I Never Met

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.

She comes in the late afternoon, always Tuesday, always alone. Older than Jess, younger than Mrs. Lessard, somewhere in that stretch of life I can't estimate yet because I'm twenty-two and everyone over forty looks approximately the same age to me, which I know is rude and I'm working on it. She wears a gray coat. She comes in, and she nods—not to me exactly, just a general nod to the room, an acknowledgment that she's entered a place with people in it—and then she goes to the same corner every time. Fiction, back left, under the good light bulb now, where the older novels are.

And she reads.

She doesn't buy. That's the thing that got me at first. She comes in every single Tuesday, she stays forty-five minutes, an hour, and she stands or sits in that corner and reads a few chapters of a book and then she puts it back—carefully, in the right spot, she's not one of the shove-it-anywhere people—and she nods again to the room and she leaves. Week after week. She's reading one long novel, I finally figured out, a fat one, a chapter or two at a time, on Tuesdays, in my store, for free.

The first few times I thought I was supposed to do something. That's the training, right, you greet the customer, you offer help, you make the sale. I hovered once. I went over and did the "can I help you find anything" and she looked up with this expression—not annoyed, just surprised, like I'd spoken to her in church—and said, "No, thank you, dear, I'm fine," very gently, and went back to her page. And I felt like I'd broken something.

I asked Jess about it. Whether we should say something. Whether it was, you know, okay, her reading the whole book for free like a library that charges rent to nobody.

And Jess said the thing that I've been turning over ever since. She said: "Sarah, do you know how many people in this world have somewhere to go on Tuesday?"

I didn't have an answer.

"She has somewhere to go on Tuesday," Jess said. "It's here. Leave her be."

So I leave her be. And now that I've stopped trying to sell her anything, I've started actually seeing her, and I've built a whole life for her in my head that's probably completely wrong but feels true. I think she lives alone. I think Tuesday used to be something—used to have somebody in it—and now it's a gray coat and a fat novel in the back corner of a bookshop, and that's not nothing, that's a shape a week can hold. I think she reads it slow on purpose. I think she doesn't want the book to end, because when it ends she'll have to pick another, and picking is harder than continuing.

I don't know any of that. I've never spoken to her past the once. I don't know her name and I'm not going to ask, because asking would make her a customer, and she's not a customer, she's something better and stranger that stores aren't supposed to have and the good ones always do.

Last Tuesday she got close to the end of her book. I could tell by where the ribbon of her thumb sat, near the back. And I felt this little clutch of worry for her, what she'll do when it's done, whether she'll come back the Tuesday after or whether the finished book will break the spell. Jess says not to worry. Jess says she'll pick another, they always do, that's what the store is for—an endless supply of somewhere to go on Tuesday.

I hope Jess is right. I've started saving a book for her, in my head, for when she finishes. A good long one. I'll shelve it in the back left corner under the good light, and I won't say a word, and maybe she'll find it. That's the most I'm allowed to do for her, and Jess is right that it's enough, and I'm learning that the best thing you can do for some people is leave the door open and the light on and never once make them explain themselves.