The Spider

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.

There was a spider.

Now, I want to establish that I am not, as a rule, a screamer. I've owned this building for years. I have dealt with mice, with a bat once, with the raccoon that got into the storeroom the autumn before last and had to be negotiated with like a hostage-taker. I am a grown woman who runs a business by the sea in an old building, and old buildings by the sea are simply full of things with more legs than you'd prefer. You make your peace. You coexist. You escort them out with a cup and a postcard and wish them well.

This spider was different. This spider was on the underside of the shelf I was reaching under, and I did not see it until my hand was approximately two inches away, and it was—I need you to trust me here—enormous. It was the size of a policy decision. It had a body you could have read the time off of. And it moved, when my hand got close, in that terrible sudden skittering way, the way that bypasses your entire civilized brain and plugs directly into some ancient wiring that has been waiting since the caves for exactly this moment.

I made a sound.

I don't know what the sound was. I have never made it before or since. It came out of me at a register I didn't know I owned, and I went backward, and I went backward fast, and I collided with the wheeled cart I keep by the local-history section, and the cart rolled, and I went with it, and I ended up sitting on the floor of my own bookstore with a spilled cart of books around me and my heart trying to leave through my ears, staring at the shelf where the spider had been and was no longer, because it had gone somewhere, and not knowing where it had gone was somehow the very worst part of the entire event.

Reagan came at a run. Reagan, hearing the sound and the crash, arrived certain that something had happened to me, and found me on the floor, and did the only thing she knows to do in a crisis, which is to climb partway onto the afflicted person and apply her full concerned weight and lick whatever's available. So now I was on the floor, in the books, being comforted by sixty pounds of dog, in the aftermath of a scream I'll deny to my grave, and that is the exact moment—of course, of course, the universe has a sense of humor and it is not a kind one—that the bell over the door rang.

It was Harold Ames.

Harold Ames stood in the doorway and surveyed the scene: the spilled cart, the scattered books, the proprietress on the floor under a dog. And Harold Ames, who notices everything, who delivers facts without being asked, took the whole thing in, and said, with no change of expression whatsoever:

"You've dropped your local history."

That was it. That was the entire acknowledgment. He came in, he set his own bag down, and he began, without another word, to gather the fallen books and square them and restack them on the cart, by date, I noticed, not by author, but I let him have it, a man doesn't help you off the floor of your dignity and then get lectured on your filing system.

We never spoke of the spider. He never asked why I was down there. He simply chose to believe, or chose to let me believe he believed, that the cart had gotten away from me, a plausible everyday mishap, and he restored order to my history section and then bought a book about the herring fleet and left.

I have thought about it since. Not the spider, the spider is gone, relocated to whatever policy meeting it came from, good riddance. Harold. The kindness of a man who sees everything and says only the one small thing that lets you keep your feet. You've dropped your local history. He gave me a story I could live with, and helped me tidy up the evidence, and asked for nothing.

That's a rarer thing than a big spider, and a better one, and the only part of Wednesday I'm willing to keep.