The Wrong Order

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

This happens more than you'd think in the trade. Boxes get mixed up somewhere in the great sorting machinery between the distributor and my door, and every so often I slit the tape expecting my careful little order—the three copies of the new mystery, the cookbook a customer requested, the poetry I take a flyer on twice a year and mostly regret—and instead I get a stranger's dream.

This box was somebody's dream. That was clear right away. It wasn't a store's order; a store's order has a logic to it, a spread, a hedging of bets. This was one person's whole heart in a box. Forty-some books, and every one of them about the same thing.

Bees.

Beekeeping, bee biology, the history of honey, a memoir by a man who kept bees in Provence, a field guide to bumblebees, a slim strange volume of poems about bees, three different books on building your own hive, and one enormous German thing that I believe was the collected everything of bees, in German, with fold-out diagrams. Someone, somewhere, had ordered forty books about bees, and the machinery had sent them to a bookseller in Maine who had ordered a cookbook and some mysteries, and had sent the cookbook and the mysteries, presumably, to a beekeeper who was now very confused.

I should have just called it in. That's the correct thing. You report the error, you get a label, you send the bees home and your own order comes along in a week. Businesslike. Sensible.

I did not do that first. First, I read the bees.

I sat down on the floor by the receiving table—I do a lot of my important thinking on the floor of this store, I'm realizing as I write these down—and I went through the whole box, and I fell a little in love with the person who'd ordered it. You can know someone from their books the way you can know them from their handwriting. This was a person just starting out. You could tell. There were the beginner books, the earnest how-to-build-a-hive books, right alongside the dreamy books, the Provence memoir, the poems—the books you buy not to learn beekeeping but to fall in love with the idea of it, the life you're imagining before you've lived a day of it. Somebody was about to keep bees for the first time. Somebody had sat down and ordered the entire future they wanted, all at once, in one hopeful box.

And it had come to me by mistake.

I'll be honest: I sat there and I wanted them. Not the bees—I have no intention of keeping bees, I can barely keep a store—but I wanted to be the person that box was meant for. That specific ache of the beginning of a thing, when you've bought all the books and haven't made a single mistake yet, when the future is still just field guides and poems and a hive you haven't built. I remembered buying books like that, once, about running a bookshop, before I owned one, when it was all still a dream in a box and nothing had gone wrong yet.

Then I got up off the floor and called the distributor and sent the bees home.

Of course I did. They weren't mine. Some hopeful soul was out there right now holding a cookbook and three mysteries, thinking this isn't right at all, waiting on their whole imagined future, and it wasn't my future to keep just because I liked the look of it. So I taped the box back up and slapped the label on and I'll admit I put my hand flat on the top of it for a second before it went, the way Harold does with a book that means something, wishing the beekeeper well.

My own order came Thursday. Cookbook, mysteries, the poetry I'll regret. No bees. Correct and complete and a little bit disappointing, the way the right thing usually is.

But I think about that person sometimes. Out there past the machinery somewhere, building a hive from a book, poems about bees on the nightstand. I hope it all comes true for them. I hope the future was as good as the box. You don't often get to hold someone's whole beginning in your two hands and then hand it safely back, and I'm glad I did, even though a small greedy part of me wanted to keep the bees and become a different person entirely.

That's the store again, isn't it. Everyone's dreams pass through it in boxes. You just don't usually get to open the wrong one.