The Bookseller(81)

He nods. “You just tell me what you need,” he says gently. “Whatever you need, Katharyn . . . anything . . . I will do it for you.”

I smile. He is so amazing, so perfect.

But he can’t give me the one thing I want.

He can’t give me back the people who—in my real life—I love the most.


After Lars leaves the house, I go to the kitchen and ask Alma to fix lunch for Michael. “What for you?” she asks me, frowning.

“Nothing,” I tell her. “I’m not hungry.” I go to the staircase and call Michael. He appears in the doorway to his room. “Come down and eat lunch now, honey,” I say. “Alma will sit with you.” I turn to her. “After he’s done, he can watch television,” I say. “Then he won’t be in your way. Is that all right?”

She shrugs and nods. I tell her I’m going to lie down.

In the green bedroom, I lie on the bed and cover myself with an afghan that matches the colors in the wallpaper. I don’t recognize the afghan itself, but I recognize my mother’s favorite knitting pattern. She must have made it for us after we moved into this house. It would have been like her to make me one that matched my perfect new master bedroom.

I close my eyes and wait, knowing exactly where I will be when I awake.





Chapter 28


It’s sunny when I open my eyes. I am in my own living room, lying on the sofa. Across my body is my familiar, cozy afghan—also my mother’s pattern, of course, but this one purple and blue, colors I chose. Aslan is curled alongside my stomach.

To my surprise, my mother is sitting in the armchair to my right. Her knitting needles click quietly; it looks like she’s making a baby sweater. Blue, for a boy. “Hi,” I say. “What are you doing here?”

She looks up and smiles. “Well, good morning, sunshine.” She turns her wrist and glances at her watch. “Actually, good afternoon. It’s almost two.”

“Oh, good heavens.” I throw off the afghan and sit up. Aslan, disrupted by my sudden movement, also rises. He arches his back and then settles down at the end of the sofa, where he has a good view of my mother’s flashing knitting needles. “How could I have slept so long?”

Mother shrugs. “Frieda rang us when you didn’t come in to the shop by eleven. She had called here several times, and there was no answer. So she asked us to swing by.” She frowns. “Your door was unlocked, Kitty. That’s not safe, you know, not for a woman living alone. It near about gave me a heart attack, when I saw you lying on the davenport. Dad and I thought perhaps you’d been strangled by a burglar and left for dead.”

I grimace. “Yikes, I’m sorry. I guess I was sleeping really hard.” I rub my eyes. “I suppose I fell asleep reading, after you and Dad left last night.”

“I suppose you did, all right. You must have been exhausted. When your father and I saw how soundly you were sleeping, we decided not to disturb you. We telephoned Frieda and explained the situation. She said it was all right, that you should take the day off and rest. Then your father left; he wanted to get the brakes checked on the car, said that the car sitting idle in the garage while we were away had not been good for it. The brakes weren’t responding quite right to his foot . . .” She shrugs again. “In any case, you slept right through all that. So I just settled down here, and I’ve been knitting and waiting for you to wake up.”

It is exactly like my mother to have the foresight to grab her knitting bag when she has been called to her adult daughter’s home to check whether she’s dead or alive.

“You were sleeping so deeply. It’s like you weren’t even in there,” she says, tapping my forehead teasingly with one of her needles.

I duck away, smiling. “Who are you making that for?”

She looks down at her work. “My neighbor Rose’s daughter,” she tells me. “You know Rose and Harry; they’re the couple that moved in to the Freemans’ old place, around the same time you moved over here. Their girl, Sally is her name, she’s expecting in January.” She shrugs. “Now, Rose insists it’s a boy. Sally already has a girl, so Rose says this one has to be a boy.” My mother winks at me. “But I’m making a pink one, too, just in case.”

I wink back. “Good thinking, Mother.” I look out the window. “You don’t always get one of each.”

My mother shakes her head. “Now, that is certainly true,” she says, not meeting my eyes. And I know she must be thinking of my brothers, those three babies who never breathed a single breath of life.

“Mother.” I turn to face her, tucking my legs under the afghan. She looks up at me. “Are you ever . . . does it ever bother you . . .” I hesitate, then go on. “That I didn’t marry and have children?”

My mother casts her glance back to the needles in her hands. “Now, that’s not a fair question,” she tells me. “Bother me? What a strange way to put it.” She finishes a row and looks up, meeting my eyes. “Did I want you to marry and have children? Of course I did. What mother doesn’t want that for her daughter? But am I ‘bothered’ that it didn’t happen? Well, that’s just silly. I want you to be happy, and you seem . . .” She starts the next row. “You and Frieda . . . you both seem happy.”