The Bookstore Sisters(9)

“When was the last time you were in a bookstore? When did you last read a novel?”

“I used to read,” Isabel said. “And Violet will too. I gave her Half Magic today.”

Sophie burst into tears.

“Was I not supposed to?” Isabel asked.

Sophie shook her head. “It was exactly what you were supposed to do.”

They both thought that over. “Did you pay for my divorce lawyer?”

Sophie shrugged. “It was money you would have gotten if we’d sold the bookstore.”

Hank was on the floor between them, exhausted from running around the island. He looked extremely happy.

“Do you think we can keep the bookstore open?” Sophie had always been the one to make the decisions, but that time seemed to have passed.

“We can try,” Isabel said.

That was what their father had always said. They left out the part that came next, though they both remembered how it went. The worst we can do is fail.

They spent the rest of that glorious June in the overheated kitchen, with Sophie’s leg propped up on a stool. Violet and Isabel got the bookstore ready to open at the end of the month, once the bakery was finished. Johnny Lenox and his father made a lovely bakery case, which they installed, and Mr. Hawley donated a small refrigerator and a rather complicated coffee maker. On the week of the opening, Sophie went to the clinic and had her cast removed. Isabel went with her, and afterward, they did a dance in the parking lot, just a few small joyful steps.

Two days before the opening, while the I Must Be in Heaven Chocolate Brownies were baking, Isabel couldn’t find Violet anywhere. As it turned out, she was in the meadow reading Mary Poppins.

“What happened to Edward Eager?” Isabel asked.

Violet shrugged. “Finished. I read all seven. He should have written more.”

“Well, there are eight Mary Poppins books, so they should keep you busy for a while. The author P. L. Travers once said, ‘A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.’”

“Are we supposed to believe Mary Poppins arrives on the west wind?”

“It’s magic.”

“There was a west wind when you arrived,” Violet said thoughtfully.



“You’re right,” Isabel said to her sister that night. The sisters were sitting on the porch drinking iced tea and testing the brownies. Isabel had been rereading Half Magic, and she’d been remembering how wonderful a book could be. “She is like me.”

“I told you so.” Sophie started to cry.

“Should I be insulted?” Isabel asked.

“Not at all,” Sophie said, wiping her eyes. “It’s just that you are very dense.”

“That’s what Johnny said.”

“Of course he would. You’ve been dense about him your whole life long.”

“He told me I was in love with him,” Isabel said.

“Let me guess. You didn’t believe him.”

“I don’t think I’m the smart sister,” Isabel said.

“You are,” Sophie told her. “You just have a lot to learn.”



The next day Isabel went out to the garage and found some old wood and paint cans and got to work on a sign for outside the bookstore. It was only supposed to say grand opening, but then she decided to add the marshes and the lupines and everything she had made herself forget about Maine that she now remembered. She brought the sign outside and leaned it against an old lawn chair. It was early in the morning, and there were starlings in the trees, and the marsh was thick with green reeds. She remembered that Johnny once told her he would never stop following her unless she ran away. She remembered where the Lenoxes lived, and found that she knew the route by heart. Their house was out on the point, beyond the marshes. There Johnny was, hanging up laundry on the line.

“Don’t you have a dryer?” Isabel said.

“It’s better when it dries outside. It smells like the marsh.”

“Do you want to see what I never showed you that day I ran away?” Isabel asked.

She’d forgotten her shoes, and she now realized she was in paint-splattered pajamas that had belonged to her father, but she was done forgetting now. She was remembering everything about the way she used to feel.

“I do,” Johnny said.

He put on high boots and loaned her a pair, and they headed through the marsh, which was so muddy a person could sink to their knees if they weren’t careful. Once or twice, Johnny grasped Isabel’s arm when it seemed that she might be sinking. She brought him to the hidden rookery of the herons where she and Sophie and their mother used to go, their secret place.

“How did I never see this before?” he asked.

As it turned out, Isabel remembered how to climb a tree. She went into the huge nest of reeds first, then reached out her hand and Johnny caught it and climbed into the nest as well. You could see to the ocean from here. You could see Main Street and the ferry building and the fields of lupines.

“If you had brought me here instead of running away after you lost your mother, our whole lives would have been different,” Johnny said, and Isabel really couldn’t disagree.



Isabel went into the bookstore early on opening day, just to make certain everything was perfect. Or near to perfect. Or just terrifically good. She set out the cups and spoons and plates that had belonged to their mother, and looked over at the books now in neat rows on the new shelves Mr. Hawley had recently built. There were chairs to sit in when you paged through books you might want to buy, and in the small room in back was the younger readers’ section. It was practically perfect, but it needed something more. Before the morning light had broken, Isabel painted the walls and turned them into marshes, and the tables and chairs were turned into pieces of the ocean, with starfish and sharks and seals.