Where the Stars Still Shine(34)

“Again, Peach,” Joe says. “Again.”

I play the game over and over, until Phoebe brings me a steaming plate of pancakes. “Eat your breakfast, Joe,” she says.

“Joe eat,” he says. “Peach eat.”

We don’t talk as we all sit at the table, but Tucker zooms his fork around as if it’s an airplane and delivers a running monologue as his pancake plane crashes into his mouth. It’s really annoying and I have to bite my tongue to keep from telling him to shut up—but he keeps the silence from being uncomfortable. When I finish eating, I rinse my plate and continue on my way to the bathroom for a shower.

Phoebe’s bike is on the front porch. It’s a flat-tired blue cruiser style, coated in a layer of sticky dust. After I wipe it down with some dish soap and the hose, she offers to drive me up to the gas station to put air in the tires.

“You don’t have to go through the trouble of getting the boys all loaded up for me,” I say. “I can walk.”

She puts on her sunglasses and digs through her purse for her keys. “It’s no trouble. I’m going to take them to the park.”

I put the bike in the SUV while she fastens Tucker and Joe into their car seats. Phoebe drops me off at the Sparta station, and as I pump air into the tires I remember the way Alex’s knee touched mine as we sat on the tailgate of his truck in this parking lot. How one little contact point could conduct so much heat. I wonder if he’s thinking about me right now and—if he is—does it make him blush the way it does for me?

From the gas station, the bookstore is only a block away. It’s a small storefront, tucked between an antique shop and an Irish pub. On the sidewalk outside the bookstore is a sandwich board with a Mark Twain quote chalked on it in blue lettering. I bet they change the quote daily and use different colors of chalk. It looks like that kind of place. I lock the bike to a one-hour-parking sign and go inside. The store has the dusty, papery scent of old books, and right in the middle of the floor is a salmon-pink, L-shaped vinyl couch littered with throw pillows sewn to resemble giant Scrabble tiles. Someone has arranged four of them to spell “shit,” which makes me smile.

The store carries both new and used books, but the sections are arranged illogically. Instead of alphabetical fiction by the author’s last name and nonfiction broken into categories, the shelves are tagged with snarky labels—vampire novels that don’t suck (no pun intended), books no one should read (but you probably will anyway), and books by dead white guys. There’s also a shelf called authors who committed suicide, and I wonder what criteria go into deciding if Hemingway is a dead white guy or an author who committed suicide. I’m unsure where to look for a book on taking the GED exam, but I find it with other study guides on a shelf labeled … in the real world all rests on perseverance (goethe). It’s not a new book; there are penciled notes in the margins and it’s dated to last year’s exam. Do study guides change significantly from year to year? I’m willing to risk five dollars plus tax the answer is no.

The sole employee in the store is a pale-skinned girl in her twenties, sitting on the checkout desk with her black-denim-clad legs dangling over the edge, reading a paperback. She’s wedged between a small spinner of artsy postcards and a now playing display featuring a CD by a band I’ve never heard. Beneath the now playing sign, scratched in black pen, it says as selected by real people, not corporate assholes with bad taste.

She tears herself away from the page and looks at me through black-rimmed glasses that magnify the way her black eyeliner is slicked along her lashes, cat-eye style. Her earlobes are stretched around black plugs, a silver ring is looped through her lip, and a script-y tattoo on the inside of her wrist says be here now. “All set?”

“Yeah.”

She doesn’t comment on the GED study guide but eyes the paperback I found on the they won awards for a reason shelf in the teen section. “I approve.”

Despite the judgmental book categories, so-cool-no-one-has-heard-of-it music, and a bookseller—the lanyard draped around her neck says her name is Ariel—who feels the need to critique my selections, I love this place. I feel at home among the books and could see myself curled up in the L of the couch with a book on a rainy day. Or, maybe working here.

Ariel bags up my purchases, then squats to change the music. On the far end of the counter, right next to the door, is a stack of job application forms. I slide my fingertips over the line where my name would go and picture myself shelving books. It’s startlingly easy to imagine. They may not be hiring and it’s possible they wouldn’t even hire me, but I take an application and shove it in my bag on my way out.

Phoebe and the boys are still at the park when I get to the house. I lock the bike to the fence beside the Airstream and go inside. As I take my books from the bag, I catch the faint scent of vanilla and cigarettes in the air, making my heart stutter. It’s my mom’s signature scent—cheap drugstore vanilla body spray and Marlboro Reds.

As if she’s—

I rush from one end of the small trailer to the other, flinging open the bathroom door as I pass. Pulling aside the shower curtain.

—she’s not here.

It’s only my imagination.

Except, on the counter, there’s a cigarette stubbed out in the purple candle I bought with Kat. I pick it up and smell it. Marlboro Red.