All the Beautiful Lies(13)
Alice dipped her head next to Harry, and covered her face with her hands. He slid toward her and put an arm around her narrow shoulders. Behind him he could hear stifled crying.
After the eulogy, Carl Ridley walked gingerly to the pulpit, a trembling sheet of paper in his hand. Tears already streaked Carl’s papery cheeks before he even spread out the sheet of paper in front of him. There was a long pause, Carl smoothing back his thinning hair, but then he was speaking, saying how Bill’s office was decorated by two things: stacks and stacks of books, and one poem, tacked onto the wall. The poem was “If,” by Rudyard Kipling (he pronounced it “Kiplin’”). Harry had heard the poem before, or at least the line that went, “If you can meet with triumph and disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same,” but he’d forgotten that the poem was a message from a father to a son. Harry tensed his jaw. His aunt, from behind him, put a hand on his shoulder, making it worse. But then at the end of the recitation—“You’ll be a man, my son!”—Paul leaned close to his ear and said, “Jesus, salt in the wound,” and Harry quietly laughed, feeling better.
When the final hymn was sung and the closing prayer spoken, Harry finally turned around to see a sizable crowd, much larger than he’d thought. In the receiving line, many of the people who shook his hand and muttered their sympathies were strangers, but some were cousins and second cousins whom he barely remembered. No one knew what to say, so everyone said how sorry they were, and Harry nodded and thanked them.
While speaking to a man who referred to himself as Ackerson’s Books’ best customer, Harry noticed a dark-haired woman, probably in her twenties, who had remained seated in her pew, toward the back of the church. Harry thought she was staring at him but couldn’t be sure; maybe she was staring at the reception line in general, wondering whether she should join in. She was vaguely familiar to Harry, and he wondered what her connection was to his father. Was she the daughter of a friend? As though she felt Harry’s eyes on her, she suddenly tilted her head away, revealing a strong jawline and an upturned nose, and Harry remembered where he’d seen her before. She’d been walking along the road near his father’s house on the first night that Harry stayed there. She’d been wearing a headband and had been looking at the house, as though she knew what had happened there.
“Are you also interested in books?” said the man still speaking with Harry.
He was standing too close, his breath sharp with the bitter smell of coffee. Harry willed himself to not lean backward, said: “Not the way my father was, no. But I do like books.”
“Not obsessed, eh?”
“No. Not obsessed.”
The man moved along, and so did the line. When Harry looked for the dark-haired woman again, he couldn’t spot her anywhere.
Alice’s best friend, Chrissie Herrick, had skipped the service in order to set up food and drinks at Grey Lady for a small memorial gathering. There’d been talk back and forth on whether it should be at her house or a restaurant, but Chrissie had talked Alice into the house option, saying she would take care of every detail.
When Harry, Paul, and Alice got home, some guests had already arrived and were milling silently around the spread of cold cuts and salads on the dining room table. Chrissie had purchased a guest book for people to sign and had put together a slideshow of pictures of Bill on a laptop. “At least there’s beer,” Paul said, and pulled two bottles of Shipyard from a cooler filled with ice. Harry told himself that he should talk to his cousins, most of whom he hadn’t seen for two years. But before he could approach them, John Richards cornered him and asked if Alice had broached the subject of him helping out at the store this summer.
“She did,” Harry said.
“Oh, good. And you can, I hope?” John was a local widower, and a retiree, who had asked to volunteer at Bill’s store. Bill had taken him on just for a few hours a day, but John had made himself indispensable, both as an employee and as a late-in-life friend.
“I can help for the summer. You want to keep the store open, then?”
“I don’t know about that, but I do know I can’t just shut it down right away. We’ve got special orders to fill, and cataloguing. Even if we decide to close it, it’s still a lot of work.”
“No, I know. What about the store in New York?”
Harry had actually been surprised that Ron Krakowski, who had bought out his father’s share in the original Ackerson’s Rare Books in Manhattan, had not come to the service. Ron had been Bill’s closest friend for many years, a true savant with an encyclopedic knowledge of the rare-book trade. Harry did remember hearing from his father once that Ron had become one of those city dwellers terrified to step off the asphalt island of Manhattan. That was probably the reason he hadn’t made it to Maine.
“What about the store in New York?” John asked, confusion in his voice.
“I thought maybe they’d buy up your stock, if you decided to close shop.”
“Oh, right. I hadn’t thought of that, but they probably would. When can you come in?”
Harry told John that he’d come and help out in the store on Tuesday. The thought of going in the following day was just too much to stomach. John looked visibly relieved that help was on the way.
His beer gone, Harry checked in briefly with Aunt Anne’s kids; all three were milling around the food, demolishing a bowl of Ruffles and some French onion dip. It was clear that he remembered them better than they remembered him, or maybe they were all at that stage of teenage boy in which conversation and facial expressions disappear. Aunt Anne came over and helped out, repeating to Harry several times that he could come visit whenever he wanted to and for however long. While talking with his aunt, he kept an eye on Alice, who was sitting on one of the T-back chairs, a plate of untouched pasta salad on her lap. Carl Ridley stood next to her, a hand on the back of her chair, while a familiar woman—was she a librarian?—bent at the waist to offer Alice her condolences.