Confessions of a Curious Bookseller(87)

Many thanks!

Fawn, Owner, The Curious Cat Book Emporium

P.S. You must be making a lot of money this year! Philadelphia has been falling apart at the seams. Did you hear about my neighbor who lost his business in a sinkhole? Tragic!

From: O’Hare Repair

Sent: Tue, Jul 23, 2019 at 8:19 AM

To: Fawn Birchill

Re: Basement Flood

Hi Fawn,

Sorry to hear about your basement issues. I’ve attached a quote here, but it would probably be best to stop by and give you a quote in person. This estimate is probably on the low end of what it would be. I’d have a better idea if I took a look at it myself. Let me know if you’d like to schedule a time for me to stop by.

Cahill

From: Fawn Birchill

Sent: Tue, Jul 23, 2019 at 10:04 AM

To: O’Hare Repair

Re: Basement Flood

Dear Cahill,

That is simply out of my price range. Is there something else we can work out? Perhaps I can make you a delicious home-cooked meal? Do your boys like reading yet? I have many great books that they can just have for free. Please consider. I have very little to give, but this must be resolved. I believe every day that the water is sitting there, it is ruining the already questionable foundation.

Many thanks,

Fawn



From: Fawn Birchill

Sent: Tue, Jul 23, 2019 at 9:18 PM

To: Jack Grisby

Subject: Shop-Vac

Jack,

Thank you for offering to bring in your Shop-Vac from home. I fear it will be a lot of work, as the basement is enormous. If you are up to it, I would appreciate your effort, but please understand that I cannot pay you.

Fawn, Owner



July 24, 2019

I have left Jack to the mess downstairs, but I fear he will not be able to take care of it all. The books in the now-empty apartment have such a horrible, rotten smell to them. I am tempted to throw them out. It’s a minor blessing that no one has responded to my PSB ads for the apartment, since upon entering they would most likely turn around and leave due to the offensive smell. It is evident, even from the first floor.

I am back from the lawyer’s office. Where do I begin? I wasn’t surprised to find the pastor sitting there with us, and he was among the appointed beneficiaries along with Florence, my mother, and me. Surprise, surprise, he made out with the jackpot: $14,000 to go toward that pristine church. The pastor, a very nice man who just happens to be wealthy, was humbled and grateful for my father’s generosity. I looked at him, hungrily, hoping that he would give the money to the family—the rightful owners, the ones who suffered through knowing Father for fifty-plus years—but alas, it was not in the cards. He just sat back and listened as Florence was bestowed Father’s gun rack, worth about $5,000, and I was left with his gold watch and high school ring, worth only about $300. Mother, of course, got the house and apparently a small but helpful IRA that none of us knew about.

I said my goodbyes to everyone and headed for the train station alone, trying not to burst into tears right there on the street. The watch was heavy in my shorts pocket, and his ring barely fit my slender thumb. None of us wanted these things. We didn’t want a gun rack or watches or even money. We just wanted a dad.

I’m not sure how I almost missed his store. I suppose I was thinking about too many things, so I didn’t notice that there before me stood the gray, decrepit, boarded-up old building—a building that I had walked to most of the years of my young life but hadn’t revisited in over a decade.

His sign had been left up, weathered over the years: BIRCHILL’S GENERAL STORE. The gray-blue paint that my sister and I slapped onto the building during the span of a few weeks over the summer when we were in middle school had nearly chipped completely off. Underneath was the rugged brown skin of bare wood. It almost looked as if it was leaning into the building beside it (a Domino’s Pizza), as if it were too weary to hold itself up anymore. And then, it hit me all at once like a stack of falling hardcovers: I wasn’t looking at a store. I was looking up at my father.

I touched the building, and the paint flaked off in my hand. I held my father, small and fragile. That flake of paint, this moldy building that had long belonged to the bank, this thing that no one wanted, was more an embodiment of him than his own skin, or perhaps now, his ashes. I went up to the front door and breathed in the stale air through the tiny cracks. My old life came flooding back to me: boots on the dirty front steps, the creak of the freezer unit door, the cold smell of the stone basement, the ding of the cash register, the distinct staccato laugh of the postman. I sat on the front stoop for a moment, the odor of decades past whirling around in my brain. Images of my father sweeping became so real I could almost see it. The early-morning odor of his cheap coffee wafting through the aisles and out the front door, hanging in my mouth, clinging to my hair. The slam of a new stack of newspapers each morning brought in by Smoking Joe, the delivery guy.

As I sat there, I realized that it wasn’t for lack of money that he became the way he did. It was simply the fact that we Birchills don’t know when enough is enough. We are too caught up in our memories of what was rather than our dreams of what could be. I certainly don’t want to end up with this as my legacy: this husk of a dream that once was, this monstrosity of peeling walls and warped floorboards, of broken windows and a waiting bed in hospice. All my life I’ve been proving to my father that I’m nothing like him and that I’m better in every conceivable way, but where has it gotten me? My god, I’ve spent my whole life in a pissing contest with my family. My whole entire life.