The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry(2)
The sign over the porch of the purple Victorian cottage is faded, and Amelia nearly walks past it.
ISLAND BOOKS
Alice Island’s Exclusive Provider of Fine Literary Content since 1999
No Man Is an Island; Every Book Is a World
Inside, a teenager minds the till while reading the new Alice Munro collection. “Oh, how is that one?” Amelia asks. Amelia adores Munro, but aside from vacation, she rarely has time to read books that aren’t on the list.
“It’s for school,” the girl replies, as if that settles the question.
Amelia introduces herself as the sales rep from Knightley Press, and the teenager, without looking up from the page, points vaguely to the back. “A.J.’s in his office.”
Precarious stacks of ARCs and galleys line the hallway, and Amelia feels the usual flash of despair. The tote bag that is embossing her shoulder has several additions for A.J.’s piles and a catalog filled with other books for her to pitch. She never lies about the books on her list. She never says she loves a book if she doesn’t. She can usually find something positive to say about a book or, failing that, the cover or, failing that, the author or, failing that, the author’s website. And that’s why they pay me the big bucks, Amelia occasionally jokes to herself. She makes $37,000.00 per year plus the possibility of bonuses, though no one who does her job has made a bonus for a very long time.
The door to A. J. Fikry’s office is closed. Amelia is halfway to it when the sleeve of her sweater catches on one of the stacks, and one hundred books, maybe more, crash to the ground with a mortifying thunder. The door opens, and A. J. Fikry looks from the wreckage to the dirty-blond giantess, who is frantically trying to repile the books. “Who the hell are you?”
“Amelia Loman.” She stacks ten more tomes and half of them tumble down.
“Leave it,” A.J. commands. “There’s an order to these things. You are not helping. Please leave.”
Amelia stands. She is at least four inches taller than A.J. “But we have a meeting.”
“We have no meeting,” A.J. says.
“We do,” Amelia insists. “I e-mailed you last week about the winter list. You said it was fine for me to come by either Thursday or Friday afternoon. I said I’d come on Thursday.” The e-mail exchange had been brief, but she knows it was not fiction.
“You’re a rep?”
Amelia nods, relieved.
“What publisher again?”
“Knightley.”
“Knightley Press is Harvey Rhodes,” A.J. replies. “When you e-mailed me last week, I thought you were Harvey’s assistant or something.”
“I’m Harvey’s replacement.”
A.J. sighs heavily. “What company has Harvey gone to?”
Harvey is dead, and for a second Amelia considers making a bad joke casting the afterlife as a sort of company and Harvey as an employee in it. “He’s dead,” she says flatly. “I thought you would have heard.” Most of her accounts had already heard. Harvey had been a legend, as much as a sales rep can be a legend. “There was an obituary in the ABA newsletter and maybe one in Publishers Weekly, too,” she says by way of apology.
“I don’t much follow publishing news,” A.J. says. He takes off his thick black glasses and then spends a long time wiping the frames.
“I’m sorry if it’s a shock to you.” Amelia puts her hand on A.J.’s arm, and he shakes her off.
“What do I care? I barely knew the man. I saw him three times a year. Not enough to call him a friend. And every time I saw him, he was trying to sell me something. This is not friendship.”
Amelia can tell that A.J. is in no mood to be pitched the winter list. She should offer to come back some other day. But then she thinks of the two-hour drive to Hyannis and the eighty-minute boat ride to Alice and the ferry schedule, which becomes more irregular after October. “Since I’m here,” Amelia says, “would you mind if we went through Knightley’s winter titles?”
A.J.’s office is a closet. It has no windows, no pictures on the wall, no family photos on the desk, no knickknacks, no escape. The office has books, inexpensive metal shelves like the kind for a garage, a filing cabinet and an ancient, possibly twentieth-century, desktop computer. A.J. does not offer her a drink, and although Amelia is thirsty, she doesn’t ask for one. She clears a chair of books and sits.
Amelia launches into the winter list. It’s the smallest list of the year, both in size and expectations. A few big (or at least promising) debuts, but other than that it is filled with the books for which the publisher has the lowest commercial hopes. Despite this, Amelia often likes the “winters” the best. They are the underdogs, the sleepers, the long shots. (It is not too much of a stretch to point out that this is how she sees herself, too.) She leaves for last her favorite book, a memoir written by an eighty-year-old man, a lifelong bachelor who married at the age of seventy-eight. His bride died two years after the wedding at the age of eighty-three. Cancer. According to his bio, the writer worked as a science reporter for various midwestern newspapers, and the prose is precise, funny, not at all maudlin. Amelia had cried uncontrollably on the train from New York to Providence. Amelia knows The Late Bloomer is a small book and that the description sounds more than a little cliché, but she feels sure other people will love it if they give it a chance. In Amelia’s experience, most people’s problems would be solved if they would only give more things a chance.