The Back Room Had a Chair in It

July seventeenth. There was a bookshop. I had walked past it a few times in the fall when I was doing the east-side route, the kind of place where you can only see a sliver through the window and the sliver is always just more shelves, and I had never gone in. Simone was the one who finally said, on a Saturday with nothing attached to it, that we should just go.

The front room was what you'd expect. Narrow. Every wall occupied. The kind of layout that makes you immediately adopt a slower walk without deciding to. There was a display table near the door and Simone had already picked up two books before I'd finished orienting myself. I found myself reading the back of something that had been face-up in the middle of the table and I had that particular skeptical feeling I get right before I like something. We did not purchase either of those things. We went further in.

The back room found us

The back room had a chair in it. One of those worn reading chairs with the flattened arms that means someone has been sitting in it with their legs over the side for years. There was a floor lamp, the amber kind that makes a circle on the floor. I sat down, just to look at the book I'd been carrying, and stayed there approximately twenty minutes. Simone did not ask me to leave. She was communing with a shelf in the corner and occasionally said something that I could hear but not quite parse, which was its own good quality.

The part where we realized we were going to be here a while

We have been back twice since. It is a neighborhood fact now the way the framing shop is a neighborhood fact, which I did not expect to happen from one Saturday with nothing attached to it, but that is consistently how the things that stay seem to arrive. The specific smell of the back room, old paper, something slightly floral I haven't identified, is, I think, a thing I will continue to notice for a long time. Simone bought four books that first day. I bought one. I finished it the following Tuesday on the bus home from climbing and said nothing about it until I said something here, which is consistent with how I operate.