Ashlyn locked the door behind her, savoring the reassuring calm that descended each time she stepped through the door of An Unlikely Story, the sense that she was wholly and completely where she belonged.
The shop had been hers for almost four years now, though in a way it had always belonged to her. Just as she had always belonged to it. As far back as she could remember, the shop had felt like home, the books lining its jumbled shelves like trusted friends. Books were safe. They had plots that followed predictable patterns, beginnings, middles, and endings. Usually happy, though not always. But if something tragic happened in a book, you could just close it and choose a new one, unlike real life, where events often played out without the protagonist’s consent.
Like a father who couldn’t hold a job. Not because he wasn’t smart enough or skilled enough but because he was simply too angry. The entire neighborhood had known about Gerald Greer’s temper. They’d either experienced it firsthand or heard it spilling out of the windows on a near-daily basis. Berating her mother for overcooking the pork chops, buying the wrong brand of chips, or using too much starch on his shirts. Nothing was ever right or good enough.
People used to whisper that he had a drinking problem, but she never knew her father to keep liquor in the house. Good thing, too, according to Grandma Trina, who had once grumbled that her son-in-law was never more than one ruined dinner away from burning down the house. The last thing he needed was an accelerant.
And then there was her mother, the shadow figure who could generally be found in her room, watching game shows or sleeping away her afternoons, aided by the seemingly bottomless vial of yellow pills in her nightstand. Her coping pills, she’d called them.
The summer Ashlyn turned fifteen, Willa Greer had been diagnosed with uterine cancer. There’d been talk of an operation, followed by chemo and radiation, but her mother had refused treatment, concluding that there was nothing in her life worth hanging around for. She was dead within a year, buried four weeks to the day before Ashlyn’s sixteenth birthday. She had chosen death over her family—over her daughter.
Ashlyn’s father had been strangely unmoored by the loss of his wife, shutting himself up in his room or staying away from home entirely. He ate little and rarely spoke, and his eyes took on an unsettling emptiness. And then, on the afternoon of her sixteenth birthday, during the party her grandmother insisted on giving her—a party she hadn’t wanted—her father had climbed up to the attic, braced a loaded Winchester side-by-side beneath his chin, and pulled the trigger.
He had chosen too.
She’d gone to live with her grandmother after that and had spent her Thursday afternoons with a therapist who specialized in children and grief. Not that it had done much good. Two parents gone in the space of a month, and both had chosen to leave her. Surely the fault lay with her. Something she’d done or not done, some awful, unforgivable flaw. Like a disfiguring birthmark or faulty gene, the question had become a permanent part of her. Like the scar on her palm.
After her parents’ deaths, the store had become her sanctuary, a place to retreat from the stares and whispers, where no one gave her sideways looks and snickered about the girl whose father had blown his brains out while she was blowing out her birthday candles. But it wasn’t only her father’s suicide that had marred her early years. She’d always been different, skittish and withdrawn.
A freak.
It was a label she’d earned on the first day of seventh grade, when she’d burst into tears after being issued a battered social studies textbook dripping with self-loathing. The echoes had been so bleak and so bottomless—so uncomfortably familiar—that she’d found it almost unbearable to touch the book. She’d begged the girl beside her to trade but had refused to say why. In the end, her teacher had issued her a different book, but not before the entire class had a good laugh at her expense.
Years later, the memory still stung, but she’d eventually come to accept her strange gift. Like the ability to paint or play the violin, it had become a part of her and was even a comfort at times, the echoes a standin for actual friends, who might judge or abandon her.
Ashlyn shook off the thought as she deposited her tote on the counter and ran her eyes around the shop. She adored every inch of its cozy clutter, the threadbare carpets and warped oak floors, the scent of beeswax mixed with lingering traces of Frank Atwater’s pipe tobacco, but as she eyed the stack of books waiting for her on the front counter, the shelves that needed dusting, the windows that were long overdue for a wash, she regretted not following through on her plan to finally hire someone to help with day-to-day tasks.
She’d nearly placed an ad last month, had gone so far as to write the copy, but ultimately she had changed her mind. It wasn’t the money. With the bindery business taking off, the shop pulled in more than enough to support a staff. Her reluctance had to do with preserving the sanctuary she’d built for herself, an insular world of ink and paper and familiar echoes. She wasn’t ready to let someone else in, even if it meant more free time. Perhaps especially if it meant more free time.
Ashlyn glanced at the old depot clock as she peeled out of her jacket and tossed it on the counter. It was nearly four and she had an hour’s worth of reshelving to tackle before she could change hats and head to the bindery. Today’s stack was especially diverse and included titles such as The Art of Cooking with Herbs & Spices, A Guide to Bird Behavior: Volumes I & II, The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott, and The Four Dimensions of Philosophy.
The varied interests of her customers never ceased to amaze her. If someone, somewhere, was interested in a subject, no matter how obscure, there was a book about it. And if there was a book about it, someone, somewhere, wanted to read it. Her job was to connect the two, and it was one she took very seriously. She’d grown up believing a person could learn absolutely anything from books, and she still believed it. How could she not when she spent her days in such rarefied air?