When the shelving was finished, she polished the counter and restocked the handouts in the rack at the front of the store, including the latest issue of the store’s monthly newsletter. The windows would have to wait for another day. After sixty years in business, the place was long past gleaming, but there was a warm patina to the scarred floors and overcrowded shelves that her customers seemed to appreciate, and perhaps even expect.
In the bindery, situated at the back of the shop, Ashlyn flicked on the overhead fluorescents, almost uncomfortably bright after the shop’s softer reading lamps. The room was small and cluttered, but there was an organized chaos to the clutter. On the right, just inside the door, sat the sewing frame, used to stitch pages together, and a rack of endpapers in various colors and patterns. The left side of the room was dominated by an ancient cast iron standing press, which had once conjured images of the Spanish Inquisition until Frank had shown her how it was used to press books.
A workbench occupied most of the back wall. Above the bench, shelves held the various tools of the trade: book weights, awls, sanding blocks, bone folders, an assortment of mallets and spatulas. There was also an array of less specialized supplies, household items like waxed paper, binder clips, and the old blow-dryer she used to remove sticky labels from garage sale finds. At the end of the bench, a glass-front case housed an assortment of solvents and adhesives, pots of dye and tubes of paint, mull and tape to strengthen spines, Japanese tissue to repair torn pages.
The sight of it all had intimidated her once. Now each tool felt like an extension of her love of books, an extension of herself. After her father’s accident, as Grandma Trina insisted on calling it, Frank had offered her a proper job. It was just dusting and emptying wastebaskets at first, but when he caught her hovering in the doorway of the bindery one day, watching with breath held as he painstakingly dissected a first-edition Steinbeck, he had waved her over and given her her first lesson in book restoration.
She had proved a quick study, and after a few weeks was allowed to help regularly in the bindery, handling less valuable books at first, then moving on to rarer and more costly volumes. Years later, book restoration had become an almost sacred vocation. There was something enormously rewarding about taking something that had been neglected, even mistreated, and making it new again, deconstructing it with the greatest of care, then putting it back together again, its spine straightened, its scars removed, its tired beauty restored. Each restoration was a labor of love, like a kind of resurrection, a broken and discarded thing given new life.
Today, her first order of business was to check on several pages from a volume of Tom Swift she’d left soaking in a large enamel tub, in hopes of removing the copious amounts of glue applied during an ill-advised do-it-yourself rebinding attempt. Glue could be a bit of a high-wire act, even for a skilled binder. In the hands of an enthusiastic amateur, it generally spelled disaster.
Using a small spatula, she reached into the water, gently teasing the mixture of glue and old tape from the edge of the top page. Not ready yet, but another few hours should do it. Once she got them dry, she would reassemble the text block, add new boards and endpapers, then re-emboss the repaired spine. It wouldn’t be cheap, but the book would leave the shop with a new lease on life, and with any luck, Mr. Lanier would know better than to attempt any future home repair.
When she was satisfied that she’d done what she could, she dried her hands and flipped off the overheads, her mind already wandering upstairs to her apartment, to her reading chair and the words that had already etched themselves in her mind.
How, Belle? After everything . . . how could you do it?
The words were still with her as she stepped through the door of her apartment and kicked off her shoes. Like the shop, Frank Atwater’s apartment had become a second home growing up. Now, it, too, was hers.
When things were rough at home, Frank and his wife, Tiny, had provided a place to come after school, to have a snack and do her homework or just curl up on the sofa and watch Dark Shadows. When Tiny suffered an aneurism and died suddenly, Ashlyn had done everything in her power to fill the hole left by her absence. In return, Frank left her everything when he died six years later. The daughter I was never blessed with, the will had said. A joy and a comfort in my time of sorrow.
She missed him terribly. His unfailing kindness, his quiet wisdom, his love of all things written. But he was still here, in the old ormolu clock that remained on the mantel, the weary leather wingback near the window, his cherished collection of Victorian classics, each brimming with echoes of a life well lived. She’d done some updating before moving in, resulting in an eclectic mix of Victorian, contemporary, and arts and crafts that worked surprisingly well with the apartment’s high windows and exposed brick walls.
In the kitchen, she popped last night’s leftover kung pao in the microwave and ate it straight from the carton, standing over the sink. She was itching to dive into Regretting Belle, but she had strict rules about food and books—one or the other, never both together.
Finally, after swapping her jeans for sweats, she retrieved the book from her tote, flicked on the funky arts and crafts reading lamp she’d discovered at a yard sale last summer, and settled into the old wingback near the window. She sat a moment with the book balanced on her knees, steeling herself for the emotional storm she knew was coming. Then she pulled in a breath and opened to the first page.
Regretting Belle
(pgs. 1–13)
27 March 1953
New York, New York
You will perhaps wonder why I’ve gone to this trouble. Why, after so many years, I should endeavor to undertake such a project. A book. But in the beginning, it wasn’t meant to be a book. It began as a letter. One of those cathartic outpourings one never really intends to send. But as my pen began to move, I found I had too much to say. Too much regret to fit on a single page—or even several pages. And so I have moved to my desk, to my typewriter—my father’s old Underwood No. 5—where I now sit, pounding out the words I have swallowed for a dozen years, the question that continues to haunt me.
How? How, Belle?
Because even now, after all the mistakes I’ve made with my life—and I’ve made many—you are the one I regret most. You have been the capital error of my life, the one regret for which there can be no absolution, no peace. For you or for me.