Page 8 of Beachfront Pages

"I carry what's worth carrying." Marty set down the story collection and turned around. His glasses were still up on his forehead. He reached up, found them, and brought them down with the air of a man who'd misplaced something he'd been wearing the whole time. "I can order you something with a little more under the hood. There's a Spanish detective novel that just came out. Does everything Maxwell does and means it."

"I don't want it to mean anything. I want to find out who killed the guy in the alley." Hal grinned. "That's the whole appeal, Marty. You sit down, you turn the pages, and the smart detective sorts it out. The world makes sense for three hundred pages. You should try it sometime."

"I've tried it."

"You've sniffed at it."

That was fair. Not that Marty intended to say so. "Commercial fiction is built to be forgotten. That's the design. You consume it, you forget it, and you buy the next one. Very efficient machine." He shrugged. "I'd rather sell a man a book he remembers in twenty years."

"I'm seventy-three. I don't buy green bananas, and I sure don't buy books for twenty years from now." Hal thumped the counter, but it was a friendly thump. "Order me the Maxwell. Donna'll have my hide if I come home with a Spanish detective who means things."

"Donna has better taste than you do. Why isn't she picking the books?"

"Because she's got me trained to fetch." Hal spread his hands, helpless and pleased about it. "Forty-one years. You'd be amazed what a man'll fetch."

Marty wrote it on the pad by the register. Hal was a regular, and the shop did not, in fact, have the luxury of turning away a sale on principle. "A few days. Week at the most."

"You're a good man under all that snobbery."

"I'm a terrible man. It's the only thing keeping the lights on." He tore off the slip. "Tell Donna I said hello."

Hal was still chuckling as he walked out the door.

Marty stood a moment in the quiet he'd gotten back. He looked at the order slip, at the name printed in his own ink-smudged hand. F. L. Maxwell. Fifteen books. A devoted reader who couldn't sleep for his knees and came down to a failing bookshop early to make sure he had all the books.

And here Marty was, acting like it was a problem to order it.

He shook his head at himself and slid the slip under the register clip. Snobbery was a luxury too, when a man thought about it. Maybe he couldn't afford that anymore either.

He headed to the back office. The column was due Thursday. He'd left it half-finished, four hundred words on a forgotten Florida poet. The Beacon would run it on page six, between the tide chart and the church suppers. Nobody read it. Well, Hal read it. Hal read everything, then came in and argued.

Marty had started writing the thing eight years ago as a favor to the editor. He'd kept writing it for a smaller reason. It was the only place left where he got to make the case for the books he loved. Four hundred words, once a week, into the silence. He'd finish it tonight. Or he wouldn't, and he'd finish it Wednesday, and tell himself Wednesday had been the plan all along.

Winnie came in on the back of a warm gust off the water. She had a foil-covered plate in both hands. "You left your door propped open," she said. "Anybody could wander in."

"That's generally the idea with a shop."

"Don't be smart. I brought you sugar cookies." She set the plate on the counter and peeled the foil back partway. The smell of them went straight past his defenses, butter and vanilla with a sugar crust on top. "Made a double batch. You look like you're not eating."

"I eat."

"You eat crackers over the sink, Martin. That's not eating, that's grazing." She slid the plate an inch closer to him. "Take two. You'll hurt my feelings."

He took one and ate half of it. It was very good. It was always going to be very good. Winnie's things always were. She always knew it, and she never once let on that she knew it, which he respected enormously.

"How's the shop?" she asked.

"Doing okay. We're still here." He brushed a crumb off the counter. "Sold three books yesterday. Two of them to the same person, so really one customer. But we're here."

"Mm." She looked around the place the way she looked at everything, taking inventory without seeming to. The spine-out lighthouse books. The literary fiction nobody browsed. The reading chair in the corner that mostly held him. "You ever think about stocking the things people actually ask for?"

"Don't you start."

"I'm only saying. A man's got to keep the doors open before he can be particular about what's behind them." She said it gently, no edge to it. That was how she got away with saying things nobody else could. "Henry kept that lighthouse to be useful first and beautiful second. He'd have told you the same."

"Henry didn't have a Spanish detective novel doing real work that nobody would buy."

"No. Henry had other troubles." A shadow crossed her face, there and gone. She reached for a cookie of her own, and that was the end of that. Marty had learned, over the years, that Winnie's face did that sometimes when the lighthouse came up. Asking about it got a man exactly nowhere. He didn't ask.