Snowfall Secrets and the Bookshop Selkie

Chantelle was twenty-four years old, and on a Thursday in late October she walked into The Velvet Spine for her first shift, carrying a thermos of coffee she did not need and a folder of paperwork she probably did. The bell over the door did that thing bells do, a bright little clatter that made her feel like an intruder, and she stood there a second too long before the man behind the counter looked up.

This was Gerard, thirty-five, owner of the store, and she had met him once before at the interview, which had really just been him asking her if she liked books and her saying yes and both of them nodding at the floor. He had been in a relationship for four years, from twenty-nine to thirty-three, and it had ended the way people say things ended amicably, which usually means it ended quietly and nobody got to be angry about anything, which is its own kind of loss. Chantelle did not know any of this yet. She knew he had a nice handshake and that the store smelled like old paper and floor wax, and that was about it.

She had taken this job because her house was empty. Her younger sister had left for college in August, and her parents had gone to visit an aunt for the season, and Chantelle had come home from three twelve-hour shifts at the hospital to a silence so complete she could hear the refrigerator thinking. Nursing was fine. Nursing was good, actually, most days. But she had spent so long becoming a nurse that she had never figured out who she was when she was not being one, and now, with no sister hogging the bathroom and no one asking what was for dinner, the question had gotten loud. So she answered an ad on the community board at the grocery store. Part-time help, used bookstore, flexible hours. It paid a little. Mostly it gave her somewhere to be.

Gerard showed her around. The register, which stuck and needed a particular kind of smack in the corner. The poetry section, which he defended like family. The math of the inventory, which he explained twice and she pretended to follow. Then he took her through a door behind the counter, down two steps, into the back room.

The back room was where the store kept its better books, or maybe its stranger ones. Mismatched shelves ran floor to ceiling, and boxes sat stacked in the corners, some of them open, some of them sealed with tape gone brittle. There was a lamp with a green glass shade and a desk with three mugs on it, none of them washed. Gerard explained the sorting system, which had rules, he said, though Chantelle suspected the rules lived only in his head.

She noticed, while he talked, that his hands were broad and a little rough-looking, and that he kept them folded behind his back when he was not gesturing. She noticed the way he stood, squared and still, like someone who had learned to hold himself carefully. She would think about that later, though not for the reasons a person might guess. At the time she just filed it away the way nurses file things, without deciding what it meant.

They made small talk, and it was bad small talk, both of them good at their jobs and bad at this. He asked if she was in school. She said no, she had finished, she was a nurse, and he said that was good work, and she said it was, and there was a pause where a real sentence should have gone. He asked how long she had lived in town. Since she was born, she said, minus two years she did not count. He nodded like that was data he would store somewhere. Chantelle wiped down the counter and thought that at least the silence here was a warm silence, full of paper, not the hollow kind she had been living in.

The evening was slow. Maybe nine customers over four hours, two of them students looking for cheap copies of things they were not going to read. Chantelle shelved a cart of donations, which meant deciding where a book belonged by feel, since the system was not written down anywhere, and Gerard corrected her only twice and apologized both times like he had committed a crime. Around eight the street outside went dark and the leaves started skittering past the window in little dry packs, and the wind found a gap somewhere and made a low whistle, and Chantelle thought about how she would have been watching television alone right now, if not for this.

Near closing, Gerard asked if she wanted tea. He had an electric kettle back by the desk in the back room, an old one with a calcified bottom, and he made it in mismatched mugs, and hers had a faded picture of a lighthouse on it. She said yes mostly because saying no would have sent her home an hour early to that empty kitchen, and she was not ready for it yet.

They sat on two stools by the desk and drank tea that was too strong, because he had left the bags in too long, and he apologized for that too, and she told him to stop apologizing, and he laughed, the first real laugh she had heard from him. Then it got easier, the way it sometimes does when two people are both tired in the same way. She told him about the hospital, the night shifts, the man in room four who had proposed to her twice while on his pain medication, and Gerard laughed again and told her about the worst customer he ever had, a woman who returned a paperback because, she claimed, the ending was morally wrong.

They talked about how he had come to own the store. He had worked here for somebody else years ago, he said, and when the old owner wanted out, Gerard had taken it over at thirty-three, right around the time his relationship was ending, and the two things had gotten tangled together in his memory, the store as both a rescue and a hiding place. He did not say the word lonely, but Chantelle heard it anyway, standing there plain in the pauses.

The tea went cold in the mugs and neither of them made more. It was after ten when he finally said he should let her go home, and she agreed, and neither of them moved for a minute, which told her something about both of their evenings.

She was the one who found the box. It was in the corner near the back door, a donation box dropped off sometime that week, and he had asked her earlier to start on it if she had a spare minute. Most of it was junk, old paperbacks with cracked spines, a water-damaged atlas, a fondue set manual. Underneath those was a journal. Not a diary exactly, though it could have been. It was small, bound in something dark that was not quite leather, and it had a lock built into it, a tiny brass plate with a clasp, and the clasp was closed.

She turned it over in her hands. There was no name on it. The cover was worn smooth in the middle, the way books get when they are held a lot, and she felt a strange reluctance putting it down, which she did not examine too closely. She set it on the desk next to the lighthouse mug and called Gerard over to look at the box, because that was the procedure, keep anything worth keeping, discard the rest.

He came around the desk and saw the journal and stopped. It was not dramatic. He did not gasp or go pale or knock anything over. He just stopped, for about two seconds, the way a person does when they walk into a room and forget why. Then he said it was probably nothing, people donated odd things all the time, he would set it aside, and he picked it up and put it in a drawer under the desk and shut the drawer with his hip.

Chantelle was a nurse. She had spent four years watching faces for the thing under the thing. She had seen people smile while they received bad news and cry while insisting they were fine. So she noticed what she noticed. When Gerard closed that drawer, his hands were trembling. Not much. Just enough that he tucked them into his pockets right after, quick, like tucking in a shirttail.

She said goodnight and walked home through the cold, past the shuttered bakery and the bus stop with its broken schedule case, and she thought about the journal, and she thought about his hands, and she thought, without any reason she could name, about seals. There had been a story her grandmother used to tell, about men who shed their skins, though she could not remember how it went anymore, only the shape of it, something about a hidden skin and a locked chest and a wife who found it. She had not thought about that story in fifteen years, and here it was, arriving uninvited on a cold street, all because a shy bookstore owner had flinched at a locked book.

At home, the kitchen was still empty and the refrigerator was still thinking. But it felt different now. She put her coat on the hook and stood in the dark a while, not turning on the lights, and wondered what she had gotten herself into, and found, to her surprise, that she was not worried about the answer.

A week went the way weeks do when you work nights at a hospital, meaning it went sideways and mostly in the dark. Chantelle worked three twelve-hour shifts, slept odd hours, ate cereal for dinner twice, and thought about The Velvet Spine more than she expected to. On Saturday her next shift there fell on an evening, and it was only after Gerard had locked the front door and walked her out through the back that she realized her keys were still in her coat pocket in the store, hanging on the hook by the desk, because she had taken the coat off an hour into the shift and never put it back on.

She could have gotten them in the morning. The bus did not run that late anyway and she would have walked the twenty minutes home and back, but the night was clear and cold and she did not mind the walk, so she texted him and he texted back that he would leave the back door unlatched for half an hour. When she got there the street was empty and the first thing she noticed was that the light in the back room was on but wrong, the green glass lamp turned low, and the second thing she noticed was that Gerard was standing at the desk with the journal open in his hands.

He did not hear her at first, or he heard her and did not turn, she never found out which. He was just standing there, big man, broad rough-looking hands, holding a small locked book that was not locked anymore, and his shoulders were up around his ears in a way she recognized from families in waiting rooms. The clasp hung open. Whatever was inside the journal was not paper, or not only paper, because something