The Last Page

I've been selling medical textbooks for thirty years, and in that time I've walked into more bookstores than I can count. Damp ones, shiny ones, ones run by guys who talked at you for forty minutes about Wittgenstein whether you asked or not. So when Amara said her friend Antoine was closing his store, I nodded the way you nod at weather news. Another one gone. Sad, but it happens every week somewhere.

Then we pulled up to it and I felt something shift in my chest.

The Gutter & Spine sat between a nail salon and a vacated dry cleaner, and it looked exactly like a store called The Gutter & Spine should look. Narrow front window, hand-lettered sign with a crooked S, a sandwich board out front that said FAREWELL PARTY TONIGHT, 7 PM. EVERYTHING MUST GO. INCLUDING ME.

Amara squeezed my hand before we even got out of the car. "You're going to love him," she said. "Just let him talk. He'll talk."

She was 48 and I was 55, and we'd been together eight years now, ever since I bought a dog-eared Graham Greene off her table at a library book signing and she told me I had the saddest taste in literature she'd ever seen on a man in a blazer. I'd been on the road my whole adult life, selling to hospitals and university libraries from one end of the state to the other, and my curiosity about certain things had stayed exactly that, a curiosity, a thing I carried around in a suitcase pocket next to the phone chargers. But that's getting ahead of myself.

We walked in and the smell hit me first. Old paper, dust, coffee somebody had burned years ago and never quite apologized for. The shelves leaned. I mean that literally, they leaned to the left like a crowd of drunks listening to a story. Paperbacks stacked two deep, spines cracked, a whole wall of nothing but westerns. There was a cat somewhere, I could hear it but not see it.

And the place was full. Not packed, but full. Maybe thirty people holding wine glasses, murmuring under the low yellow bulbs, everybody doing that thing people do at a wake for a business, which is laughing too easily and touching the merchandise.

"There they are." Antoine came toward us with both hands out, a big man gone soft at the edges, sixty-two years old, white beard, glasses pushed up on his forehead for no reason I could figure. He hugged Amara like a brother and shook my hand with both of his, which always feels like a deal is happening. "Rex. The famous Rex. She talks about you."

"All good things, I hope."

"She says you buy books you never read and finish books you never buy. That's a good thing. That's a reader." He handed us each a glass of red wine without asking, which I liked. Behind him a woman was coming around the shelf with a plate of little sandwiches, and that was Lexi, and I'll be honest, I noticed her right away.

She was 34, dark hair cut short, clay under her fingernails, which I later learned was a permanent condition because she was a ceramicist and the studio was her second home. She had on a green dress and no shoes, and she moved through that crowded little store like the shelves were rearranging themselves politely for her.

"You must be Rex," she said. "Antoine's been nervous all day. He reorganized the poetry section three times."

"I was not nervous. I was curating."

"You moved Baudelaire to the front window."

"He deserves a sendoff too."

Lexi laughed and it was a real laugh, the kind that makes other people check what's funny. She touched Amara's arm and said, "It's so good to finally meet you. He talks about you too, you know. Both of you. 'My librarian friend, the only person whose taste I trust.'"

Amara smiled at that, and I watched them, the two of them, Antoine at 62 and Lexi at 34, and the way his hand rested at the small of her back like it had lived there for three years, since that gallery opening. It didn't look like anything scandalous. It looked like a marriage that hadn't bothered with paperwork.

The evening went the way good evenings go, slowly and without a plan. We ate little sandwiches. Antoine told the story of the flood of '09 and the tarp and the two thousand paperbacks he dried on rooftops like a man making jerky. A woman from the newspaper took notes and bought a first edition she couldn't afford. The cat turned out to be real, an enormous orange thing named Tennyson, who sat in my lap for twenty minutes without invitation and left when he was done with me.

Somewhere around the second glass of wine I found myself alone with Amara by the westerns, and she looked up at me with an expression I knew. It was the banana expression. I'll explain that another time, but in our house it means she's leading me somewhere on purpose.

"So," she said. "Antoine told me something on the phone last week."

"What's that?"

"About the back room. And about him and Lexi." She took a sip of wine, unhurried. "They have an understanding. They've had parties before. Small ones. Careful ones."

I felt my face do something and she watched it do it. "An understanding," I said.

"Rex," she said my name the way she does when I'm being deliberately slow. "You've talked about wanting this for as long as I've known you. Eight years of sideways conversations. I told you a while back that I did something like this once, when I was younger, with an old partner, and it was good, and it was gentle, and nobody got hurt. And you asked me a hundred questions over the following month and then never brought it up again."

"I brought it up twice."

"You circled it. Men circle." She set her glass on a shelf between Zane Grey and somebody named Brand. "Antoine's store closes tomorrow. The back office is cleared out. He told me, half joking, that the last thing that room should see is something better than inventory. And Lexi asked about you specifically. She saw your picture on my phone at the ceramics sale in spring. She said, and I quote, 'the one with the kind shoulders.'"

I looked across the room. Antoine was refilling Lexi's glass and she said something in his ear and he laughed, a big easy laugh. And there was this feeling in me, quiet and slow, like a door in a house you've lived in for years that you never noticed, and now you find it and it opens and there's a whole room behind it.

"Why does this feel important?" I asked, mostly to myself. "It's just a store."

Amara leaned against the leaning shelf, which accepted her like an old friend. "Because endings loosen people up. Everybody here tonight is a little more honest than usual. You can feel it. Forty years of a man's life in this room and he wants to send it off with something warm instead of a U-Haul." She looked at me. "You don't have to decide anything right now. You don't have to decide anything at all. But I wanted you to know the door exists."

"The door exists," I repeated.

"And it has a Persian rug behind it, apparently. A good one."

I laughed then, and she did too, and we stood there in the westerns like a couple of kids which we very much were not, her 48 and me 55, and the dust settling around us in the yellow light.

Antoine's voice came over the small crowd just then. He'd climbed onto a stepstool behind the register, wine glass raised, and the room went quiet the way rooms do.

"Forty years," he said. "Forty years of telling people the book they wanted was terrible and then finding them the book they needed." Laughter. "The store closes Sunday. The inventory goes to the wholesaler Monday. But tonight, the store is still alive, and I want to thank every single one of you for keeping it breathing this long." His voice cracked a little on the last of it and Lexi put her hand on his ankle from below, just that, just an ankle, and he steadied. "So drink up. Browse around. And anyone who wants to see the back office before it's gone for good, come find me later. It's the best room in the building and nobody ever believes me."

He stepped down and the murmur picked back up, and Amara took my hand, and across the room Lexi caught my eye and held it for a beat, no smile, just an honest look, like she was checking whether I was real. Then she smiled.

"So," Amara said. "The back office."

"So," I said.

We refilled our glasses first. It seemed like the kind of night where you'd want to take your time.

The crowd thinned the way crowds do at farewell parties, in layers. First the ones with kids and babysitters, then the ones who'd come mostly for the free wine, then the stragglers who kept picking up the same paperback and putting it down. By eleven there were maybe six people left, and by half past, four. Us.

Antoine had locked the front door without making a thing of it. He just did it while talking to Amara about some poet they both knew, and the bolt slid home and it was finished. Tennyson was curled up on the register like a lozenge, an enormous orange lozenge, and he opened one eye periodically to confirm we were still worthy.

"Back room's empty," Antoine said, coming over with the bottle of wine by its neck. "Shelves are bare in there. First time in forty years I've seen the walls of that office. Strange feeling. Like seeing a man without his glasses."

"You should show them," Lexi said from her chair by the register. She was sitting with her legs folded under her on the seat, a habit that would have gotten most chairs killed, and her dark hair fell across half her face. "It's a good room. They won't believe it otherwise."

"There's also scotch," Antoine said, wiggling the wine bottle. "Aged. A gift from a customer who owed me money in 1998 and paid me in liquor instead. I've been saving it for an occasion, and I decided this is it, because after tonight there's no occasion left."

"He's been saying that about everything this week," Lexi told us. "The good coffee. The good candles. He opened the good coffee on Tuesday like the world was ending."

"The world as I know it is ending," Antoine said. "Tomorrow. The sign's already half off the door."

Amara looked at me. I looked at her. Neither of us said anything clever, which was fine, because we'd gotten good over eight years at the wordless version. She stood and gathered both our glasses.

"Lead the way," she said.

The back office was a small room behind the stockroom, and it was exactly as advertised, it didn't look like much and then it did. Bare shelves, pale rectangles on the plaster where shelves and frames had hung for decades. A desk pushed to one wall. And in the middle of the floor, a Persian rug, worn down to a soft dark red in the walking paths, the kind of rug that has absorbed forty years of a man's footsteps and thoughts.

"That's the one," Antoine said, shutting the door behind us. "Found it at an estate sale in '86. The widow wanted it gone because her husband bought it the week he left her for the other woman, and then came back, and she never forgave the rug for being there for both halves." He set the scotch on the desk and pried at the cork with his thumbnail. "I've done my best thinking on it. Most of it useless."

The four of us arranged ourselves on the floor around the desk, which held the scotch and four mismatched tumblers. Antoine poured with the care of a man who had waited a long time for this bottle and it showed, a slow amber ribbon into each glass.

Amara sat on my left, her knee against mine. Lexi sat across from us, cross-legged now, and Antoine beside her in the corner where two shelves met. The scotch was genuinely good, smoky and sweet at the back, and I said so, and Antoine pointed at me with his glass like I'd passed a test.

"So," he said. "Amara tells me you sell medical textbooks."

"Almost thirty years. Hospitals, university libraries, whatever's got a budget and a cardiologist."

"Every book in this store got sold by somebody like you, once. Road warriors. It's a whole invisible economy." He knocked back a sip. "You like it?"

I thought about that honestly, which the scotch helped with. "Parts of it. I like the driving. I like knowing where every teaching hospital in three states keeps its coffee machine. I don't love hotels anymore. There's a ceiling on how many Holiday Inn bedspreads a man can see and stay a person."

Everybody laughed at that, and Lexi said, "That's the saddest sentence I've ever heard and it's also a poem."

"What about you?" I asked her. "Ceramics. Is it good?"

"It's lonely until it isn't. You spend six months alone in a studio talking to clay, and then one weekend a market, and people touch your work right in front of you, which is terrifying, and then somebody buys the bowl you made on the worst day of your life and doesn't know it." She shrugged. "It's good. Antoine's my gallery opening that stuck."

"Three years," Antoine said, and there was a softness in it.

Then, because the room was small and bare and the scotch was working, the talk went where talk goes at the end of things. Risk. Regret. Antoine told us about a woman in the eighties who'd offered to buy the store and he'd said no, out of pride, and she'd died rich and he'd stayed poor and neither of those was the regret, the regret was that he'd never told her he thought she