What You Never Said

The Bent Spine closes at nine on Tuesdays, and I got there at six because Christa wanted to leave early for a thing her wife had going. I clocked in, hung my coat on the hook by the register, and stood there a minute watching the rain come down on College Street.

You want to know about me first, fine. I'm Julia. I'm thirty-two, I'm divorced going on two years now, and I'm a PhD candidate in library science, which is a fancy way of saying I'm still in school at an age where most people have stopped. I work part-time here because student funding doesn't cover much more than rent and cat food.

And here's the part I usually don't say out loud. Since the divorce, I've felt like my own body belongs to somebody else. I gained weight in the marriage, lost some after, gained it back differently. Nothing fits the way it used to. I catch mirrors at bad angles and it's like seeing a stranger wear my face. My ex never touched me in the last two years we were married, and after a while you start to believe you're not the kind of person people touch.

So that's where I was that Tuesday. Wiping down the counter, alone, rain on the windows, feeling about as visible as a dust mote.

The bell over the door rang at seven.

"God, it's a swamp out there," she said, shaking water off a green jacket. "Sorry, am I dripping on your floor?"

"We're all dripping somewhere," I said, which is not a sentence I planned. "I mean, the mats. There are mats."

She laughed and stamped her boots on the mat, and I looked up to point her toward them and stopped functioning as a normal human being.

I knew her. I knew her from a graduate seminar nine years ago, when I was twenty-three and she was twenty-two, and we sat two chairs apart every Tuesday for a semester and I never once worked up the nerve to say anything to her beyond "can I borrow your syllabus." Shannon. Shannon with the dark hair cut short now, Shannon who used to wear these enormous scarves like she was hiding a bird under them.

"Shannon?" I said.

She squinted at me. Then her whole face opened up. "Julia? Julia Ripley?"

"Oh my god!"

"Holy shit!" She came over and hugged me before I could decide whether to hug back, and my body did the stiff-board thing while my brain screamed. "You work here?"

"Part-time. I'm still doing the PhD, so, you know, poverty with benefits."

"You look great," she said, and I want you to understand I did not believe her, not even a little, but she said it like it was a fact she'd just confirmed, not a compliment she was handing out.

"Thanks, so do you. You cut your hair."

"Five years ago. You're very behind." She peeled off the jacket and hung it over her arm. "I'm actually here on a mission. You have a poetry collection, limited run, 1968, blue cloth binding, possibly behind the glass case?"

"The Ransom thing? Let me look."

I walked to the case faster than I needed to because my hands needed a job. Nine years. Nine years I'd carried this woman around in my head like a splinter, and she'd walked in out of the rain asking about a book of poems.

Christa keeps the good stuff in a locked case in the back. I found the listing card and pulled the key off the ring. "Christa, the owner, prices everything by hand," I called over my shoulder. "So it might be wildly wrong in either direction."

"I work at the university archive," Shannon said, following me back. "Rare books. So I will know if it's wildly wrong."

"Then I should overcharge you now and apologize later."

"Julia Ripley, still the funniest person in the room."

I got the case open and there it was, blue cloth, water stain on the spine. I handed it over and she held it like it was a baby bird. And I stood there watching her hands, and nine years compressed into nothing, because I used to watch those exact hands turn pages in a seminar room while a man with a white beard talked about prosody.

"Okay," she said softly. "Okay, this is the one."

"You want it wrapped?"

"I want it read tonight."

I took it up front to the register, and this is where things went wrong for me. I typed in the price and the register threw an error. I typed it again. Error.

"It's doing that?" I said to nobody.

"Take your time."

"It's not you, it's me, it's this machine." Third try, error again. My face was going hot. Somewhere in nine years of imagining this reunion I had not once imagined being bad at my retail job in front of her.

She leaned on the counter, chin on her fist, watching me. "You still at the university? The PhD?"

"Yeah. Library science. Metadata, mostly."

"Metadata. God. That's so you!"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means you used to alphabetize the seminar readings. Don't act like you didn't."

"I organized them by theme, actually, alphabetizing is for cowards." The register finally accepted the price and printed a receipt like it had done it on purpose to humiliate me. "There. Forty-two dollars and I've made a fool of myself, standard Tuesday."

She counted out cash, exact change, laid it flat. "You know, I thought about you a couple years back," she said, easy, like she was talking about weather. "Saw your name on a conference program. Julia Ripley, panel on digital cataloguing. Almost drove out to hear it."

My heart did something I'm not going to describe. "Why didn't you?"

"Three-hour drive on a work night." She shrugged. "Regretted it, though. I figured you'd be tenured and famous by now."

"I'm neither of those things."

"And married, probably."

And there it was, the question, sitting on the counter between us next to her exact change. The bell over the door rang and an actual customer came in, some guy shaking off an umbrella, and I had never wanted to strangle a stranger with an umbrella so bad in my life.

"Divorced, actually," I said. "Two years ago."

"Oh," she said. And then, quieter, "Oh."

The guy browsed the new arrivals table for a solid five minutes while Shannon browsed the poetry shelf, and the whole time I rang up nothing and thought about absolutely nothing and everything. Rain kept coming. Christa's neon OPEN sign buzzed the way it always does when it's humid.

The guy finally bought a paperback western and left. Shannon came back up front with her book under her arm and her jacket still over her forearm.

"Are you closing soon?" she asked.

"Nine. But Christa let me off at close since she left early, so, it's just me and the mop after this."

"Huh." She looked out at the rain, then back at me, and I couldn't name what I saw and wasn't ready to name it. "There's a wine bar two doors down. The one with the orange awning."

"I know it."

"Are you doing anything after nine?"

"Alphabetizing is for cowards," I said, which made no sense, and she laughed anyway, the same laugh, lower now maybe, and it went through me like a current through water.

"So that's a yes?" she said.

"That's a yes. If you can tolerate an hour of me catching you up on nine years of nothing."

"Julia." She picked up her bag. "There was never nothing."

She left and stood under the awning across the street, waiting out the rain, and I watched her through the window like an idiot for longer than I'll admit to anyone.

Then I texted Christa.

Me: you will not believe who just came in

Christa: the plumber

Me: Shannon. From grad school. The one from the seminar

Christa: THE Shannon?? Wait I don't know a Shannon. The one you've mentioned twice in three years with that specific voice

Me: that's the one

Christa: and you're closing alone and probably dying rn

Me: we're getting a drink at nine

Christa: JULIA

Me: it's not a thing. It's a drink. With a woman I've been quietly in love with since I was twenty-three

Christa: ok so it's a thing

I put the phone down and picked up the mop because if I didn't give my hands a job I was going to stand in the middle of the store and hyperventilate. Two hours till close. Two hours to figure out what I was going to do with my face, my hair, my body, my whole situation.

The rain kept hitting the glass. Somewhere across the street Shannon was checking her watch under an awning, and I was twenty-three again, two chairs away, saying nothing.

Around eight Shannon came back in with rain in her hair and said the awning had stopped being load bearing, could she wait inside. I said yes about four times too many, and she went off to browse the poetry shelf.

At eight-thirty the door chimed and Christa came in dripping, holding her keys like a trophy.

"Her thing got cancelled," she announced. "So I came back to rescue you."

"I don't need rescuing."

"You're mopping in a spiral. I watched you through the window for a full minute." She looked at the register, then at the woman standing at the poetry shelf trying very hard to look like she was reading spines. "Is that her?"

"Christa."

"Hi, Shannon, I assume," Christa said, sticking her hand out. "I'm Christa, I own the place, I've heard literally nothing about you but I know your whole story anyway."

"Christa," I said again, louder.

"Good to meet you," Shannon said, and she was grinning. "Should I be worried?"

"Only a little." Christa shrugged off her coat. "Okay, here's the deal. It's dead tonight, it's raining, nobody buys used Auden in a monsoon. Let's close early. You two shut it down, I'm ordering pizza for the back room event crew, and nobody tells my wife I was here twice."

"That's not even a little how closing works," I said.

"It is how closing works when the owner is me. Shut the sign off, Julia."

So it went, she was on her phone thumbing through a pizza app and I was flipping the neon sign off, and Shannon stood in the middle of my store with her book and her green jacket and watched me do it.

"No wine bar?" she asked.

"Rain check. Apparently we're pizza."

"Apparently we're pizza," she agreed.

Christa left three boxes and a warning. "Do not reorganize anything, Julia, the shelf in the back room is alphabetized by a system only you understand and I hate it." Then she was gone and it was just us and the boxes and the creaky floors and the rain, and I sat down on one of the mismatched reading chairs before my knees could file anything.

Shannon took the other one, the green saggy one, and put her feet up on an overturned crate like she'd worked here for years.

"Okay," she said, and opened her pizza box. "Tell me everything. Nine years, go."

"That's not a story, that's a deposition."

"I've got all night. Well, until you kick me out."

So I told her some of it. The master's, the marriage at twenty-seven, the divorce going on two years now, the PhD that kept not ending. She listened the way she used to in seminar, chin down, eyes up, like whatever you said next was going to be the good part.

"And the cat," I finished. "That is the entire biography."

"What's the cat's name?"

"Dewey. I'm not proud of it."

"Every library person has a Dewey. My coworker has one called Melvil."

"That's worse."

"It's so much worse." She wiped her hands on a napkin and leaned back. "You know what I remember about you? Besides the theme-organized readings."

"Please don't."

"Your books. Everything you brought to seminar was underlined. Pencil, mostly. Little lines in the margins. You underlined the strangest things, like lines nobody else would catch." She pointed at me with a crust. "I used to borrow your copies on purpose."

"You did not."

"I absolutely did. Why do you think I always sat next to you? You had the best editions and the weirdest marginalia."

I stared at her. Nine years, and the thing she remembered was my pencil.

"That's the least romantic thing anyone has ever said to me," I said.

"I'm not being romantic. I'm being accurate. There's a difference." She took a drink of the soda Christa had left. "There's one about birds, in that essay collection. You underlined a line about birds and wrote 'yes' in the margin. Just 'yes.' I still think about that."

"I don't even remember doing that."

"Well I do. So." She set the box down. "Now you. Why'd you vanish?"

"I didn't vanish. I graduated."

"You graduated and fell off the planet. I looked you up once, back when that meant something, and there was nothing. And I asked around, and nobody knew where you'd gone." She said it evenly, no accusation in it, which somehow made it worse. "Nine years, Julia. You could've emailed. One line. 'Hey, remember that seminar.' I'd have answered."

The rain was loud on the glass. I looked at my pizza instead of at her.

"I'm bad at that," I said. "You know me. I organize by theme because alphabetizing is for cowards, and I underline birds, and I am terrible at the part where you reach out to a person for no reason."

"There was a reason."

"Was there?"

"Julia." She waited until I looked up. "I thought about you for years. That's the reason. I'd be at some exhibit or reading some awful newly acquired diary from 1880 and something would remind me of you and I'd think, I should find her. And then I'd think, she's married, she's fine, she doesn't need some