Publishable By Death by Andi Cumbo-Floyd (free books to read txt) 📕

number and told him to text me when he arrived. Then, I answered enough queries about parking and general activities in town that by the time we opened at ten, I felt confident we were going to have a great day.

About ten thirty, Mart arrived with Cate, our friend who ran the art coop. They’d been out on the bay kayaking, trying to capture photos of some watermen at work for Cate’s new portrait series. Mart was on hand to run the register in case things got busy, and Cate was going to lead a plein air painting group that was meeting here at eleven. Both of them were rosy cheeked and equally pleasant tempered. Part of me wished I’d been able to go, but most of me was quite content to have spent the morning answering questions about books, making notes about titles we needed to order back in, and enjoying Phoebe’s cinnamon roll. Sure, I missed out on some things by running the shop, but what I got to do, well, it more than made up for it.

“Looks like you’ve got things well in hand,” Mart said.

“Now, let’s not be too hasty, Martha.” Cate put on a serious face as she brushed her short black hair out of her eyes. “The true test is whether she—“

I reached below the counter and pulled out two saucers, each adorned with a cinnamon roll.

Cate laughed. “Yep, all in hand here.”

When I’d met Cate a few weeks ago, I hadn’t realized that Mart and I really needed a third to make our friendship even more amazing, but it turns out that the third we were missing was a short, Korean-American photographer whose husband cooked really, really well.

Mart and I had been friends for years back in San Francisco, and when I’d decided to return home to Maryland last fall, she’d decided to come along. She, by far, looked the youngest of all of us with her fair skin that showed nary a wrinkle and her thick, brown hair that she wore in soft waves or in a ponytail that, somehow, managed to look amazing. My curly, quickly-graying short hair did not always fare so well in the wind and moisture of a waterside town, and I took to rolled bandanas on days when I didn’t want to look like Lyle Lovett or to spend an hour with a flat iron. (I never wanted to spend an hour with a flat-iron.) Also, I had wrinkles in my pale, pinkish skin, including a furrow between my eyes that would never smooth out again.

Many women never get to have one good friend in the world, and I was lucky enough to have two. In both literal and figurative ways, they had each saved my life, and I was so glad we got to see each other every day, even if they teased me no end about having a boyfriend. They always insisted on saying it boooyyyfriend, like we were eleven. Still, I adored them.

My friends tucked into their cinnamon rolls with all the genteelness of vultures on roadkill, and I couldn’t help but smile. No pinkies in the air here. I’m pretty sure I even caught Mart licking the plate when I turned around to get more bags to put under the counter.

Snacks done and coffee procured from Rocky, they got to work, and I began my usual circuit around the store, just to be sure things were tidy, but not pristine. Something about a little bit of disheveled order felt home-like, comfortable.

I was just rounding the corner of the religion section when I spied a familiar pair of Jordans propped on a shelf next to a wing-back chair. I slipped behind the seat and peeked over the top to get a look at the title of the book the person was reading. “The Water Dancer. I hear that’s really good.”

Marcus Dawson slowly lowered his book, pulled his brown legs down as I stepped around in front of him, and smiled up at me. “It’s amazing,” he said, “but no spoilers. You have to read it yourself.”

“Will do.” I kicked his shin playfully. “You know, you don’t have to be here when you’re not working.”

He shrugs. “What can I say? When you find a good thing . . .”

Marcus had started working here almost a month ago, and he was amazing at his job – thoughtful with his recommendations and voracious in his reading. At first, I’d hired him to help him out, but it turned out that he was a major draw for returning customers who found his book suggestions to be so fitting for them that they came in just to talk to him about the previous recommendation and pick up a new one.

Now, he had a regular column in our weekly newsletter, where he did book matchmaking with customers who filled out a short survey as they stopped by. I’d gotten the idea from one of my favorite podcasts, What Should I Read Next?, and people were loving it. Our box of completed surveys was so full that we were talking about doing Instagram videos to accommodate more customer requests. I had definitely gotten the better end of the deal when I’d hired Marcus.

On Monday, he would begin his first shift as assistant manager. I noticed he’d had his hair cut into a shorter version of his typical box fade and wondered again if all the things from my teenage years were coming back: high-waisted jeans, fanny packs, and shoulder pads. It made me shiver. Marcus’s hair though, I loved. I couldn’t help but think of Kid ’n Play when I saw him, but I wouldn’t make the mistake of mentioning them again since Marcus had looked at me like I was approximately eight hundred years old the one time I’d brought them up.

I’d given him the weekend off so that he could relax, spend time with his mom, and maybe even do something fun in Annapolis or Baltimore, but I wasn’t all that surprised to see him in the store. He really did seem to love St. Marin’s and my bookshop, and I knew that living in his apartment above Daniel’s garage was probably kind of lonely, especially when Daniel wasn’t at work. Plus, I just liked him and liked having him around.

“Well, happy reading. But no working today. Not even Insta photos. It’s your day off. I don’t want to pay you, but I’ll be forced to if you work, you hear me?” I gave his leg another nudge and headed off to help Daniel, who was bringing up two boxes of books for the new window display.

Max Davies, the owner of Chez Cuisine, had taken a while to grow on me, but it turned out that he had great taste in cookbooks. I’d promised him we’d do a new display with some titles he’d recommended. It had taken a bit of coaxing for me to convince him that we needed not only true cookbooks but also some other titles – like Ruth Reichl’s Save Me The Plums – to round out the display. But his list of recommendations turned out to be stellar and diverse, and I was eager to get the books into the window for the afternoon.

Daniel hefted the boxes onto the display platform and gave me a quick hug before heading over to his garage. For the past couple of weeks, he’d spent the first couple of hours of Saturday morning here at the shop helping me with displays and shelving. He wasn’t much of a reader, but he was all in for supporting the shop. Today, though, he had car repairs to manage, so I focused on my display and looked forward to seeing him later.

I had just put the final book – Eat This Poem by Nicole Gulotta – into the display when David pulled up. Mart and I helped him unload his car, and then he and I headed out for lunch at the new BBQ place that had just opened up at the end of Main Street. I was a sucker for a place with a cute name, so Piggle and Shake had won me over as soon as the sign went up.

The author and I had a lovely lunch, and I was thrilled to hear that he had more books coming in his renovation series. I knew his military thrillers were good, too, but I was much more a mystery girl myself.

After our meal, I pointed him in the direction of the co-op and gave him the address for the maritime museum before heading back to the shop for the afternoon. St. Marin’s wasn’t San Francisco in terms of entertainment, but in some ways, it was even better. At least here, everything was within easy walking distance of everything else. Plus, since I knew Cate would take good care of David at the co-op and then Lucas would do the same at the museum, I didn’t worry that he might get bored or frustrated. They’d agreed to give him the behind-the-scenes tour and have him back to the shop by five so we could all get dinner before the reading.

On my way back, I needed to stop by Elle Heron’s farm stand to pick up some fresh flowers for the café tables and a bouquet for the signing table, too. Elle, a white woman in her sixties with light-brown hair cut into a bob, had been supplying fresh flowers – all grown at her small farm outside of town – since we opened, and this time, she was giving us some of the most amazing tulips I’d ever seen. The bright reds and yellows and purples would add just the right color to the store, and I couldn’t wait to see what she’d put together for the main arrangement.

I shed my sweater as I walked the two blocks up to her shop – No Label; Just Farm to Table – and took a swig from my water bottle before I walked in. The day had grown quite warm, and I had broken my first sweat of the year, which was cause for a small celebration that I’d begun a decade ago in my first “summer” on the west side of San Francisco. There, the warm days come in mid-fall, when the fog burns off completely and the temperature climbs into the high seventies, maybe even low eighties. On each of those days, I walked to the corner market and got an ice cream from the chest freezer by the front door. Always the same thing every day until the fog returned. Sadly, “summer” in San Francisco rarely lasted more than two weeks.

Now, I was going to keep up that tradition with a slight modification. After all, I couldn’t eat ice cream every day