We Are Inevitable by Gayle Forman (read aloud txt) 📕

his chair, extract the weighted blanket, and lay it over him. I turn on the kettle we keep downstairs and brew him some chamomile tea.

“But the books . . .” Ira’s voice is heavy with mourning, as if the books were living, breathing things. Which to him they are.

Ira believes books are miracles. “Twenty-six letters,” he used to tell me as I sat on his lap, looking at picture books about sibling badgers or hungry caterpillars while he read some biography of LBJ or a volume of poetry by Matthea Harvey. “Twenty-six letters and some punctuation marks and you have infinite words in infinite worlds.” He’d gesture at my book, at his book, at all the books in the shop. “How is that not a miracle?”

“Don’t worry,” I tell Ira now, walking over to clear up the mess on the floor. “The books will be fine.”

The books will not be fine. Even they seem to get that, splayed out, pages open, spines cracked, dust jackets hanging off, their fresh paper smell, their relevance, their dignity, gone. I flip through an old Tuscany travel guide from the floor, pausing on a listing for an Italian pensione that probably got killed by Airbnb. Then I pick up a cookbook, uncrease the almost pornographic picture of a cheese soufflé recipe no one will look at now that they can log onto Epicurious. The books are orphans, but they are our orphans, and so I stack them gently in a corner with the tenderness they deserve.

Unlike my brother Sandy, who never gave two shits about books but conquered his first early reader before he even started kindergarten, I, who desperately wanted the keys to Ira’s castle, had a hard time learning to read. The words danced across the page and I could never remember the various rules about how an E at the end makes the vowel say its own name. The teachers would have meetings with Ira and Mom about delays and interventions. Mom was worried but Ira was not. “It’ll happen when it happens.” But every day that it didn’t happen, I felt like I was being denied a miracle.

Toward the end of third grade, I picked up a book from the bins at school, not one of the annoying just-right baby books that got sent home in my backpack, but a hardcover novel with an illustration of a majestic and kindly lion that seemed to be beckoning to me. I opened the first page and read the line: Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. And with that, my world changed.

Ira had been reading to me since before I was born, but that was not remotely comparable to reading on my own, the way that being a passenger in a car is nothing like being the driver. I’ve been driving ever since, from Narnia to Hogwarts to Middle-earth, from Nigeria to Tasmania to the northern lights of Norway. All those worlds, in twenty-six letters. If anything, I’d thought, Ira had undersold the miracle.

But no more. These days, the only book I can stomach is The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs. Other than that, I can’t even look at a book without thinking about all that we’ve lost, and all we are still going to lose. Maybe this is why at night, in the quiet of my bedroom, I fantasize about the store going up in flames. I itch to hear that foof of the paper igniting. I imagine the heat of the blaze as our books, our clothes, our memories are incinerated. Sandy’s records melt into a river of vinyl. When the fire is over, the vinyl will solidify, capturing in it bits and pieces of our lives. Fossils that future generations will study, trying to understand the people who lived here once, and how they went extinct.

“What about the shelf?” Ira asks now.

The shelf is ruined. Consider this a metaphor for the store. Our lives. But Ira’s brow is furrowed in worry, as if the broken shelf physically pains him. Which it probably does. And when something pains Ira, it pains me too. Which I why I tell him we’ll get a new shelf.

And so it begins.

The next morning, Ira wakes me with a series of gentle shakes. “Aaron,” he says, a manic gleam in his hazel eyes, “you said we’d go buy a new shelf.”

Did I? It’s still dark outside. My head is full of cotton balls.

“C’mon!” Ira urges.

I blink until the digital clock comes into focus. It’s 5:12. “Now?”

“Well, we have to drive to Seattle and back and if we leave at six, even if we hit traffic, we’ll be there by eight when Coleman’s opens and we can be done by eight thirty and there won’t be traffic heading north, so we can be back by ten.”

According to the laminated sign on the door Mom made a lifetime ago, Bluebird Books is open from ten to six, Monday through Saturday, closed Sundays. Ira insists on abiding by our posted times, even on snow days, even on sick days. It’s part of what he calls the bookseller covenant. The fact that no one ever comes into the store before noon, if they come in at all, does not seem to play into his logic.

“Can’t we get shelves in Bellingham?” I’m still not fully awake, which is why I add, “At the Home Depot?” even though I know Ira does not shop at Home Depot. Or Costco. Or Amazon. Ira remains committed to the small, independent store. A dinosaur who supports other dinosaurs.

“Absolutely not!” Ira says. “We have always shopped at Coleman’s. Your mother and I bought our first bookshelf from Linda and Steve. Now come on!” He yanks away the covers. “Let’s get moving.”

Twenty minutes later, we are firing up the Volvo wagon and pulling out of the driveway. It’s still midnight dark, dawn feeling very far away. At this hour, the businesses are all shuttered, so you can’t tell which