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

offers only one major, but you can’t beat the tuition and the professor’s so distracted most of the time, he barely notices that his student isn’t reading all of the books. Or any of them.

“This is one of my favorites,” Ira says, tapping a book on top of the pile called Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal.

“What’s it about?”

“A garbage collector who rescues books from dumps.”

“So, basically, your memoir.”

“Ha, ha. It’s slim but packs a punch. I think you’ll like it.”

“Can’t wait.”

Ira stands there, watching, so I open the book. For thirty-five years now I’ve been in wastepaper, and it’s my love story, it begins. The font is tiny and the words skitter across the page the way they did when I was learning to read.

“Good, huh?” Ira is so genuinely excited to share another miracle with me that it makes me feel all the shittier when I reply with a completely insincere: “Tremendous.”

Satisfied that I’m fully hooked, Ira returns to his corner and picks up his book. Once he’s engrossed in his, I put mine down. I will never read it. I’ll peruse some reviews and pull out some quotes and bullshit well enough to make Ira think I have. Two years ago, he would have seen right through me. But if a lot can change in one year, the world can end in two.

Bluebird Books once had a small but devoted group of regulars. These days, we have two. Grover, our mail carrier, and Penny Macklemore, who stops in about once a week.

“Good afternoon,” Penny drawls. “And how are we today?” She speaks in the cadence of a kindergarten teacher and wears a sweatshirt emblazoned with slogans like PROFESSIONAL GRANDMOTHER. But don’t be fooled. Penny is a shark with blue-tinted hair that she has set twice a week at the only salon in town, which she happens to own. She also owns the hardware store, the liquor store, the ValuMart, and the used car dealership, where her late husband worked for forty years.

“Doing well, Penny,” Ira replies. “And how are you?”

“Fine, fine.” Penny stumbles over the pile of fallen books teetering next to the split shelf. “Didn’t you say you were getting a new shelf yesterday?”

Yesterday. It feels like ten years ago already. By the time we got home, Ira and I were both so dispirited it was all we could do to drag the flat-pack box to the basement. “Just need to set the shelf up,” Ira says.

“Well, do it soon,” Penny replies. “This place is a lawsuit waiting to happen.”

“Who’s going to sue me? You?” He laughs, like it’s a joke, and Penny laughs along too. Though I wouldn’t put it past her. Penny has made no secret of her desire to own a building on Main Street, a jewel in her small-town Monopoly crown. She’s also made no secret that she’d like our store to be that jewel. We are smack-dab between C.J.’s Diner and Jimmy’s Tavern, prime real estate Penny says is wasted on a bookstore. “I mean, does anybody read anymore?” she asks.

“Storytelling is as old as language, so presumably yes,” Ira replies when she poses that question again today.

“Well, if it’s stories you’re after,” Penny drawls, “Netflix has sixteen seasons of Grey’s Anatomy.”

Ira starts to lecture Penny about the primacy of the printed word. Of the particular transportive experience of ink on paper. How, when you watch, you are a spectator, but when you read, you’re a participant. “Can Grey’s Anatomy do that?” he asks, with the authority of someone who has never seen a single episode of that show.

“If you ask me,” Penny says, “what people want . . . no, what they deserve”—she points out the window to a few such people: a grizzled group of out-of-work lumberjacks on their daily pilgrimage from C.J.’s, where they spend the first half of their day, to Jimmy’s, where they spend the second half—“is something useful.”

“Every town deserves a bookstore and nothing is more useful than reading.” Ira gestures to a fading poster of Frederick Douglass that promises Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.

“People learn to read at school, Ira,” Penny says. “And this is America. We’re already free.”

“So I’m told,” Ira muses.

Penny gathers up her things. She’s halfway out the door when she stops, turns around, and, in a voice that sounds almost sympathetic, says, “Ira, I know you think every town deserves a bookstore, but you ever consider that not every town actually wants one?”

Ira sighs. “Every day of my life.”

Our second visitor comes in a couple hours later. Grover used to deliver us boxes of books, copies of Publishers Weekly Mom would pore over, thick catalogs full of the next season’s offerings that I’d always crack before anyone else, inhaling the papery scent, tabbing books I thought looked good. Back then, Grover would linger, leaning against the porch swing with Mom, gossiping—between the two of them, they knew everything: who’d gotten engaged, who’d been arrested, who was pregnant. These days, he drops the mail like a hot potato, apologizes that he’s late, and gets the hell out.

“Anything good?” I ask as Ira leafs through the mail.

“Just junk,” he says, dropping everything into the recycling bin. “How’s the Hrabal?”

“Great,” I reply, even though I have not made it past page four.

After Ira settles back into his easy chair, I stealthily pull today’s “junk,” and all the rest of the junk beneath it, from the recycling bin and bring it back to the counter to take a look. There are several credit card statements. The first one is maxed-out, with a balance of more than $2,700. I open another one, also at its limit. Same with the third. All three are snowballing astronomical interest charges because Ira has only been making the minimum payments.

My throat closes and I taste them: strawberries, sweet and rotting and right on my tongue even though it’s been years since I ate one. I used to gobble them up