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

“The secrets. The lying. The justifying. Making and breaking promises to yourself. That’s your brother in a nutshell.”

“Yeah, but at least I didn’t ruin anyone’s life . . .”

As soon as I say this, I see Ira’s broken face after I told him I’d sold to Penny. And Ike’s hopeful face as he vowed to not be the termite that destroyed the wood. And Chad’s betrayed face when I called him a dinosaur.

Suddenly, I see it. A flaming piece of rock hurtling through the atmosphere.

Oh my god. I’m the fucking asteroid.

“But I never meant for this to happen,” I say. “Things, they just, I don’t know, spun out of control.”

“I imagine your brother felt the same way.”

Instead of objecting, drawing a Kryptonite line between me and Sandy, as I have done for years, I let myself feel how Sandy must have felt: caught in the undertow of his mistakes, trying with everything he had in him to set things right—and still failing.

And with that, I begin to understand. He didn’t mean to destroy our family any more than I chose to destroy the store. He got caught up in something he couldn’t control.

Same as me.

The next day, we go out to lunch at a diner in Silver’s City’s tiny downtown. The place is a lot like C.J.’s, the same well-worn booths, laminated menus, whipped-cream-laden pies in the display cases. Donna, the waitress, already knows Mom’s name and her order. “The usual?” she asks.

“I’m celebrating Thanksgiving a day late with my son,” Mom says. “We’ll have two hot open-faced turkey sandwich platters, please.”

“Turkey’s always better the next day anyway,” Donna says, scratching the order onto her pad.

“I’m going to hit an Al-Anon meeting after lunch,” Mom says after Donna drops our food. “If you want to come. I think it might do you good.”

“Maybe another time,” I say. “I went to an NA meeting last week and I’m still in recovery from that.”

“You went to an NA meeting?” Her look is more amused than concerned.

“I went with Hannah, the girl I was seeing.”

“Was?”

“She dumped me.”

“How come?” Mom asks.

I scoop up a hunk of mashed potatoes and splat them against the plate. “She said I had some shit to deal with, if you can believe that.”

“Don’t we all.” Mom swirls the gravy into the cranberry sauce. “I have a crazy idea.”

“Yeah?”

“You could stay here. Work out your shit. With me. Silver has three bookstores, a public university, and three hundred sunny days a year. Not the worst place to make a home.”

“You’re gonna stick around?”

She nods. “I think so. I feel at peace in the mountains. The animal shelter where I volunteer has offered me a job. Also”—she glances at me and smiles—“I have a porch swing now, so I need somewhere to hang it.”

“What about Ira?”

“Ira wants you to be happy. And he has Bev now.”

“Can I think about it?”

“You can do whatever you need to, my love.”

When Mom heads off to her meeting, I walk toward downtown, a cluster of low-rise brick buildings dwarfed by the mountains behind them. I find the bookstore immediately and as soon as I step inside, my olfactory bulb kicks into gear. I’m transported to Bluebird Books, and in that moment I yearn to be back there. And then I remember that there is no more there to go back to.

“Can I help you?”

The man behind the counter looks nothing like Ira—he’s short, brown-skinned, and balding, wearing a bunch of turquoise rings—except I can tell right off the bat, they are brothers of a sort. If there were such a thing as a bookseller covenant, this man would be a signatory.

“I’m looking for a book.” I used to scoff at people who said that. What else would you come to a bookstore for? But I think Mom always understood that bookstores were about the people inside them, the ones on the pages, and off the pages too.

“You’ve come to the right place,” he says. “Would you like help finding one?”

“I would.”

“Tell me: What’s the last book you read that you loved?”

The question stumps me at first. I’ve reread The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs multiple times, but I’m not sure that’s a book I loved so much as clung to. But then I remember Hannah and me, a few days ago, reading aloud from my first love.

“The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.”

“Ah yes,” he says. He looks at me for a long moment, sizing me up, the way Ira used to with customers. “I think I have just the thing for you.” He disappears into the stacks. When he returns, I expect to get another of the Narnia books. Or another fantasy series. Harry Potter. His Dark Materials. But he hands me a slender volume, its cover a sketch of three red birds.

“A Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis,” the bookseller tells me. “He wrote it after his wife died, trying to reconcile his faith with his loss before coming to realize the two aren’t at odds; they’re bedfellows. It’s nothing like Narnia, but I thought it might be of interest.”

I look at this man, who doesn’t know me, or anything about me, but who knows, like Ira always knew, like all the best booksellers know, not just what their customers want, but what they need.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I read the opening lines of the book, and it’s like my own pages are coming unstuck. For so long, all I’ve felt is fear, and all this time, it was grief. I continue reading, remembering why I used to love books. Because they show us, in so many words, and so many worlds, that we are not alone.

A miracle, in twenty-six letters.

I’m reading the book when Mom finds me that afternoon. I read it the rest of the day as the long shadows fall, Ramón occasionally perching over