The Hardest Cut by Jamie Bennett (book club recommendations .TXT) 📕

would appreciate stayed in their display case, and I stayed broke.  The bookstore had slowly sunk around me, and nothing I did could keep it afloat.  And now, it was over.  While Gaby was occupied with her call, I walked back to press my nose against the shop window, to take one last look.  My initials were carved into the wood counter near the cash register, with the date of my birth; in the cozy spot next to the steps up to the biography shelves, my dad had read Trixie Belden books to me until I could read them for myself.  There were so many memories, so many wonderful memories in this place…

“Hal?  Let’s go, ok?  It’s time.”

I pulled my forehead off the glass and turned to see Gaby off the phone and tapping her foot slightly.  Yes, she was very sympathetic, but I had been saying goodbye for over an hour.  “Right.  Coming,” I answered.

She started questioning me about how I was going to off-load the inventory of books, because although we were offering everything in the interior for sale along with the shop, probably the buyer of the building would have new ideas for what to put in the space.  After all, why would someone want to run another bookstore there, when the previous one had just gone belly-up?

Belly-up.  A failure.  Yes, that was what my family’s legacy had become.  I looked at the sky again to combat a fresh round of tears.  It was over now, and there was no point to this emotional breakdown.  I had to look forward and not back.  I needed to get a handle on my future so I could answer pertinent and pressing questions like, “How will I pay for the two mortgages on my house?”  I tripped on a tuft of grass and that brought me back to more immediate problems, like staying upright.

“Gravy!”  Gaby was shaking her head and frowning as she read something on her phone.  “Sorry, I have to head back to the office.  Shep—I mean, my boss is telling me that a buyer’s agent wants me to fax her something!  Faxing?  Who still does that?”  She paused the rant to ask, “Are you ok now?”

“I am,” I lied, and she believed me.  She gave me a hug and rushed away on her pink, patent leather wedges back to the gleaming car painted with the Sterling Standard Realty logo on its door.  I waved back and plodded off in my tennis shoes to my dad’s ancient Bronco, whose door only had a big dent and some scratches.

Once upon a time, I’d worn nice shoes to work too, and nice little dresses and blazers to go along with them.  I’d carried a (faux) designer, (faux) leather bag which held a sleek, steel water bottle and my clean gym clothes, because I’d worked out like a demon.  My phone had been the latest model and didn’t have a broken screen covered in tape to keep the glass from cutting me as I swiped, like the one currently residing in my purse.  And this purse was itself an old canvas tote bag with stains where I’d spilled coffee on it, and was not even close to the former (faux) leather.

Once upon a time, I’d gone out at night, doing things other than running down the driveway to chase raccoons from the garbage cans.  I had been upwardly mobile, too, and I didn’t mean how last week I had climbed on the roof of my cottage to try to coax a TV signal from the giant antenna my grandpa had installed there thirty years prior.

That was when I had discovered some problem areas among the shingles.  And a tragedy had barely been averted when I’d slipped on a leaf and almost took a header back to ground level.

I looked down at my old jean cutoffs and my dad’s college t-shirt, at the jagged scratch on my pale leg.  I noticed that I was only wearing a singular sock because I hadn’t found two clean ones, and I frowned.  Yes, things had changed a lot since I’d left Chicago and moved home to Michigan.  And nothing, not one thing, had changed for the better.

“Hi, Hallie!” Martha called from the door of her grocery store when I drove slowly past, and I waved.  I had asked her for a job at the NGS, a second job to supplement my lack of income from the bookstore, but she didn’t have any room in her budget to hire me.  She was getting ready for increased competition if the other grocery store in town really was keeping the rats out of the food now.  I had asked at the library, too, since I did know books, and also at the gas station and garage, but I didn’t actually know anything about cars.  I had applied to just about every place in town to try to get a cash influx to keep Holliday Booksellers open, and I had come up empty.

That was how I currently felt, too: empty.  Empty and totally disbelieving that this was actually the end, even after I had initialed and signed Gaby’s contract and she had put the “for sale” sign in the window under the gold lettering.  Even after I sat for a while in the parking lot at the library (where there was a good Wi-Fi signal) and checked the Sterling Standard Realty website on my cracked phone screen and saw the store listed there.  I went through all the professional pictures she’d had taken that made it seem bigger, brighter, and better than the dark, cramped, and cozy reality, reading all her suggestions for what else the building could become (knitting shop!  Insurance sales!  Restaurant/café!) and I still had a hard time thinking it was real.

It was just hard to understand how I could have let things slip away from me.  That just wasn’t who I was!  I was supposed to have returned home to fix everything, riding in as