The Bookshop Of Yesterdays - Amy Meyerson

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but otherwise the same. Prospero towered above the window, staff in right hand, a book in left, purple cape and white hair windblown behind him. The picture window looked the same, too, only it displayed titles by Lionel Shriver, Isabel Allende and Michael Pollan in place of the new releases of years before.

      The smell of the store hit me as soon as I entered. Freshly cut paper. White musk. Jasmine. Black pepper. Coffee beans. I’d forgotten the sound of the brass bell on the door, the corkboard in the entryway, now covered in flyers for personal trainers and Pilates classes. The store itself was smaller than I remembered. The ceilings not as high. The shelves more narrowly spaced. They were divided, then subdivided. Fiction into literary, popular, banned, historical, classic, feminist, LGBTQ, science fiction and fantasy, mystery, noir, foreign language and small presses. The lime green of the exposed brick walls still looked fresh. The mosaic tables still glittered blue and gold in the café’s bright light. I didn’t see Lee. I didn’t see any of the poets in trench coats sipping espresso, the pretty girls in overalls stalking the shelves. There were still pretty girls. They were skinnier now, without as much eyeliner. Every table in the café was still occupied, customers intensely typing on laptop keyboards instead of writing in notebooks. Everything buzzed with activity, the store still alive with the possibility of Prospero’s magic books.

      Against the far wall, the wild-haired, Dylan Thomas–reciting man from Billy’s funeral was inspecting a shelf, scratching checkmarks beside a list of titles. His T-shirt read Smile, You’re on Camera.

      “You were at Billy’s funeral?” I asked as I approached him. He glanced up from his clipboard. His crystalline eyes regarded me with little recognition. “You read the Dylan Thomas poem? I’m Miranda.”

      He surveyed me with those candied eyes, their flit clinical rather than flattering. “The prodigal niece appears.”

      “That’s me.” I smiled in the way that usually made strangers think I was cute—never sexy, always cute—but he didn’t return the smile. I held out my hand. He shook it perfunctorily.

      “Malcolm,” he said as if I should have already known his name.

      The phone rang, and he released my hand to walk over to the desk.

      “Prospero,” he said as he picked up. His tone changed as soon as he started to talk about books. “White Teeth is out of stock. We can order you a copy.” He held the phone in the crook of his neck as he typed something into the ancient computer monitor behind the desk. The desk area wasn’t private enough to be the mess that it was. An overflowing bin of advance reader copies, unpacked boxes of books, a calendar with first names and publishers scrawled onto several dates. “It should be here in two days. Have you read On Beauty? It’s more like White Teeth than NW, but I think you’ll find... We have a copy... Sure, I’ll set it aside for you.”

      I wandered around the literature section, listening to Malcolm answer the caller’s questions about Zadie Smith, whom I hadn’t read. Book after book across the shelves I also hadn’t read, many titles I didn’t recognize, subsections of literature I hadn’t realized needed to be distinguished from each other. I couldn’t recall how they’d been organized when I was a kid. I never paid much attention to the adult books. Malcolm continued to talk about the stylistic differences between Smith’s older novels and her most recent one. I walked around the stacks, trying to determine why he would pretend not to recognize me when he’d clearly seen me at the funeral, when my eyes had locked with his. The teen section was now termed Young Adult, twice its former size, consuming the entire length of one of the interior shelves. I used to think that all of those books had been selected just for me, but as I scanned the YA titles, I saw only a handful of books I remembered.

      “Do you read?” Malcolm asked, reappearing at my side.

      “Mostly nonfiction. I’m a history teacher.” I waited for him to ask me what grade I taught or what type of history, questions that typically followed I’m a history teacher in polite conversation. “Where books are prized above dukedom,” I said when he didn’t ask me about myself. He looked confused. “That’s how we used to answer the phone when I was a kid. ‘Prospero Books, where books are prized above dukedom.’” I don’t know why I said we. I’d never answered the phone at Prospero Books before.

      “I’ve never heard anyone answer the phone that way.” He bent down to pull a copy of The Perks of Being a Wallflower stuffed incorrectly in the T’s. The cover was as lime green as the walls of Prospero Books.

      “It could have been taken right here.” I walked over to the wall and did my best to look like one of the young actors on the front of the novel. Nope, nothing from Malcolm, not even upturned lips. I’d never thought of my students as particularly generous but they always humored me with an eye roll at the least, acknowledging, if not appreciating, my effort.

      “I hate movie tie-in covers.” He filed the copy under C where it belonged.

      “I’m not here to close the store down, if that’s what you’re so worried about.” It was the most logical explanation for his coldness.

      “Who says I’m worried about anything?” he said indignantly, and I could imagine him as an adolescent, defiant and stubborn, likely too smart for his own good.

      “Billy used to bring me here as a kid. I know how important this place is,” I told Malcolm. He didn’t respond, focusing his attention on the toe of his dirty white sneaker as it pressed into the scuffed wood floor. The floorboards creaked under his weight. “Did Billy tell you he was leaving his store to me?”

      “His lawyer did. I didn’t know Billy had any living family.” He turned his focus toward the shelves, crossing his arms across his chest, gestures anyone who spent time with teenagers could recognize as evasion. The wiry man with bifocals who had sung at Billy’s funeral signaled to him from a table in the back. “Excuse me,” Malcolm said, and headed toward the café.

      “Did you know he had any family that wasn’t living?” I called to him. He shot me a funny look, like I’d asked him if he slept standing up.

      Malcolm kept his back to me as he leaned over the wiry man to review one of the many books open on the café table. I continued to reacquaint myself with the store, counting all the sections I’d never paid attention to before, the books I didn’t know, the colorful spines aching to be read. In the noir section, a caricature of Malcolm smiled from the shelf. His cheekbones were more pronounced in the drawing than in life, his unruly hair neater, his eyes kinder, less wary. A speech bubble floated on the drawing above his portrait. It described noir as LA’s lifeblood. Chandler, its Homer. Philip Marlowe, its Odysseus. I studied Malcolm’s picture, wondering what he wasn’t telling me. He was close enough to Billy to have read at his funeral. He’d avoided my eye contact when I’d asked him if he’d heard of me. He knew more than he was letting on about Billy’s living family, probably about his deceased family, too.

      Along the interior shelves, the history section was separated into World, American and Californian. The books were not only divided by region but organized by subject, alphabetically rather than chronologically. Most bookstores organized history books that way, as though history was a collection of discrete episodes rather than a fluid series of events that evolved over time. It reflected the misguided way we often taught history, the erroneous chaptering of the past. Jay often told me I was a hopeless romantic when it came to history. What else could I be? It was our past, something that shouldn’t be alphabetized.

      I bent down to browse the titles on the lowest shelf of Californian history, filed under seismology and earthquake history. Books on the 1906 earthquake, the San Andreas Fault, predictions and forecasts. Here, on this modest, ankle-level shelf, was the Billy of my youth. I pulled out a book on the Northridge earthquake. It was one of those nights everyone living in Southern California at the time remembered. Joanie and I were asleep, startled awake as books fell off the shelves. When my bedroom stopped shaking, Mom ran in, checking us for cuts and bruises before the room began to rumble again. The first aftershock ended, and Dad screamed that we had to get out of the house. We followed him downstairs where broken glass littered our hardwood floors. Joanie and I didn’t have shoes on, so Dad

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