The Lonely Hearts Book Club

by Lucy Gilmore

I held both books up with a laugh. “Don’t blame me,” I said. “It’s A Time to Kill Pollyanna

That was when it happened. I wasn’t a good enough writer to describe it, but it was as if Arthur decided, right then and there, that I was an adversary worth having.

All I knew was that I’d come to enjoy these little scuffles with Arthur McLachlan. His tongue was sharp and his tone acid, but he never cut any deeper than I could handle. And he always seemed happy to see me, even if nothing would prevail upon him to let it show.

He paused long enough to turn back to me. “When was the last time you cared about something so much you couldn’t eat?” he demanded. “Or sleep? When have you ever felt the fire of life burn so bright that it hurts? When did you ever bother to fight for something you loved?”

“And what am I?” “An echo with nothing and no one to call her own,” Arthur announced without preamble. Clearly, this was a subject he’d given some thought to. “A friendly facade. An empty smile. A scared little girl without an opinion of your own, latching on to other people’s bigger and brighter lives because you’re not willing to fully live your own.”

A seat on the acquisition board wasn’t just an opportunity to help select which books the library would buy and shelve, though that was how most people saw it. For me, it represented a way to shape the community, to dig deep and have a real impact on people’s lives. The protector of wisdom. The good fairy of literature. I got goose bumps just thinking about it. If I was being perfectly honest, it was also a way to prove I was more than just an echo, but I wasn’t going to admit that out loud. Not while Arthur McLachlan was still somewhere inside this building.

“Your problem, Sloane, is that you only seem to attract people with personalities that are stronger than yours.” His words, though well-meaning, still hit hard.

Once upon a time had always been good enough for me.

See, that was the thing they never told you about happily ever after. Sometimes, there was no happy. Other times, there was no forever. Only the after remained.

“Gosh-darned? Son of a biscuit?” A tinge of red touched his cheeks. “I’m sorry. I’m not very good at this. What can I do to convince you I’m not a murderer?” I didn’t tell him that he’d already done it, mostly because talking with strangers wasn’t something I excelled at. Especially not strangers who would rather lock themselves inside an elevator than scare an unwitting librarian with sentiment where her common sense should be.

I remembered, then. The phlegmy cough I hadn’t quite trusted. The shuffle in his step. That new and different look on his face—that look of terrible, bleak nothing. I knew that nothing. I’d felt that nothing.

Brett heaved a sigh of long-suffering—and of understanding. That second one was important to note. With the exception of my sister—and possibly Arthur McLachlan—no one had ever understood me as well as this man. I didn’t have a single flaw that he hadn’t pulled out, examined, and preapproved as acceptable in his future life partner.

“Me? Now, I prefer my romance to have a true happily ever after. Give me Nora Roberts and Beverly Jenkins or give me death. I think you’d like Jenkins. She’s got a real flair for love scenes.”

Yes, Nora!!

And there it was. The truth in a tiny, impenetrable nutshell, a secret buried so deep inside my heart that I’d thought it would be safe there forever. I didn’t love Brett Marcowitz, and I didn’t love his family. I didn’t love my parents. I’d never loved any of my old college roommates, and the friends I had now were more like work acquaintances than kindred spirits. Since the day my sister Emily died, her life snuffed short by a hole in her heart that no number of surgeries could fix, I hadn’t loved anyone who didn’t exist between the covers of a book. At this point, I wasn’t even sure I knew how.

I shook my head. The thing I couldn’t make Octavia understand was that my fate and Arthur’s had somehow become tangled, and the knot was impossible to undo. Since the day he’d walked into this library, refusing all my book suggestions and overtures of friendship, I’d known that he meant something—that he meant something to me. If Octavia had any idea how bleak and empty my life had been for all these years, how desperately I’d wanted to feel that human connection again, she’d know. I could no more walk away from Arthur McLachlan than I could my own sister.

In my forty-four years on this planet, I’d never been the sort of woman who lit up a room when she walked into it. I’d been cute enough in my twenties, partly because I’d jumped headfirst into the lifestyle and wardrobe of a post-hardcore groupie, but mostly because everyone was cute in their twenties. It just took a couple decades of hard living and suddenly sagging skin to realize it.

At first it had hurt, this idea that I’d never be more than the butt of other people’s jokes, but people underestimate fools. When they’re in a fool’s company, they feel safe. They stop trying so hard.

Arthur set his jaw. “What else was I supposed to do? They were going to let me die in there. Hooked up to a machine. Tied to the bed. Without a single—” He cut himself off so suddenly that I knew exactly what he refused to say. Without a single person there to witness it. Without a single person to hold my hand and watch me go.

Nothing. What waited for me at home was nothing. That was the thing I’d been avoiding for years, the thing that Bella recognized as soon as she’d grown old enough to see me for who I really was. I was a woman without hobbies or friends, who talked to strangers on the phone all day—not to help them with their problems, but so I could hear the sound of another human being’s voice. For a while there, I got to be Bella’s mom, and that was enough to hold up the pretense of more. As long as I was busy and active in her life, I could ignore the fact that I wasn’t busy or active in my own.

“I gave her the very best I had to give, and now…” I let my voice trail off, unable to say the rest, but that was okay. The nice thing about having literary friends was that they already knew. I find I do not have a great deal more left to give.

Har-rumph. Noun: A way for irritable old men who knew themselves to be in the wrong to avoid admitting it.

“She doesn’t know what she’s worth. She doesn’t think she can do anything better with her life.” He threw his copy of The Joy Luck Club across the room. It hit the opposite wall with a thud. “But she can, by God. She can and she will

“I’m fine.” That was all he said—just two words, two syllables—but it was enough to lay my fears to temporary rest. He was fine. I was fine. We weren’t good and we weren’t whole, but we were getting by. For now.

It was strange. For a few minutes there, I’d felt as though my mother were alive again, her memory awakened by a few simple questions and my just-as-simple answers. In the five months since I’d lost her, no one else had done anything like that. It was as if Sloane knew that what I needed more than sympathy and support—more than all the condolences in the world—was a chance to talk about her.

In many ways, every death was separated by a lifetime. There was before and there was after, and the only thing that linked them was a wisp of a memory that seemed to be fading with every passing day.

Every part of me wanted to wrap my arms around her and pull her in for a hug—not romantically, but because I’d never seen anyone who looked like she needed it more.

She must have known this one was coming, because she fingered the old Victorian-looking pin she always wore. “She made this for me. It’s from our favorite book. Once things got bad, we didn’t get outside a lot, so reading together was our only way of experiencing the world. Even though our surroundings were confined, we went so many places together, shared so many adventures. And after she was gone, well…”

Of course there was a chasm between generations—between past and present, the people we were long ago and the people we were now. Life stories were written in ink, not pencil. Once they were down, the only thing you could do was turn the page.

All that had changed the day I met Sloane Parker pushing her little library cart down an aisle in the Fiction section. She’d played book-title games and sweetly suggested the most basic reading list possible, and I’d fallen for it. Me, a professor of literature.

They couldn’t just walk away in the middle of a book. They wouldn’t. No matter how strong the provocation. Or how terrible the man.

I didn’t mean it, I wanted to say. All the things I said, all the things I didn’t. Please don’t leave me the way she did.

“I’m tired,” I said—and I was. Tired of going through the motions, tired of pretending that something terrible hadn’t been happening to my heart ever since my stay at the hospital. Physically, that heart was the same as it had always been—consistent and strong, a sturdy organ that I could rely on for years to come. Emotionally, however, I was broken. I’d been broken for a long time, and I’d done my best to make sure that everyone around me was broken, too. “I’ve done so many terrible things,” I said. “I’ve said so much even worse.” I don’t think Sloane heard me, but that was okay. For once in my life, words weren’t going to cut it.

Maisey knew something of that pain. It was why I left the front door unlocked, why I’d been leaving it unlocked all this time. Hugs weren’t my style, and she hardly needed the benefit of my advice, but until that girl of hers reached out, Maisey was in for a rough ride. She’d survive, though. We all did.

“And I am desperate, Nigel. She’s going to leave. It took me thirty goddamn years to find her again, and she’s leaving.”

“Sloane. Sloane Parker. Up until a few months ago, she was the only friend I had in the world.” I couldn’t help smiling at how far I’d fallen since I’d, well, fallen. “As you already pointed out, I’ve got them coming out my ears now, but that’s not the point. She gave them to me. She did this. Now it’s my turn to return the favor.”

“‘Kindred spirits are not so scarce as I used to think,’”

“Of course I don’t want you to be the reason.” Honestly, had these two never heard of such a thing as platonic love? “I want her to stay for me. And for Maisey. And for Mateo and maybe a little bit for you. But most of all, I want her to stay for her

He smiled ruefully and took the book from me. “Until I got here, I never realized it was a family trait. I should’ve known. Mom always encouraged it, though she never told me why. She just said that when I couldn’t find the words to say what was in my heart—when my throat got too tight and all I wanted to do was boil over—I could always find myself in a book.”

“As soon as Genie got the book, she understood what I was trying to say. That she had a place with me, a home with me. After that, she never asked me for any kind of declaration of love. She knew that if she needed to understand what was in my heart, all she had to do was pick up whatever I was reading at the time, and she’d see it.” She was in every book I’d ever read, every tale that had ever touched my heart. Fiction and nonfiction, memoir and short story—no matter what I read, I always found her.

This world was a terrible place. It gave you people to love and then took them away before you stopped loving them. It made you mean and angry and cruel to those who needed you most. It ground you down until it was all you could do to get through the day. But most of all, it tried to convince you that you were alone in your suffering. Everyone in this room had fallen for that lie, but I wasn’t having it anymore.

“For God’s sake, Mateo. Stop hiding and let people love you. Take it from a man who learned that the hard way—life’s a hell of a lot better when you do.”

There was more than one way to break a heart. And there was more than one way to heal it.

With a resolute breath, I turned my step in the opposite direction and headed into the hospital. In there, I’d find anger and passion, irritability and wrath. In there, I’d find my friend. In there, I’d find myself again.

“What do the books say?” “What’s in your heart. The things that your wife made you feel—the things she still makes you feel, even after all these years. You pretend to be angry and bored with life, but you’re as full of wonder and joy as the rest of us. And don’t you dare try to deny it, because I’ll drag every book from your house into this hospital room to prove it. You love this world, and you love the people in it. I know you do.”

Every highlighted passage spoke of friendship and affection, of hope and optimism. Alone, they were happy little sound bites that were pleasing to the eye. Stitched together, they became something else entirely. They became a love letter of words and sentiment—and one that was addressed entirely to me.

Oh, my heart.

I clutched the book to my chest in sudden, heart-wrenching sadness. Not because of the people we’d lost and would continue to lose, but because even with that loss on every horizon, life still called to me. Its voice took the form of an irascible old library patron who refused to let life quieten his passion, even when that passion burned hot to the touch. It spoke as a friendly neighbor across the street, who always had a smile and a cookie waiting. It was the sound of a coworker who’d been waiting patiently for me to notice his generous and never-wavering offer of friendship. It was even detectable in the low rumble of an angry-looking young man who was quite possibly the least angry person I’d ever known. Life was calling to me—it had been calling to me for years—but it had taken this random, beautiful collection of people for me to realize what I had to do. It was time for me to answer.