The Bookstore Sisters

by Alice Hoffman

Tuesdays were meant for accidents, disappointments, and bad news. Long ago, the day was considered to belong to Mars, the god of war and blood.

She was good at forgetting; she had practiced for years, and it was now a skill at which she excelled.

She could even forget that she had once been considered the girl most likely to become somebody, when she’d turned out to be nobody in particular.

She’d had promise back then—all her teachers had told her so—but promise can disappear if you leave it to flounder,

it nearly broke her heart, something she didn’t even think she had anymore. Forgetting you had one could nearly make it so.

And that was as good as an engagement ring, better, Sophie always said, because you could lose a ring, but a tattoo was part of you, yours forever, yours for life.

Matt and Sophie were fated to be together even back then, but fate can turn dark when you least expect it to, and there you are alone and in mourning with no one to help you raise the child you’re about to bring into the world.

they’d forgotten how much they had loved each other.

When you stop forgetting, the effects can be overwhelming.

“Can’t you just wait to grow up before you leave?” her father told Isabel the last time the ferry captain caught her stowing away and brought her back. “Time goes faster than you think.” “Not fast enough,” Isabel answered, but as it turned out, her father was right. Suddenly, here she was in her thirties, with no family and no one to love, and she’d begun, only rarely and at odd hours, to think she’d made a terrible mistake.

Oh, you’re moonlight, he’d said. Harder to see, but there for those who look.

Isabel remembered what books had meant to her so long ago, and she suddenly had a longing for all those fictional worlds that had helped her through the worst years of her life.

“A lot of people don’t know what to do about grief. I don’t blame you for a thing.”

“It’s likely she loves you more than she blames you,” Mr. Hawley said. “The worst part is when you blame yourself.”

He was too handsome; that had always been his problem.

“We’re always the people we used to be,” Isabel said.

‘A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.’”

Someday you will find this and you’ll know that to the very end I thought about you. There is no ending to that. You still hold my heart in your hands. I loved you girls more than a fish loves a river, more than a bird loves the sky. Remember that. Remember me.

She was remembering everything. How love could change a person, how it could cause you the greatest sorrow or shelter you from harm.