East Hope by Katharine Davis Page B

large wing chair by the window that looked like a good place to read.
    After Penny showed him the office and the ledger where her father used to record sales and expenditures, Will walked her to her car. He offered to come and see her father.
    â€œIt’s tough for him to talk,” she said. “Maybe later this summer.” She had said good-bye and driven off, relieved, he had guessed, to have this business off her shoulders for the summer.
    Will gathered confidence as he set to work in the store this first morning. The yellow clapboard building looked exactly as it had in the advertisement in Down East . The first floor was one large room with shelves along the walls and two banks of bookcases in the middle dividing the space into thirds. There was a small office in the back along with the stairwell leading to the basement and second floor. The apartment upstairs replicated the first floor, with a living room and open kitchen in the front.
    The bedroom, directly above the office, held a double bed covered with a candlewick spread like the kind he remembered from his grandmother’s house in Rhode Island. The bedroom window overlooked the field behind the building, where glimpses of water shone through the trees. The bathroom, remodeled in the sixties, had ugly peach-colored fixtures. A tattered shower curtain surrounded the tub. He would have to replace that before Mary Beth came.
    He had finished cleaning the upstairs and unpacked his things. The next step was to tackle the shop itself. Dust was everywhere. Spiderwebs dangled from light fixtures, and dust balls blew about his feet when he opened the windows to let in some fresh air. Judging from the thickness of the dust, he guessed old Mr. Taunton had not cleaned for several summers. Will didn’t mind the physical labor.
    For the next several days he worked hard cleaning. He liked handling the books. Now and then bits of paper slipped from the pages: grocery receipts, ribbons, postcards. As he dusted and sorted, many of the books having apparently been set randomly on the shelves, he became more interested in the odd things that readers left behind in their books. One morning he found a pocket comb, the stub of a bus ticket, a recipe for “Mother’s Johnnycakes,” written in pencil on a sheet of oily paper.
    There were letters too. Setting these aside with some of his other finds, he was struck by one written on faded blue stationery. The fine ornate script was almost impossible to read, as if the ink had blurred from having been left out in the rain. Only the first few lines were legible.
    My dearest Ernestine, is there anything comparable to the power of one’s first love? Truly, I have been swept away by the intensity of it, the sheer joy of knowing that I am capable of such feeling. Now I long only for your return to Boston.
    The rest of the lines were impossible to decipher.
    Will read this last letter a second time and suddenly longed for Mary Beth, his first love. He’d been a “dweeb of the first order” in high school, according to his brother, Rusty, and his love life reflected it. College had been better, but the stars had never lined up for him. He had been flattered by the attentions of several young women, but when the relationships moved to more serious ground he found himself wanting out. They were like the soap bubbles of his childhood, glimmering and lovely for a while and then nothing at all.
    Mary Beth was a student in the small discussion section that he led once a week in the spring of her senior year at the university. The course was on the birth of the English novel. Will was in his third year of graduate school and worked as a teaching assistant to cover his tuition. He felt an instant attraction to Mary Beth, as if there were a clear thread pulled taut between them. She was unlike any of the women he’d dated as an undergraduate, silly girls who thought of college as one big party. Mary Beth was