The Bookshop Vote (Part 4)
They cleaned until dark. Somebody’s teenage son dug the mud out of the drain with a spade and a lot of complaining. The chairs went back to the church hall, still dry, still unused.
It was the baker who said it, sitting on the step at the end with his tray of unsold bread. “Nobody voted for you because nobody knew,” he said. “Not because they don’t like you.”
Otto turned and looked at the box he had carried back from Hope Street, still heavy with the postcards nobody had wanted, and only damp at the corners.
“These are the wrong way round,” he said. “We’ve been telling people about the shop. Everyone on this street has already got a book from Joan. Let them tell it.”
They dried the postcards along the radiator overnight, and on Sunday the shop opened with a pen on the counter and a sign that said: write down the book she got right for you.
The barber wrote three lines about a book on Roman roads. A woman from the apartments above the bakery wrote about a novel she’d read four times. One card said only: she found my son a book, and he reads now. The baker put a postcard in every bread bag on Sunday and on Monday, and people photographed the cards on their kitchen tables and put them online, and by Monday night the market traders were handing them out with the change.
Voting closed at midnight.
On Tuesday morning Otto refreshed the page at one minute past nine, with Joan standing behind him holding a cup of tea she wasn’t drinking.
“Well?” she said.
“We won.” Otto’s voice came out strange. “The result’s up. We won by two hundred and twelve votes.”
Joan sat down on the step where the water had been.
Otto was still reading the screen. “Two hundred and twelve,” he said again, and then, more slowly, “How much bread does he sell in a weekend?”
“About two hundred and twenty loaves,” Joan said.
They looked at each other.
Joan stood up and took her purse from under the counter. “Otto,” she said. “Go and buy some bread.”