The Bookshop Vote (Part 1)

The email arrived on a Tuesday, between a box of calendars and a customer who wanted everything ever written about bees.

Otto read it twice before he said anything. “Joan. We’re on a list.”

“What kind of list?” She was up the ladder in the poetry section, where she went when she didn’t want to talk about money.

“Best Local Bookshop. It’s national. Four hundred shops, and we’re one of them.” He turned the laptop around. “People vote online. It closes in six days.”

Joan came down the ladder slowly. Hopewell Books had stood on Hope Street for twenty-two years, and for the last two of them she had stopped putting the monthly figures on the wall, because there was nothing on them worth showing. She looked at the screen for a long time.

“Who else is on it?” she asked.

Otto didn’t answer.

“Otto.”

“Kestrel Books,” he said. “The big one, out by the mall on Route 2.”

Kestrel had a café, a parking lot, a range of books three floors deep, and forty thousand people following it online. It had opened three years ago, and Joan could name the exact month, because it was the month her Saturdays went quiet.

“How many votes do they have?” she said.

“Two thousand. We have sixteen.”

“Sixteen.”

“Well. Nineteen now.”

Joan put both hands flat on the counter, which was what she did instead of shouting. Then she took a pencil and started writing on the back of an order form: coffee, chairs, a writer, children at eleven.

“What’s that?” Otto said.

“Planning,” she said. “If they want a vote, we’ll give people a reason to vote. Saturday. Here, in the shop. The bakery does the coffee, the school sends the children, and that writer from Camp Street reads from her new book. She lives four streets away. She’ll say yes.”

Otto looked around. There were twelve chairs in the whole building, and one of them was broken.

“How many people do we need?” he asked.

“All of them,” Joan said.