The Bookshop Vote (Part 3)
The rain started before five, and by seven Hope Street was a river.
Otto got there at seven thirty with his jeans rolled to the knee. The drain by the door had given up completely, and the water was already over the step and coming in under the door in a wide brown line. Joan was on her knees in the children’s corner, lifting books onto the high shelf two and three at a time.
They worked for two hours without talking much. The water level rose to the second shelf and stopped there, which was the only piece of luck they had all day. The picture books were saved. The boxes of postcards, stacked by the door where they were easy to reach, were not: two hundred of them turned into gray paste before Otto could get to them.
At nine the writer called. Her street was closed, and she was sorry, and she’d come another time. At nine thirty the bakery called: no power, no coffee. At ten the school group cancelled. At eleven the rain stopped, and the street lay quiet and brown and completely empty, and thirty-eight borrowed chairs stood in neat rows inside a shop that nobody was going to walk into.
Otto sat down on one of them. “The vote closes Monday night,” he said.
Joan was wringing a cloth out into a bucket. “I know when it closes.”
“We’re at nine hundred and forty. They’re at five thousand two hundred.” He said the numbers flatly, like a weather report. “Everything we had was today.”
“Then we take the risk we haven’t taken yet,” Joan said, “which is asking people for something.”
“Asking them for what?”
She didn’t get to answer. Somebody was knocking on the window: the baker from next door, in boots up to his knees, holding a tray of bread that nobody had come to buy. Behind him, half the street stood in the wet road with buckets and brushes.