Amelia can tell that A.J. is in no mood to be pitched the winter list. She should offer to come back some other day. But then she thinks of the two-hour drive to Hyannis and the eighty-minute boat ride to Alice and the ferry schedule, which becomes more irregular after October. “Since I’m here,” Amelia says, “would you mind if we went through Knightley’s winter titles?”
A.J.’s office is a closet. It has no windows, no pictures on the wall, no family photos on the desk, no knickknacks, no escape. The office has books, inexpensive metal shelves like the kind for a garage, a filing cabinet and an ancient, possibly twentieth-century, desktop computer. A.J. does not offer her a drink, and although Amelia is thirsty, she doesn’t ask for one. She clears a chair of books and sits.
Amelia launches into the winter list. It’s the smallest list of the year, both in size and expectations. A few big (or at least promising) debuts, but other than that it is filled with the books for which the publisher has the lowest commercial hopes. Despite this, Amelia often likes the “winters” the best. They are the underdogs, the sleepers, the long shots. (It is not too much of a stretch to point out that this is how she sees herself, too.) She leaves for last her favorite book, a memoir written by an eighty-year-old man, a lifelong bachelor who married at the age of seventy-eight. His bride died two years after the wedding at the age of eighty-three. Cancer. According to his bio, the writer worked as a science reporter for various midwestern newspapers, and the prose is precise, funny, not at all maudlin. Amelia had cried uncontrollably on the train from New York to Providence. Amelia knows The Late Bloomer is a small book and that the description sounds more than a little cliché, but she feels sure other people will love it if they give it a chance. In Amelia’s experience, most people’s problems would be solved if they would only give more things a chance.
Amelia is halfway through describing The Late Bloomer when A.J. puts his head on the desk.
“Is something wrong?” Amelia asks.
“This is not for me,” A.J. says.
“Just try the first chapter.” Amelia is pushing the galley into his hand. “I know the subject matter could be incredibly corny, but when you see how it’s writ—”
He cuts her off, “This is not for me.”
“Okay, so I’ll tell you about something else.”
A.J. takes a deep breath. “You seem like a nice enough young woman, but your predecessor . . . The thing is, Harvey knew my tastes. He had the same taste as me.”
Amelia sets the galley on the desk. “I’d like the chance to get to know your tastes,” she says, feeling a bit like a character in a porno.
He mutters something under his breath. She thinks it sounds like What’s the point? but she isn’t sure.
Amelia closes the Knightley catalog. “Mr. Fikry, please just tell me what you like.”
“Like,” he repeats with distaste. “How about I tell you what I don’t like? I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be—basically, gimmicks of any kind. I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful—nonfiction only, please. I do not like genre mash-ups à la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like children’s books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and—I imagine this goes without saying—vampires. I rarely stock debuts, chick lit, poetry, or translations. I would prefer not to stock series, but the demands of my pocketbook require me to. For your part, you needn’t tell me about the ‘next big series’ until it is ensconced on the New York Times Best Sellers list. Above all, Ms. Loman, I find slim literary memoirs about little old men whose little old wives have died from cancer to be absolutely intolerable. No matter how well written the sales rep claims they are. No matter how many copies you promise I’ll sell on Mother’s Day.”
Amelia blushes, though she is angry more than embarrassed. She agrees with some of what A.J. has said, but his manner is unnecessarily insulting. Knightley Press doesn’t even sell half of that stuff anyway. She studies him. He is older than Amelia but not by much, not by more than ten years. He is too young to like so little. “What do you like?” she asks.
“Everything else,” he says. “I will also admit to an occasional weakness for short-story collections. Customers never want to buy them though.”
There is only one short-story collection on Amelia’s list, a debut. Amelia hasn’t read the whole thing, and time dictates that she probably won’t, but she liked the first story. An American sixth-grade class and an Indian sixth-grade class participate in an international pen pal program. The narrator is an Indian kid in the American class who keeps feeding comical misinformation about Indian culture to the Americans. She clears her throat, which is still terribly dry. “The Year Bombay Became Mumbai. I think it will have special int—”
“No,” he says.
“I haven’t even told you what it’s about yet.”
“Just no.”
“But why?”
“If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll admit that you’re only telling me about it because I’m partially Indian and you think this will be my special interest. Am I right?”
Amelia imagines smashing the ancient computer over his head. “I’m telling you about this because you said you liked short stories! And it’s the only one on my list. And for the record”—here, she lies—“it’s completely wonderful from start to finish. Even if it is a debut.
“And do you know what else? I love debuts. I love discovering something new. It’s part of the whole reason I do this job.” Amelia rises. Her head is pounding. Maybe she does drink too much? Her head is pounding and her heart is, too. “Do you want my opinion?”
“Not particularly,” he says. “What are you, twenty-five?”
“Mr. Fikry, this is a lovely store, but if you continue in this this this”—as a child, she stuttered and it occasionally returns when she is upset; she clears her throat—“this backward way of thinking, there won’t be an Island Books before too long.”
Amelia sets The Late Bloomer along with the winter catalog on his desk. She trips over the books in the hallway as she leaves.
The next ferry doesn’t depart for another hour so she takes her time walking back through town. Outside a Bank of America, a bronze plaque commemorates the summer Herman Melville had spent there, back when the building had been the Alice Inn. She holds out her phone and takes a picture of herself with the plaque. Alice is a nice enough place, but she imagines she won’t have reason to be back anytime soon.
She texts her boss in New York: Doesn’t look like there’ll be any orders from Island.
The boss replies: Don’t fret. Only a little account, and Island does the bulk of its ordering in anticipation of the summer when the tourists are there. The guy who runs the place is weird, and Harvey always had better luck selling the spring/summer list. You will, too.
AT SIX O’CLOCK, A.J. tells Molly Klock to leave. “How’s the new Munro?” he asks.
She groans. “Why does everyone keep asking me that today?” She is only referring to Amelia, but Molly likes to speak in extremes.
“I suppose because you’re reading it.”
Molly groans again. “Okay. The people are, I dunno, too human sometimes.”
“I think that’s rather the point with Munro,” he says.
“Dunno. Prefer the old stuff. See you on Monday.”
Something will have to be done about Molly, A.J. thinks as he flips the sign to closed. Aside from liking to read, Molly is truly a terrible bookseller. But she’s only a part-timer, and it’s such a bother to train someone new, and at least she doesn’t steal. Nic had hired her so she must have seen something in the surly Miss Klock. Maybe next summer A.J. will work up the energy to fire Molly.
A.J. kicks the remaining customers out (he is most annoyed by an organic chemistry study group who have bought nothing but have been camped out in magazines since four—he’s pretty sure one of them clogged up the toilet, too), then deals with the receipts, a task as depressing as it sounds. Finally, he goes upstairs to the attic apartment where he lives. He pops a carton of frozen vindaloo into the microwave. Nine minutes, per the box’s instructions. As he’s standing there, he thinks of the girl from Knightley. She had looked like a time traveler from 1990s Seattle with her anchor-printed galoshes and her floral grandma dress and her fuzzy beige sweater and her shoulder-length hair that looked like it had been cut in the kitchen by her boyfriend. Girlfriend? Boyfriend, he decides. He thinks of Courtney Love when she was married to Kurt Cobain. The tough rose mouth says No one can hurt me, but the soft blue eyes say Yes you can and you probably will. And he had made that big dandelion of a girl cry. Well done, A.J.