Chapter 2
Chapter Two: Mae's Pages
She opened the shop at nine the next morning.
This was perhaps overambitious given that she had been in Merrow Cove for less than twelve hours and the shop had technically been closed since yesterday and there was a great deal she did not yet know. But the sign on the door still said the shop's hours were nine to five, Monday through Saturday, and Mae had never once been late opening, and Elena was not going to start.
She changed the sign to OPEN. She turned on the front lamps and the reading lamp in the back room. She made a coffee — Mae's coffee machine, a old Italian moka pot that required some negotiation and produced something excellent — and she stood behind the counter with her coffee and her notebook and she assessed.
The shop was in better shape than the finances. That was the first thing she noticed, and it mattered. The stock was good — Mae had always had impeccable taste and the shelves were full of books Elena recognised as well-chosen: literary fiction alongside popular fiction, poetry given as much real estate as thrillers, the children's section large and carefully curated. The organisation was entirely Mae's — not alphabetical but emotional, which meant that you found what you were looking for by wandering and by instinct, which was the point. Regular customers knew the system. New customers were given Mae's two-minute orientation speech, which Elena now understood she was going to have to reconstruct from memory.
The dust, though. The dust was evident. And the stock rotation — some of the display books had been there a while, their spines slightly sun-faded in the front window, the books that had not sold in three months sitting in the same spots where Elena remembered them from Christmas. Mae had clearly been managing the shop while managing less well than usual, and the evidence was in the details.
The state of the till was also, she discovered, clarifying. Mae had been running on a relatively low transaction volume — not catastrophic, but not healthy either. The good months were clearly summer and Christmas. The rest of the year was where the problem lived.
She was deep in the sales records from the previous year when the bell above the door rang at quarter past nine.
"My God," said a voice. "Is that Elena Marsh?"
She looked up.
The woman in the doorway was about sixty, with the specific weathered-warm quality of someone who has lived near the sea for most of their life and is entirely fine with what that has done to their skin. She was carrying a canvas bag and wearing a wax jacket and she looked exactly like herself: Dottie Pearce, who had run the post office at the end of the high street for as long as Elena could remember and who had been buying a book from Mae every month for thirty years and recommending it to everyone who came in to buy stamps.
"Dottie," Elena said, with genuine warmth.
Dottie crossed the shop and hugged her over the counter. "We were all so devastated about Mae," she said, into Elena's shoulder. "She was — she was the heart of this street, you know. She was the heart of this village, really." She pulled back, her eyes bright. "And now here you are. Are you staying?"
"For now," Elena said. "I'm trying to figure out how to keep it open."
Dottie's expression went from warm to serious in a very efficient way. "What does that mean?"
Elena told her. The edited version — the finances, the landlord, the timeline. Not to be dramatic but because Dottie was not a woman who tolerated incomplete information.
Dottie listened with the focused, slightly-forward posture of someone filing everything she was told for immediate practical use. When Elena finished, Dottie said: "Right," in a tone that suggested a great deal was happening behind the word.
"I'm still working out the plan," Elena said.
"You'll have the town behind you," Dottie said. "I want you to know that straightforwardly. Mae was loved. This shop is loved. If you need bodies, you'll have them. If you need noise, we can make it." She paused. "The planning committee meets Tuesday. I'm on it. I'm not saying anything can be done at the planning level about a landlord wanting to sell, but I'm telling you I'm on it."
She bought a copy of a poetry collection she said she'd been meaning to get for months, and she left, and Elena heard her on the phone in the street outside within approximately ninety seconds.
By eleven o'clock, eight more people had come in.
Not all of them bought something — some came simply to pay their respects, in the particular way of small communities where the shop and the woman who ran it were the same thing, and the arrival of one person to tend the former was understood as a form of honouring the latter. They came and they looked at the shelves and they picked up books and put them down and some of them talked about Mae — the specific, fond, detailed way that people talked about someone they had actually known, not eulogies but memories — and Elena stood behind the counter and listened and felt the shop fill up with Mae in a way that was deeply sad and also, she thought, exactly what Mae would have wanted.
Among them were: Tom Ridley, who owned the boat repair yard down at the harbour and had been buying from Mae since he was a teenager and seemed genuinely moved to find the shop open, which he expressed by buying four books and paying for them without blinking. He had a broad, plain-spoken quality that Elena liked immediately.
Peggy and Alistair Holt, who ran the café three doors down and had shared a wall with Mae for twenty years and appeared to feel the loss as neighbours do — personally and practically both. They brought a casserole. Elena accepted it with genuine gratitude and also the understanding that this was Cornish for we have opinions and will be sharing them.
A woman she didn't know — young, late twenties perhaps, with a small child who was allowed to look at the picture books with the solemn care of a very young person taking a very important task seriously. The woman said her name was Beth, that she'd moved to Merrow Cove three years ago, that Mae had been the first person to make her feel welcome, and that if Elena needed any help with the shop she was handy with a paintbrush and available on weekday mornings.
Elena wrote her number down.
She spent the afternoon with the books and the accounts.
The accounts, she worked through systematically, building a picture. The rent — which had jumped significantly eighteen months ago — was the spine of the problem. Before the increase, the shop had been close to breaking even on a good year, with a small margin for the quiet months. After the increase, the quiet months had become losses, and the suppliers had been getting paid in arrears, and the bank account had crept slowly into the red.
Mae had not asked for help. This was entirely in character. Mae had a profound and somewhat irrational faith that things would come right if you kept doing the thing you loved with care and attention, and she had maintained this faith through thirty years of the book trade, which required it.
The books, Elena worked through simply because she needed to be in the stock to understand it. She moved through the shelves with the quiet satisfaction of someone who had been reading since before she could fully remember and had developed very clear opinions about what belonged where. She found a few things she wanted to reorder, a few gaps in sections that could be filled. She found Mae's recommendation shelf — a long, low shelf near the front that Mae had always kept personally curated, the books she was currently recommending, changed every few weeks, with small handwritten notes in Mae's neat small handwriting explaining why.
The recommendation shelf still had Mae's last selections on it. The notes, in Mae's handwriting, were in the present tense. This is the one I give to everyone right now. If you read one thing this year, make it this. I have been thinking about this book for three weeks — it does something remarkable with time.
Elena stood in front of the shelf for a long time.
She did not change anything on it.
At four o'clock, the door opened and a man she did not recognise came in.
He was perhaps forty, in a good overcoat and with the look of someone who had driven somewhere they hadn't entirely wanted to drive — the faint distraction of a person completing a task they have been given. He looked at the shop with the evaluative quality of someone who was not reading it as a bookshop.
"Ms Marsh?" he said.
"Yes."
He introduced himself. His name was Fletcher, from Hartwell Properties. He wanted to talk about the building.
Elena put down the stock order she was reviewing and gave him her full attention.
He was apologetic in the way of people delivering news they have decided to frame as practical rather than personal. He spoke about the building's value, about the current market, about the landlord's intentions. He said the word development opportunity twice without any apparent awareness of how it landed. He said they were not in a position to offer a long-term lease at the current rate and that the building was likely to go to market.
"When?" Elena said.
"The timeline is still being worked out," he said. "We've engaged a property assessment firm. Someone will be in contact."
"I see," Elena said.
She thanked him. She showed him out. She stood at the door and watched him walk down the high street toward his car, and then she went back inside and sat at Mae's counter and looked at the shop — the good stock, the warm lamps, the recommendation shelf in Mae's handwriting — and she thought.
She had three things.
She had the shop, which was viable if it could survive the rent pressure and could be made to generate better revenue.
She had the community, which was willing to help.
And she had a career's worth of financial analysis skills and a problem that was, if she was honest, not the most complicated one she had ever been handed.
She opened her laptop.
She made a list.
At the top she wrote: Save Mae's Pages. She underlined it.
Beneath it she wrote: Revenue, Costs, Community support, Building.
She spent the next two hours on the revenue column alone, generating seventeen different ideas ranging from the sensible (events programming, a subscription box, extended summer hours) to the ambitious (a small café counter, a collaboration with the school, a book club series) to the frankly slightly mad (a residency programme, a literary festival micro-event).
Mae, she thought, would have had opinions about most of these.
She made a note to write the ideas in the back of the shop notebook, which had always been Mae's place for thinking things through, and which Elena found under the counter where it had always been, with Mae's handwriting on the last page: a list of books she'd been thinking about ordering, and at the bottom, in the margin, in the slightly different handwriting that meant Mae was jotting something mid-thought: ask E about the website.
Elena stared at this for a moment.
Mae had been going to ask her about the website.
She had been going to ask her, and then she had died in her sleep on a Tuesday in April with a book on her chest, and she hadn't got to ask.
Elena put the notebook down. She pressed her hands flat on the counter.
She thought about what she was doing here and why, and whether it was manageable and whether she was qualified and whether the numbers were actually survivable, and she arrived, as she always did when she thought about it clearly, at the same answer.
She was doing this because Mae had loved this shop for thirty years. Because this shop was the kind of thing that mattered in the world — the kind of small, specific, irreplaceable thing that was easy to dismiss as impractical until it was gone and you understood what you'd lost.
She was doing this because Mae had asked, in her way, by leaving it to her.
She was doing this.
She picked the notebook back up. She turned to a clean page. She wrote: Website — priority.
She underlined it twice.
Patricia came by at six with the name of the solicitor and a shepherd's pie, and they ate it in Mae's kitchen above the shop with the harbour visible through the window in the dusk, and Patricia told her about the funeral arrangements and about their mother — Elena's grandmother's surviving sister, elderly now — who had been told and was devastated and was coming from Bristol next week.
"Are you all right?" Patricia asked, over the pie.
"I don't know yet," Elena said. "Not really. But the shop is— I have a plan. Or the beginning of one."
Patricia looked at her with the assessing look that meant she was evaluating whether what Elena was doing was grief management disguised as action. "The shop isn't Mae," she said.
"I know." Elena looked at her plate. "But it's the last thing she was. The longest thing she was. And if I can keep it—" She stopped. Chose words carefully. "It feels like I'd be keeping her here. In the place she built."
Patricia was quiet for a moment. "She'd be very pleased with you," she said, which was not the same thing as this is a good idea or this is what you should do, but was the right thing to say anyway.
After Patricia left, Elena sat alone in Mae's kitchen for an hour.
Then she went back downstairs to the shop, turned on the lamps, and got back to work.