Paris by the Book by Liam Callanan

Author:Liam Callanan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-04-03T04:00:00+00:00

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For months I’d been asking the girls to brainstorm some way to increase foot traffic in the store. I’d come to realize that specializing in dead authors, mildly quirky as it was, was also dumb: dead authors didn’t give readings; we never had events; other than Molly, most of our customers were over sixty years old. I suggested Ellie and her friends stage readings of late greats. “Sure,” she said (a word that, like many in her dwindling English vocabulary, only ever meant its opposite), and set about working with Asif to plan an evening focused on developing apps by and for teens. We stocked precisely no books on this subject.

No matter. On the appointed evening, the store was more full than it had ever been. Even Madame came down to take a look (once she heard the topic, she grimaced and withdrew). I wondered how Ellie had come to know so many people so much older than she was—and then realized that they weren’t any older; the twenty or thirty attendees she and Asif had mustered were classmates, teens, but teens who wore heels, blazers, scarfs, beards, soccer shirts, abayas, jeans, eye-catching eyeglasses, and everywhere, smiles. Also smiling, if a bit more warily, were Daphne and the twins, who perched at the one corner of the counter that wasn’t covered with food. I’d been worried Ellie would ask to serve wine, but she hadn’t and, in any case, gripped a mug of tea as she worked the crowd; she (and Daphne, too, it seemed) had the start of a cold. And then the bell over the door rang as the “special surprise guest”—the event’s speaker—arrived.

Declan.

What was not a surprise was that they loved him. He knew this demographic. As it turned out, he did not know that much about coding—but this was admitted with laughter and received with even more. Business school was teaching him a few things about marketing, however, that he was happy to share and everyone was happy to hear. When things later broke up, pictures were taken, addresses exchanged. Not a book was bought—or for that matter, mentioned—but Ellie thought it such a grand success I could only agree.

Declan stayed to help clean up. Daphne took the twins upstairs. Ellie walked Asif to the Métro. Declan explained that he’d not told me he was coming because Ellie had asked him to keep it a surprise. He said he’d hoped that was okay. He hoped I was okay. He hoped Ellie was okay. That everything was okay, because it had gotten weird a while back.

I said it wasn’t weird, nothing was, though everything was. There was still no verifiable sign of Robert in Wisconsin—no ATM withdrawal, no CCTV appearance, no word that our Milwaukee renters had reported him outside on the porch. But there was every other sign of him in Paris. And that reminded me that I was still married, to a missing person. I felt like I was getting second-guessed all the

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