The Bookstore Keepers (The Once Upon a Time Bookshop Stories) by Alice Hoffman

Author:Alice Hoffman [Hoffman, Alice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Amazon Original Stories
Published: 2025-02-18T00:00:00+00:00

More Than a Bird Loves the Sky

June

Violet didn’t stop in the town of Hensley, but instead went directly to the ferry station and bought her ticket to the island. She had mailed most of her belongings from her apartment in Chelsea, where she’d lived with five other NYU students. Today she had only a backpack, the one she planned to take with her to France, a destination she hadn’t yet revealed to her mother. Sophie had been waiting for Violet to return and take over the bakery at the bookstore, and had no idea that Violet had already enrolled in a small prestigious baking school in Paris. She’d already bought her plane ticket, and it was one way rather than round trip. She kept it in her top drawer beside a photograph of her father, a fisherman whose death at sea before she was born had left her grieving for someone she had never known. She’d made her plans in secret, and a secret can be the heaviest baggage of all.

On the day of her homecoming, Violet wore a black raincoat despite the warming weather, for rain in June was always a possibility on Brinkley’s Island; there was a low gray mist most mornings, and at least one brief shower in the afternoons, which was why the island was so deeply and beautifully green. Purple and white lupine were in bloom; fairy flowers, they’d always called them, flowers that could bring about magic if you closed your eyes and made a wish.

With her heavy lace-up boots, Violet looked like an explorer; her hair was in one long braid and her backpack was slung over her shoulders. One young boy traveling on the ferry with his parents came over to ask, “Are you going to climb Mount Everest?”

“In a way,” Violet had answered, for telling her mother the truth about her plans seemed almost as difficult, and there would be a mountain of disappointment to contend with. There would be arguments and tears. Throughout her college years, whenever Violet came home for holidays, she had camped out in the bookstore in the fairy-tale room, rather than stay at her mother and David’s house on the mainland. She liked David, that wasn’t the problem, but the old sea captain’s house where her mother and David lived wasn’t her home. She preferred to wait for the bookstore to close for the day, and once she was alone—her mother having taken the ferry back to Hensley, and Isabel gone off to the marsh house—Violet would find her way to the tent set up for readers in the fairy-tale room and spend her nights there, as if she were ten again, the girl who lived in a bookstore but hadn’t liked books. Frankly, she hadn’t liked much of anything at all in those days.

Isabel was the one who had started her reading. Violet had resented the bookstore, and all the time her mother put in working there, but one day her aunt had given her

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