I can’t remember if it’s Amazon or Barnes and Noble that’s ruining the world. Or is it Whole Foods? Something awful is wrong with all of them but I can’t remember what it is, just that I need to stay away from them. Target, too.

I promise I make an effort. Usually, sometimes. Today though, I’m in Barnes and Noble looking for The Handmaid’s Tale because Harper needs it for an English class. I know I should’ve gone to the one of many used and/or local bookstores Ann Arbor boasts instead of B&N. I should always, always, in Jesus’ Name Amen, shop local but today I choose Barnes & Noble because it is closest to my house. Because to get to the local bookstores means traveling downtown and right now there is so much construction my town looks like a scene out of Divergent and what will take me five minutes to buy the book at a chain store will take me thirty minutes to get downtown. Because Sunday is supposed to be a day of rest and all I want is to rest but I have seven part-time jobs and their income combined doesn’t even make half of what Jesse’s one job makes, and since my life is a constant hustle, I’m going to Barnes & Noble because it’s close, it’s cheap, and since I’m in a snippy mood, maybe I’ll go to Whole Foods and buy kombucha or a pre, pro, and post biotic. Like a hybrid monster, cure-all-the-things vitamin.

The smell of the bookstore smacks me in the face and all I want to do now is read and be a good person. Damn that paper and coffee smell for taking away my woe c’est moi mood. People are walking around tables of books, picking them up, paging through them, talking to each other about them. The cafe is filled and it must be some kind of Sunday miracle because nobody sitting there has a laptop open. It’s just books, magazines, and people facing each other with both hands holding something warm to drink. I feel like I’m in a Hallmark Holiday movie.

Fiction begins right next to the Children’s Section, which means I must push past an undertow of nostalgia to get to the book I need to get for Harper that I’m afraid is not fiction and is becoming true. How many afternoons did I take the girls to Barnes and Noble? Hadley used to bust into the store running to the Children’s Section where the toy train table was, repeating, “It’s good to share,” because this is what I would tell her in an effort to prepare her for when other toddlers were playing at the table. “It’s good to share. It’s good to share. It’s good to share,” she’d say with the same urgency some say, “Lord, hear our prayer.”

We’d always get a stack of books and go to the cafe to read and drink chocolate milk. There was a park nearby and if it wasn’t a million degrees in Maryland we’d walk over and play. Motherhood is the hardest, most heartbreaking, most humbling thing I’ve ever done and also I’m not sure I’ll ever not feel that space that’s open now from the days when the girls and I spent every second of our lives together. It feels like an open gum before the next tooth comes in or the skinned knee just before it begins to heal. Except there is no new tooth coming, and there’s nothing that needs to heal.

Well anyway, the book. There are three copies of The Handmaid’s Tale: a hardcover, a paperback, and some kind of anniversary edition. I pull the paperback off the shelf and head to the cashier.

Someone behind me is on the phone talking about good soil. She is concerned that the soil is no good, or maybe it’s the environment, or that the people don’t know how to take care of it. I don’t know but it’s important to her that the soil is good. We must do whatever it takes to keep the soil good. “Whatever it takes,” she repeats like a refrain.

Just like “It’s good to share,” just like “Lord, hear our prayer,” I think as I hand the story over to the cashier and she asks me if I found everything I need.

PS - The image above is a photo of one of the local used bookstores in Ann Arbor. Harper, my niece, and my sister-in-law were there recently on the first day it snowed. I couldn’t resist taking a picture.