“Humph was a pharmacist once,” she explained. “He liked to keep all sorts of cures around to help people. When you throw away the drugs, I think you’re supposed to pull off the labels so they don’t get misused on the street.”
“They were pretty much empty already.”
“No,” she corrected him, “did you check under the cushion of his armchair? There was a bunch of heart medication there. I saw it recently.”
“I checked there. Just empty bottles.”
When could Humphrey have taken all those? Tooly had gone out that morning. He knew well the effect of those drugs.
“So, in theory,” Duncan continued, “you’d get anything.”
“What? Sorry, I was thinking of something else.”
“Just saying how Humphrey left no will. But if there’s anything left in his estate you’ll get it as his daughter.”
She wasn’t sure how best to explain, after all this time, that Humphrey was no relative of hers. “Sounds like there’s nothing of value anyhow.”
“That’s pretty fair to say. Given the outstanding bills for that surgery he had,” Duncan said, “we’ll move toward declaring him insolvent upon death. I’m going to Sheepshead this weekend to oversee the removal of his junk.”
She hated that strangers would rummage through Humphrey’s belongings, then toss it all away. “Should I come back and deal with this?”
“Seriously, it’s fine.”
“If there are fees, you have to bill me.”
“Don’t worry.”
“Duncan,” she said.
“It’s fine.”
He couldn’t accept gratitude, so changed the subject to talk of the winter break. His kids were still grumbling about not having gone anywhere that past summer. Unseriously, he and Tooly chatted about the family coming to visit Wales the following year. She offered free lodgings at World’s End — he’d been so generous to her, and the inn rooms would accommodate them all for as long as they liked. But his family was a closed circle again, she an outsider, one whose lifestyle had initially looked like novelty to the McGrorys, briefly like inspiration, and finally like subtle criticism. Sometimes it was best to leave the past where it lay.
During this period, Tooly kept her grief over Humphrey to herself. She contemplated him when opening books, speculated about his opinion, imagining how it would have been to show him around the shop, which really was his. She kept busy, working with Fogg to complete the database, dealing with online sales, which were not quite as rampant as he’d suggested but kept them afloat.
Toward the end of Humphrey’s life, he had abstained from alcohol, wanting clarity of mind, and Tooly had stopped in solidarity, no matter how she had craved a drink. Since then, she’d ceased the solitary tipples of old, abolishing her nighttime habit of vanishing into glasses of red wine, that nightly amnesia starting around 8 P.M. Anyway, she was collaborating so much with Fogg now that her evenings were no longer solitary. She reserved time to practice her ukulele (oddly, she’d gotten slightly better by not playing these past weeks). Even as she strummed, her new cellphone often trilled beside her in the attic, with a text from Fogg posing a catalog query. She thumbed in half a response, then gave up and went downstairs to answer him. For breaks, they closed the shop, took afternoon hikes past the priory, up into the Black Mountains.
When they returned from one such ramble, there was a delivery truck idling before the shop, hazard lights blinking. The driver unloaded six boxes. An invoice was thrust at her; the van zoomed off. Duncan had sent these. She peeled off the packing tape and the cardboard flaps popped apart. Inside: volume after volume, crammed in, and the smell of Humphrey’s room.
His books were cheap editions, mostly — dust jackets missing, bindings torn, pages unglued and falling out. Many were too worthless even to consign to the Honesty Barrel. She sorted them, pausing here and there, losing herself for hours in familiar copies — there was the edition of Nicholas Nickleby that Paul had bought for her a quarter century before, that she had read in secret at King Chulalongkorn International School, had lugged to that house party in Bangkok, left behind with Humphrey, and from which she’d read to him in Sheepshead Bay. So strange that this had taken place weeks before — seemed at once like a single day and many years ago.
She organized the worthiest volumes on three low shelves against the right wall of the shop, with a sign identifying the new section: HUMPHREY’S BOOKS. There were about a hundred — that’s all it amounted to in the end — and they were all for sale, including his prized blue volume of essays by John Stuart Mill. Inside each cover, she wrote his name, picturing a stranger years later opening the book, reading “Humphrey Ostropoler,” and wondering who had possessed that name, and why he’d surrendered this edition. People kept their books, she thought, not because they were likely to read them again but because these objects contained the past — the texture of being oneself at a particular place, at a particular time, each volume a piece of one’s intellect, whether the work itself had been loved or despised or had induced a snooze on page forty. People might be trapped inside their own heads, but they spent their lives pushing out from that locked room. It was why people produced children, why they cared about land, why nothing felt equal to one’s own bed after a long trip.
For days, customers failed to notice Humphrey’s Books. Then, a sniffly-nosed Jaguar driver crouched before them, gathering on the cat-scented carpet a pile of volumes to buy, including that edition of John Stuart Mill essays. To avoid the sight, Tooly made a trip to the post office.
Along with business parcels, she brought two padded envelopes, one containing Palm Groves and Humming Birds: An Artist’s Fortnight in Brazil, a copiously illustrated 1924 rarity with maroon pigskin binding, gilt title lettering, and marbled end papers that she mailed to Paul. The other envelope was for Sarah, containing a work on coin collecting and a coffee-table photo book of Kenyan landscapes. She addressed it to the seaside apartment in Anzio on the assumption that this was where Sarah might be, now that the weather had turned cold.
When Tooly returned to World’s End, the customer had gone, along with several of Humphrey’s books, leaving the remainders leaning at glum angles. She crouched before them, stricken with regret, and shifted the leftovers to hide the gaps.
“You said I could sell those,” Fogg reminded her.
“No, yes, I know. I’m trying not to be stupid about it.”
He tapped the sales ledger with his pencil. She glanced up, then returned to reordering the section. He yammered on with uncommon noisiness about — well, she didn’t know what — and kept tapping his pencil on the ledger. “I’m trying to get you to come over and look,” he said.
She obliged, reading the sales entries, including those for a dozen of Humphrey’s volumes.
“Yes, I know.”
From under the counter, he produced them all. “I’m the one who bought them. Out from under his runny nose.”
She thanked Fogg, but returned them all to the Humphrey’s Books section.
“I’ll just have to buy them again,” he warned her. “Could get dear after a time.”
“Okay,” she relented. “I’ll keep these ones. Thank you.”
Sarah never did respond to her package. But Paul did, with a touching note, thanking her for the visit that past summer and for the beautiful volume, which would be ideal for the flight he was about to take, heading off for two months with Shelly to their house in Nong Khai. He wrote of his efforts to cultivate dwarf banana trees there, saying he longed to show off his renovations but could convince no one to trek out there. Tooly was welcome to visit — and even to bring somebody. He’d be honored to meet any companion of hers.