Abraham Lincoln_ Vampire Hunter - Seth Grahame-Smith [1]
I’d always known I’d end up in the store after graduation, just like I had every summer since I was fifteen. I wasn’t family in the strictest sense, but Jan and Al had always treated me like one of their kids—giving me a job when I needed it most; throwing me a little pocket money while I was away at school. The way I saw it, I owed them six solid months, June through Christmas. That was the plan. Six months of working in the store by day, and working on my novel nights and weekends. Plenty of time to finish the first draft and give it a good polish. Manhattan was only an hour and a half by train, and that’s where I’d go when I was done, with four or five pounds of unsolicited, proofread opportunity under my arm. Goodbye, Hudson Valley. Hello, lecture circuit.
Nine years later I was still in the store.
Somewhere in the middle of getting married, surviving a car accident, having a baby, abandoning my novel, starting and abandoning half a dozen others, having another baby, and trying to stay on top of the bills, something wholly unexpected and depressingly typical happened: I stopped caring about my writing, and started caring about everything else: The kids. The marriage. The mortgage. The store. I seethed at the sight of locals shopping at the CVS down the street. I bought a computer to help track inventory. Mostly, I looked for new ways to bring people through the door. When the used bookstore in Red Hook closed, I bought some of their stock and put a lending shelf in the back. Raffles. Clearance sales. Wi-Fi. Anything to get them through that door. Every year I tried something new. And every year, we barely scraped by.
Henry * had been coming for a year or so before we got around to talking. We’d exchanged the expected pleasantries; nothing more. “Have a good one.” “See you next time.” I only knew his name because I’d heard it through the Market Street grapevine. The story was he’d bought one of the bigger places off of Route 9G, and had an army of local handymen sprucing it up. He was a little younger than me—maybe twenty-seven or so, with messy dark hair, a year-round tan, and a different pair of sunglasses for every occasion. I could tell he was money. His clothes screamed it: vintage T-shirts, wool blazers, jeans that cost more than my car. But he wasn’t like the other money that came in. The asshole weekenders who liked to gush about our “cute” little town and our “adorable” little store, walking right past our No Food or Drink Please sign with their oversize cups of hazelnut coffee, and never spending a dime. Henry was courteous. Quiet. Best of all, he never left without dropping less than fifty bucks—most of it on the throwbacks you can only pick up in specialty stores these days—bars of Lifebuoy, tins of Angelus Shoe Wax. He came in, paid cash, and left. Have a good one. See you next time. And then, one day in the fall of 2007, I looked up from my spiral notebook and there he was. Standing on the other side of the counter—staring at me like I’d just said something revolting.
“Why did you abandon it?”
“I… I’m sorry?”
Henry motioned to the notebook in front of me. I always kept one by the register, in the event that any brilliant ideas or observations popped in (they never did, but semper fi, you know?). Over the last four hours, I’d jotted half a page of one-line story ideas, none of which warranted a second line. The bottom half of the page had descended into a doodle of a tiny man giving the middle finger to a giant, angry eagle with razor-sharp talons. Beneath it, the caption: To Mock a Killing Bird. Sadly, this was the best idea I’d had in weeks.
“Your writing. I was curious as to why you abandoned it.”
Now it was me staring at him. For whatever reason, I was suddenly struck by the thought of a man carrying a flashlight—rifling through the cobwebbed shelves of a dark warehouse.