CALVIN

I had to meet with the investors.

I’d spent the night staring into the fire, drinking the last of my grandfather’s really good whiskey. It felt overly dramatic and melancholy but I didn’t care.

I realized I’d never truly been heartbroken before, my relationships with other women seeming very shallow and surface-level now, even though they’d lasted longer. This, this gut-wrenching, nauseating sense of loss felt exactly like heartbreak.

If my grandfather were alive, he’d say “the kind the poets write about.” And I’d have to agree, because I just wanted to lie down in the middle of the Big Room, weeping, until the investors came and kicked me out. I wanted to go back to my old, boring job, my old life and forget any of this ever happened. Heal my heart and try to forget a bunch of rich people were getting massages in a building that had once been America’s most important literary touchstone.

When I finally fell asleep my dreams were filled with Lucia, and when I woke, I thought I’d imagined the whole thing. Woke up in some world where the gut-punch of harsh reality didn’t exist. In the morning, making coffee, I avoided the Virginia Woolf mug. At the register, I couldn’t look at the photo of Mary Oliver or the collection by Pablo Neruda that Lucia had left there, opened to a favorite line (“Our love was born/outside the walls”).

 I could imagine us here, every morning, opening the store. Drinking cup after cup of coffee, reading out loud from whatever book we were currently reading. Laughing about a strange customer. Kissing on the armchair, in front of a fire.

 I was a goddamn mess. How had I fucked this up? Why had I bared my soul to Lucia and not asked her to at least consider staying with me. She must have thought I hadn’t meant it, the way she’d cried against the Christmas lights strung up on the trees. The way she’d run from me.

We were probably just swept up in the moment.

I was an idiot. I’d only said it because fear had suddenly raced up my spine, freezing my thoughts. Halting my decisions.

And making Lucia cry would now go down as the shittiest thing I’d done in my entire life.

I was mindlessly shelving books, looking for a distraction before the meeting, when an envelope flew through my legs, landing about a foot in front of me. Calvin, it said on the front.

My grandfather’s letter—the one his lawyer said he’d left for me with his will. I scooped it up, amazed. After his lawyer had given me the inheritance news, I’d completely forgotten about this. Must have shoved it this bookshelf in a total daze.

I sat back down, opening it up. The letter was worn yellow, the creases soft, the handwriting faded and barely legible. I thought he’d written it recently, which was silly. It wasn’t like he’d written it the day before he died, but in my mind, I thought of it that way. He must have written it when he made his will, which might have been ages ago.

Dear Calvin, it started:

I think it is very likely that you’re reading this letter and hating me right about now. I mean, first I decided to die (very inconsiderate) and then I left you with a sinking ship in your hands. I don’t know when you’re reading this, but unless I won some kind of lottery, it’s likely you’re inheriting The Mad Ones and its debt, which I am deeply sorry for. There is no excuse and please do not think I didn’t try to stop this; I did. But I think, at a certain point, The Mad Ones would have benefited from a different leader, someone different from me, who had a bit more business sense. Less of a poet’s heart—because really, at the end of the day, all I wanted was a space to be surrounded by words and the incredible people that create them. Making money, turning a profit, was never the goal and maybe it should have been. I wish, for your sake, I was filled with more regret about that, but I’m really not, Cal. I have lived my life exactly the way I wanted, in as pure a way as possible. Not driven by the choices or demands of others. Not hemmed in by the pressures of society.

This is not to say my life has been easy, even though it might have appeared to be: I suffered and struggled, fought and lost hope. Felt lost and sad, listless and bored. I think it’s easy, when you live in paradise, doing your dream job, to paint my life in broad strokes: aging bohemian. Weirdo. Old hippie. I am all of those things, and proudly. But I’m a human being like everyone else—life up here was sometimes very hard. When your grandmother died, the first few years after her accident were only darkness, my only pinprick of light your summer visits.

I say all of this not to make you scared of inheriting The Mad Ones; quite the opposite. I just want you to know the full reality of a wilder life. I would say I went to bed happier, more content than many—that happens when your life choices align with your values.

But life still happens. The anxiety will chase you, depression can find you, and one night, while she’s picking up milk at the store, your soulmate might drive off the road and die, years before she was supposed to.

Your life is different now, Calvin, and it’s quite possible you no longer have the love and hunger for books that I saw in you during our summers together. You may want to burn this shambling old shack to the ground—and I wouldn’t blame you.

First of all, I’m dead, so who gives a shit? Not me. But secondly, your life might be brimming over with happiness and moving up here, taking this over, could be the absolute last thing you want to do. So don’t do it. I left it to you not as a punishment or a burden, not to pressure you into the shape of the life I had lived. I left it to you because, years ago, it was beyond obvious to me that you had that same tender poet’s soul, the heart of a book-lover, the desire for solitude and tranquility. And you’re different from me—you could do the things The Mad Ones needs to stay afloat.

Also, I just fucking believe in you, Calvin. So whatever choice you make, make it your choice. If not, you’ll only spend the rest of your life regretting it.

If I didn’t say it enough: I love you, very much. Think of me when you read Shel Silverstein to your children. Ask them questions. Help them open up their world.

The only ones for me, Calvin, are the mad ones.

I couldn’t turn around, so convinced was I that my grandfather would be walking out into the Big Room, mid-laugh, whiskey in one hand and a book in the other.

My grandfather hadn’t wanted me to live a life of regret, and yet the five years before he died I visited him twice, saw him at a few holiday gatherings. “Too busy,” I’d always said, “too stressed with work,” as if either of those things were actual excuses. And meanwhile, he stayed up here, continuing to think the world of me, even as I stayed away.

Whatever choice you make, make it your choice.

And just like that, I knew what I had to do.

It was going to be so much fucking work. And I had no plan, no idea, no fucking clue how to run a bookstore, let alone one that had completely fallen to pieces.

Nothing would be easy about this. Nothing in my life would be the same. The thought of the countless knots of my life I’d have to undo made me dizzy. And yet.

And yet. My grandfather believed in me. Lucia had believed in me.

I looked around, at this place I loved so much, and saw something: a future.

Maybe it was time to go a little mad.

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