“Maybe there’s nobody to shoot. Maybe the thing isn’t men at all.”
~John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
The Old Renton Book Exchange smelled like the dust and dreams and peace of a thousand different hands, many of those hands long dead, their belongings boxed and shelved and boxed and shelved and boxed until they arrived here, shelved once more, their pages as musty as memory. The book exchange smelled like games in a grandparents’ closet and a hand-me-down bookshelf in a baby’s room, like rocking chairs and log cabins, and the humidity that drips during a thunderstorm. The book exchange smelled like old friends forgotten since high school, the quiet space between work and play, the long nights lying in bed beside someone after a funeral. The Old Renton Book Exchange smelled like people.
I entered like a tourist.Pages like photographs, covers like landmarks. I wandered the aisles, studied a few spines, paused beside a familiar author. I glided through on an itinerary—twenty minutes, strict—and before I could memorize the aisles, before I could find the first-editions hidden like local secrets, before I could lose the smell of the bookstore like so many beachdwellers have lost the sound of the ocean’s roar, I left.