Her favorite store, which was only two or three blocks away from where she and Sophie lived that year, depending on how you walked, was full of books, and it was also full of things. Sometimes in the afternoon, when she and her boyfriend ran out of things to talk about, which was often enough, they went to the bookstore. He looked at the books. She looked at everything. Some of the things that the store had: oversize fashion magazines from the 1940s and ’50s; vintage maps from back when states were just scraggly lines, just guesses; railroad spikes that had been made into bottle openers. There was a magnifying glass built out of a knotted clunk of iron with a foggy lens that magically made even the most serious face, her boyfriend’s face, for example, evaporate into a vague and bloated and goofy smile that never failed to make her laugh. Things like that. “How good does this book smell,” she said, pulling a paperback from a shelf. “Like dust on a bottle of vanilla.” She turned it to read the front.
