"Marj!"

"Christopher, child of my heart," she said. "I'm not going to carry messages back and forth for your friends. All I'm saying is that they come here and ask about you, and I thought you'd like to know."

"Do you agree with them?"

"I don't pretend to know whether I should. I think you could come back. If you wanted. You know I'd help you."

"And do what?"

"What do you do there? Sell books, do some binding on the side. There are a few places around here that are looking for someone to buy them out."

"Not in the city. It's too cutthroat there."

"Big fish in a little pond, eh?" she asked.

"Something like that."

"Well, the offer stands, there's no expiration date. I won't mention it again. Do you suppose they ever read the books they buy from me?" she added lightly.

"They might. I should go, Marj."

"Ah yes. Your bustling clientele. I'll have Anna send you the address for the naughty books. Though if I were you I'd consider nailing some of the interesting parts to the church door."

Marjorie always knows how to end a conversation on a high note.

"I knew you'd come through for me, Marj. Have a good day."

"Look after yourself, Christopher. Bye," and she hung up.

I tossed the phone back in its cradle and leaned against the counter, rubbing the bridge of my nose. Headache coming on – and no doubt more upset than I should be. Not Marjorie's fault.

They probably weren't reading the books they bought from her. Nobody has enough time in a city to do everything, after all, so we'd always neatly divided up our duties, and reading had been my job. The friends I'd had in the city might attend a lecture with me or ask my opinion about a book, but they didn't read much. To be fair, I didn't listen to a lot of music of pay any attention to fashion or politics, outside of what they told me. Splitting up our culture saved our own most precious resource in the city: time.

The thing is, time is thick on the ground in small towns, where there's so much less need for meticulous expertise. There were no readings, nightclubs, or jazz concerts in the village. That makes it sound boring, but I didn't care. There's something to be said for having the time in which to become truly experienced in a discipline, instead of merely knowing a little about all of them, passed on second-hand over cocktails.

In the end, the friends I'd had in the city didn't have much in common with me, or even with each other. What we'd shared there was just...geography.

****

"Mr. Dusk! Mr. Dusk!"

They never show up during business hours.

I could have happily stayed curled up in my chair, working on the Farmer's Guide, except that the lights were on in my apartment, which meant people knew I was there. The shop technically closes at five, but when you live where you work there's always the hazard of latecomers. You can't just ignore people when everyone in town knows you.

The boy was calling up from the street, and when I glanced out the window I saw he was standing on the back of a pickup truck laden with wood. The truck was Phillip MacKenzie's, but the wood must have belonged to the boy's father.

He saw my face at the window and gave me a broad grin and two thumbs up, then bent to speak to Phillip through the window. The truck made a lurching turn and pulled around the building next door, heading for the little loading alley in back.

"You're my last delivery today," the boy said, hauling small bundles of wood from the back of the truck's bed to the gate, where Phillip was offloading them into the sheltered back porch. "You want 'em here?"

"Sure," I said, emerging barefoot onto the porch. "Hi, Phil."

"Christopher," Phillip said, nodding to me as he stacked another bundle next to my door.

"Hope the kid's paying you for all this."

Phillip grinned. "Gas, labor, and I get to keep all the tips. Beats kicking cows around the pasture this late in the year."

"I can imagine. Business booming?" I asked the boy.

"Yes sir. Would have been here sooner but we had to drive out to The Pines and you know the roads ain't great."

"Lucas bought some wood from you, then?"

"Yep," the boy said. "Gave him a good deal too."

"Oh?"

"Like yours," he said, offhand. "My dad says I gotta do better in school, so he's gonna tutor me."

"Who, Lucas?" I asked, baffled. "Is he a teacher?"

"No, but he knows a lot. I said, what'll you gimme for the wood, and he said he didn't have much money on him, and I said he could do my homework for me, as a joke."

I chuckled. "I bet he took that well."

"Well, he said he'd show me how to do it myself. He knows a lot," the boy added. "About history and stuff. And I don't."

"Aren't you interested in history?" I asked. "You buy books about it, don't you? I'm sure you have."