By the time we closed the shop at seven p.m. that first day, I was some dazzling combination of exhausted and exhilarated that had me smiling nonstop, but also very much in need of a comfy chair and an ottoman. Mart locked the front door, and I collapsed in the chair-and-a-half by the fiction section, curling my feet up under me and dropping my head back on the overstuffed cushion.
“That was A.MA.ZING.” Mart said as she slumped to the floor against the bookshelf next to me. “There must have been 1,000 people through here today.”
“1,312 to be exact.”
“You were counting?!”
I held up the silver counter-clicker I’d picked up at an office supply store when I’d visited Salisbury last week. “I come prepared.”
“Love it! So over 1,300 people. Wow. No wonder we’re so tired.”
“Tired doesn’t eve
