Tatnuck Bookseller

The smell was one part books, one part food, and one part warehouse. The floor was water-damaged hardwood. My mom met my stepdad there — in the poetry section, they said, although they refused to disclose more details.

During the summer after fourth grade, we moved from the condo downtown across the street from the parking lot where my stepdad used to do a lap to pick up pieces of broken glass before watching me roller-blade around and around in circles.

Now we had a two-story house with a big backyard and Christmas-light-ready porch. It happened just in time for me to be deemed old enough to walk unescorted to nearby Beaver Brook Park (with the dog) and convenience store (for candy). But my favorite destination was Tatnuck Bookseller.

Here are a few momentous things that happened there…

In elementary school:

• My mom always insisted that the end of The Giver was a metaphor for Jonas’ death, and I insisted she thought everything was a metaphor for death and couldn’t she lighten up? Lois Lowry visited Tatnuck for a book-signing, and I asked the author herself to settle the debate. She said she meant for Jonas to survive and even joked about making pins that said “Jonas lives” (a wink toward “Frodo lives”). When I jubilantly relayed to my mom that I was right the whole time, her maddening response was “Yes, that’s one interpretation.”
• In fifth grade, I was drawn into the New Age section by the smell of incense, the sight of colorful tapestries and crystals, and my own burgeoning boho aesthetic. For a dizzying two weeks, I was a practicing Wiccan, schlepping my spell book into the woods next to Fallon Memorial Hospital and inducing one Catholic classmate to call me in a panic and attempt to save my soul.
• When a new Harry Potter book came out, I went to the release party dressed in a big purple pillowcase with a giant cardboard pair of ears and stayed up unthinkably late to claim my copy at midnight.

In middle school:

• Each of the tables at the restaurant had a transparent top over décor themed for famous movies and books. During my earliest forays into unsupervised socializing, my friend Jelisa and I would ask for the Titanic one, the better to magnify our proximity to Leo. We’d share an order of sweet potato fries with tap water that she’d doctor with so much lemon and sugar it turned into lemonade, and I think about this every time I eat sweet potato fries.
• On my 13th birthday, my mom and sibling took me to brunch at Tatnuck. They soberly informed me that now I was a teenager, I was old enough to know that I’m actually half-angel, half-kiwi fruit, and am only 3 feet tall, but everyone just walks around on their knees so I don’t feel bad about it.
• The day the last Series of Unfortunate Events book came out, I literally ran from my school bus stop to Tatnuck to pick up my copy. It felt like the new jungle I’d found myself struggling to navigate, with its rotating class schedules, snowy-white eyeshadow, and unspoken social conventions that I couldn’t stop being punished for breaking, had expanded into a tangled mass and was pursuing me. The faster I ran, the bigger it grew, the closer it gained on me until I could feel its humidity hot against my back.
  
  But then the door shut behind me in the flier-encrusted vestibule, and everything was quiet and muted, and I walked purposefully to the children’s section as my heart rate slowed. The only sounds were the ancient wooden floorboards creaking beneath my sneakers and the rustling of pages from the aisles around me. And I smelled the books and the food and the warehouse, and I was safe.