Words between Us , livre ebook

Baker Publishing Group - Erin Bartels

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187 pages

English

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Robin Windsor has spent most of her life under an assumed name, running from her family's ignominious past. She thought she'd finally found sanctuary in her rather unremarkable used bookstore just up the street from the marina in River City, Michigan. But the store is struggling and the past is hot on her heels.When she receives an eerily familiar book in the mail on the morning of her father's scheduled execution, Robin is thrown back to the long-lost summer she met Peter Flynt, the perfect boy who ruined everything. That book--a first edition Catcher in the Rye--is soon followed by the other books she shared with Peter nearly twenty years ago, with one arriving in the mail each day. But why would Peter be making contact after all these years? And why does she have a sinking feeling that she's about to be exposed all over again?With evocative prose that recalls the classic novels we love, Erin Bartels pens a story that shows that words--the ones we say, the ones we read, and the ones we write--have more power than we imagine.*****"The Words between Us is a story to savor and share: a lyrical novel about the power of language and the search for salvation. A secondhand bookstore owner hiding from a legacy of scandal, tragedy, and heartbreak must unlock the secrets of the past to claim her happiness. I loved every sentence, every word."--Barbara Claypole White, bestselling author of The Perfect Son and The Promise between Us"Erin Bartels has done it again. She's created a story that has set up camp in my mind and now feels more like a memory, something I lived, than a piece of fiction. The added benefit is that it's a story about books, some of the best ones ever written. If you are the kind of person who finds meaning and life in the written word, then you'll find yourself hidden among these pages."--Shawn Smucker, author of Light from Distant Stars"Vividly drawn and told in expertly woven dual timelines, The Words between Us is a story about a woman who has spent years trying to escape her family's scandals and the resilience she develops along the way. Erin Bartels's characters are a treat: complex, dynamic, and so lifelike I half expected them to climb straight out of the pages."--Kathleen Barber, author of Are You Sleeping

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Christianity

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Publié par	Baker Publishing Group
Date de parution	03 septembre 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781493419302
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	3 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0461€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Endorsements
“ The Words between Us is a story to savor and share: a lyrical novel about the power of language and the search for salvation. A secondhand bookstore owner hiding from a legacy of scandal, tragedy, and heartbreak must unlock the secrets of the past to claim her happiness. I loved every sentence, every word.”
Barbara Claypole White, bestselling author of The Perfect Son and The Promise between Us
“Erin Bartels has done it again. She’s created a story that has set up camp in my mind and now feels more like a memory, something I lived, than a piece of fiction. The added benefit is that it’s a story about books, some of the best ones ever written. If you are the kind of person who finds meaning and life in the written word, then you’ll find yourself hidden among these pages.”
Shawn Smucker, author of Light from Distant Stars
“Vividly drawn and told in expertly woven dual timelines, The Words between Us is a story about a woman who has spent years trying to escape her family’s scandals and the resilience she develops along the way. Erin Bartels’s characters are a treat: complex, dynamic, and so lifelike I half expected them to climb straight out of the pages.”
Kathleen Barber, author of Are You Sleeping
Half Title Page
Books by Erin Bartels
We Hope for Better Things
The Words between Us
Title Page
Copyright Page
© 2019 by Erin Bartels
Published by Revell
a division of Baker Publishing Group
PO Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.revellbooks.com
Ebook edition created 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4934-1930-2
Scripture quotations, whether quoted or paraphrased by the characters, are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. ESV Text Edition: 2016
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Dedication
For Zach who has even more books than I do
Contents
Cover
Endorsements
Half Title Page
Books by Erin Bartels
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Map of River City, MI
Epigraph
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
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19
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21
22
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24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
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41
Acknowledgments
An Excerpt of Erin’s Debut Novel
About the Author
Back Ads
Back Cover
Map of River City, MI
Epigraph
Second hand books are wild books, homeless books.
—Virginia Woolf
1
Now
M ost people only die once. But my father is not most people. He is a monster.
He first died on a Wednesday in November 2001, when his sentence was handed down— We the members of the jury find Norman Windsor, on three counts of murder in the first degree, guilty; on the charge of extortion, guilty; on the charge of obstruction of justice, guilty; on the charge of conspiring with enemies of the United States of America, guilty. And on and on it went. Or so I imagine. I wasn’t there. The teenage daughters of the condemned generally are not present at such events.
Now, nearly eighteen years later, he will be executed. It’s the first thought I can separate from my dreams this morning, though I’ve tried for weeks as the date approached to ignore it.
I dress quickly in yesterday’s clothes without turning on the news. I don’t want to see the mob hoisting signs, the guards standing stone-faced at the prison entrance, interviews with grim relatives of the dead. All I want is for this day to be over, for that part of my life to be over. So I shut the past in behind the door, descend the creaking stairs, and emerge as always in the back room of Brick & Mortar Books, where my real family resides in black text upon yellowed pages, always ready to pick up our conversation where we last left off.
“Good morning, Professor.” The African Grey parrot offers his familiar crackly greeting.
“Good morning, Professor.” I open the cage door, wondering not for the first time who is imitating whom.
The Professor climbs onto the perch above the cage and produces the sound of a crowd cheering. I change his paper, refresh his water, and give him a terrible used pulp paperback to shred into ribbons. Every morning is the same, and there’s comfort in that. Even today.
I know the store will be dead—even more so than usual—but I can’t afford to stay closed, even if it is the day after Saint Patrick’s Day in River City, Michigan. I have never understood why the feast day of an Irish saint is so popular here, as nearly all the Catholics who settled in the area have unpronounceable surnames that end in ski . Maybe they all just need a big party to forget the misery of March for a day. Even the Lutheran church three blocks south canceled services so its members could walk in the parade. And many of those same people who painted their faces green and donned blinking four-leaf clover antennae as they marched down Centerline Road instead of going to church were on this side of the river later that night, guzzling green beer and kissing plenty of people who aren’t actually Irish, despite T-shirts asserting ancestry to the contrary.
Of all the storefronts on this section of Midway Street, there are only five that do not serve alcohol: a pet salon, a custom lighting store, a bank, an aromatherapy shop, and my bookstore. Every other business along this quarter-mile spur of Midway is a bar, making it the destination of choice for about half the sleepy city on any given weekend and about eighty percent on Saint Patrick’s Day. Not that the high traffic translates into high sales for me. They stay in the bars. I stay with my books.
Armed with more than a few years of experience with the aftermath of Saint Paddy’s, I pull on a pair of bright yellow rubber gloves— Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, Exhibit A: the gloves Mr. Windsor wore when carrying out the strangulation of Mr. Lambert —and head toward the front door with a triple-thick garbage bag and a broom. But there’s another matter to attend to before I can clean up all the trash.
I knock on the glass near the ear of a woman who is slumped against the door. “Hey!”
She doesn’t move.
Back through the store, through the maze of boxes in the back room, through the metal receiving door out to the alley. A stiff breeze whips up a torn paper shamrock chain, along with the stench of beer and vomit. I hug the east wall of the store, passing beneath the pockmarked remains of a mural of a billowing American flag. I stop. There, on the very lowest white stripe, a profane word is scrawled in black spray paint. I add the removal of the word to my mental checklist and keep walking.
The wind hits me hard as I turn onto Midway. Long shadows cast by light posts in the rising sun point toward the spire of St. Germain Catholic Church, just visible over the tops of the still bare trees, and graze the edge of the woman’s coat. She is curled up tight, as if she were developing inside an egg. Glittery green shoes poke out beneath her black parka. Her bottle-blonde hair, streaked with green dye, was probably stunning last night. Now it is matted down around her face. I poke her with my broom. She shrinks a little further into her egg.
“Hey, wake up!”
Slender fingers push back the bird’s nest of hair. One brown eye squints up at me. “Hey, Robin. There you are.”
Sarah Kukla is as slim as she was in high school, but as I hoist her to her sparkly feet she weighs three hundred pounds.
“I was knocking. You never answered.”
Her breath almost makes me drop her back onto the pavement.
“I can’t hear knocking at this door when I’m upstairs. You should have called.”
Leaning her body against mine, I manage to open the front door and dump her into a threadbare armchair. Her parka falls open, revealing black fishnets under an impossibly short green dress that looks like it was sprayed onto her body. Her cheeks and nose glow red. Her emerald eye shadow smudged with black eyeliner makes her look more like she had dressed for Halloween than Saint Paddy’s.
“Where were you last night?” I ask.
“Everywhere,” she moans.
“Come on. I’ll take you upstairs. You can wash up and get some coffee.”
Even a massive hangover cannot hide Sarah’s surprise at this offer. In my seven years at 1433 Midway I’ve never invited her or anyone else up. But I can’t send her back home to her son like this. Anyway, I do have a human decency clause in my unwritten personal privacy policy. I’m not a monster.
“Let me get The Professor back in his cage. If I’m not around for too long he chews up good books.”
The parrot is not impressed by this break in his routine and lets me know with a sharp bite on my thumb. I don’t grudge him his irritation. I kind of wish I could simply bite Sarah’s thumb and send her on her way. But I tell myself once more that it’s probably not her fault she is the way she is and I should have some compassion.
Somehow we make it up the steep staircase and into my apartment, where she looks around with an expression that grows ever more disappointed. “It’s so plain.”
“What were you expecting?”
“I dunno. It used to be more—” She looks away. “Never mind.”
She slouches onto the couch, kicks off her shoes, and pulls a fleece blanket over her head. I don’t know what this place looked like when she spent all her time here, before it was a bookstore, before I came back to town. But I know from the snores drifting back