Chapter 1 The Second Sunday in September

Glenna Culpepper arrived at Denby's at half past one, an hour before anyone else, because the back room did not arrange itself and she had never learned to trust it to. She set the chairs in a rough ring — eight of them, none matching, two with arms, one with a split cane seat Junie had meant to repair for three years. She wiped the long table with a rag from her coat pocket. Two doors on sawhorses, that table, and steady as a bridge. On it she placed the brown teapot with the chipped spout, the stack of mismatched cups, and a paper plate of day-old scones Junie would bring out at twenty past two, warm, pretending they were fresh, and everyone pretending not to know. The window over Court Street gave her the whole town in one frame: the pharmacy with its green cross gone gray, the insurance office, the Carding running low and brown past the backs of the buildings, the hills on the far side already turning. In another month the hills would be loud with color and then, quickly, plain. Glenna liked the plain part best. Anyone could admire October. She sat in the chair by the window and took out the spiral notebook. Eleven years of lists lived in it, in her small upright hand. The first page held the first book they had ever read, back when there were five of them and the room belonged to a hardware store, and the whole circle had fit around a card table. She turned to the last written page and read what she had set down for September, though she knew it by heart. *The Quarry Road.* A novel about a company town after the company left. She had chosen it in June, sitting on the porch with a glass of iced tea and the catalog open on her knees, and she had known at once it was right, because it was about what people do when the thing that held them together goes away. Glenna closed the notebook and put it in her bag, and then, because she was alone and the door was shut, she took out the envelope. Inside was a check made out to Junie Denby for one hundred and fifty dollars, with the memo line filled in as *coffee and pastry, Sept.* She wrote the same line every month. It was a small lie and she had told it for so long it had gone smooth as a river stone. In the beginning the money had come easy — Ralph's insurance, a sensible sum, a thing a careful man leaves his careful wife. She had used part of it on the roof and part on the furnace and part, quietly, on keeping the circle in a warm room with a working outlet and a teapot, because when the hardware store closed there had been a year when they met in cars, and she was never going to let that happen again. The insurance had thinned. Then it had run out. For the last fourteen months she had been paying from her savings, and now she was paying from her savings and also, in a way she had not yet said aloud to anyone, from the possibility of selling the house. She put the envelope back in her bag. Not yet. Junie would come through and Glenna would slip it under the register the way she always did, and no one would look at it, and the circle would have its room one more month. Outside, on the sidewalk, a woman stopped and studied the flyer taped to the glass. Glenna watched her. Young, dark ponytail, a canvas bag on one shoulder, reading the small print the way people read a bus schedule — hopeful and a little afraid of getting it wrong. The flyer said: *THE WELLERBY READING CIRCLE. Second Sunday, 2:30. All welcome. Bring a passage.* The bell over the door rang once, and the woman came in. --- Sadie Norcross had lived in Wellerby for eleven weeks and had spoken to exactly four people, three of them about a package. She had moved in June for a job that did not require her to move anywhere, which was the strange mercy of it — a software company in a city she had never visited, a salary that made her mother stop asking questions. She had signed a lease on the apartment above the pharmacy because it was cheap and because the window faced the river. She had unpacked in two days and then sat in the middle of the floor for a week wondering what she had done. There was no one to meet at work. There was no lunchroom, no hallway, no desk. There was a laptop and a wall of meetings with faces in small squares, and evenings that arrived early and stayed long. The flyer at the library had been a gift. She had found it on the corkboard by the checkout desk, between a notice for a lost cat and a card advertising gutter cleaning, and she had photographed it and then gone home and read the photograph eleven times. *Bring a passage.* She had spent a week choosing one. She had settled on three sentences from an old novel about the sea and then worried they were the wrong three sentences, too obvious, and swapped them for a paragraph about bread, and then swapped back. She had written them out by hand on an index card and then worried the card was too small. She bought a larger card. She considered buying a notebook and decided that would look like a performance. Now she stood at the bakery counter with her canvas bag against her hip and the card damp in her palm, and a woman came out from behind the register and looked at her with an expression that was not unfriendly. "Book circle?" "Yes." "Through there." The woman nodded toward a door at the far end of the counter, painted a green that had once matched the cross outside and no longer did. "You're early. Good. Glenna likes early." Sadie went through the door and down a short hall that smelled of yeast and cold butter, and into a room with a window and a ring of chairs and an old woman sitting in the chair by the window, holding a teapot. "Hello," the old woman said. "I'm Glenna. Sit anywhere. Nobody has a seat." Sadie sat. The room was warmer than the hallway. The table had a paper plate of scones and a stack of cups with a dozen different flowers on them, and a small glass vase with three sprigs of something yellow that had already begun to drop. "You're new to town," Glenna said. It was not a question. "Is it obvious?" "You walk like the sidewalk might move," Glenna said. "It won't. Wellerby's sidewalks are the one thing here that never changes." --- They came in twos and threes after that, and Sadie learned them the way you learn a new alphabet, by sound and shape. Junie Denby, who ran the bakery, forty-eight, in a flour-dusted apron she kept meaning to untie, with a laugh that arrived before she did. Annette Wickersham, sixty-six, retired English teacher, who greeted Sadie by asking what she read and then corrected her answer. Vernon Inman, seventy-one, retired from the post office, who carried a hardback in a plastic bag from the grocery store and set it on the table with care. Maeve Kilbourne, in a cardigan the color of oatmeal, who arrived last and sat nearest the door and checked her phone twice before she sat down. Blythe Yarrow, in scrubs and a jacket over them, who said she had come off a night shift and would fall asleep if anyone spoke for longer than four minutes. Katia Vreeland, who said very little and listened as though listening were a task she meant to do well. Cassie Tharp, thirty-one, with a baby in a car seat, who put the car seat on the floor by her chair and then looked at it as if it might ask her something. "Where's Romy?" Junie asked. Nobody answered for a moment. "She said she'd come," Maeve said. "She always says that," Annette said, and opened her bag. Glenna poured tea. That was the signal, and Sadie learned it the way you learn the rules of a game you have joined late: when the tea was poured, the meeting had begun. --- The book was *The Quarry Road*, and Sadie had not read it, which she had assumed would be a problem and which turned out not to be, because the circle spent the first twenty minutes arguing about whether the town in the book had been foolish or brave to stay. "Brave," Vernon said. "They had graves there. You don't leave graves." "You leave graves all the time," Annette said. "People do it every day. The question is what you tell yourself while you do it." "They told themselves it was temporary," Junie said. "That's what my mother used to say about the mill. Just until things pick up. She said it for thirty years." Maeve had not read past chapter four. She said so plainly, with an apology folded into it, and Glenna said that chapter four was the honest stopping point for anyone with a life, and Maeve laughed, one short surprised note, and Sadie felt the room loosen. Then it was Cassie's turn to read her passage, and the baby started to cry. "I'm sorry," Cassie said, and bent to the car seat, and lifted the baby out. "Read anyway," Blythe said. "It's fine. Babies are background noise." "It isn't fine, it's loud — " "Cassie." Blythe's voice was flat and kind. "I have spent nine hours listening to monitors beep. Read." So Cassie read, with the baby against her shoulder, a paragraph about a woman walking through a house at night checking the doors, and Sadie thought it was the best thing anyone had read all afternoon, partly because of the baby, and partly because Cassie's hand shook on the card and she read the last sentence twice and did not notice. When it was Sadie's turn she read her paragraph about bread, and Annette said it was a safe choice, and Vernon said he liked a safe choice now and then, and Glenna said nothing at all, only looked at her for a moment longer than was comfortable, as if she were filing something away. --- At the end, Junie stood up. Usually Junie stood up only to fetch more scones, so the room went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with tea. "So," Junie said. "There's a thing. The building's been approached. There's a firm out of the county seat, Halberd Properties, and they want the whole block, the bakery included. They've made an offer in writing." Annette set her cup down hard. "An offer you're going to refuse." "An offer I'm reading," Junie said. "It's not small." "You have a business." "I have a business that pays me about what the building's taxes cost," Junie said. "I'm not saying yes. I'm saying there's a paper with a number on it, and I've been carrying it around for a week, and I didn't know how to tell you except to tell you." The room took it in. Sadie watched them take it in — Vernon's hand flat on the table, Katia's eyes on Junie's face, Maeve already somewhere else, back at whatever waited for her at home. Cassie held the baby closer without seeming to know she had moved. Glenna poured the last of the tea, which nobody wanted, and did it anyway, which was its own kind of announcement. "Then this may be our last year," she said. Junie turned to look at her. "Glenna. I haven't decided anything." "I know," Glenna said. "I'm not deciding it for you. I'm saying the thing out loud so it isn't a surprise in June." She capped the teapot and set it in the middle of the table, on the two doors that were steady as a bridge, and looked around the ring of chairs once, slowly, at all of them, and Sadie — who was new, who had been in Wellerby eleven weeks and had spoken to four people, three of them about a package — felt, without any way to know she was right, that the old woman had been waiting a long time to say it. ---