The Third Almost

The letter from the landlord's office was on the counter for four days before Eszter opened it, which Bálint noticed and said nothing about, because he had learned, in eleven years of shelving her stock and drinking her coffee, that Eszter opened bad news on her own schedule and not one day earlier.

"It's the same as the last two times," she said, when she finally did. "They want to sell the building. Some group. They used the word 'portfolio.'"

"They used it last time too."

"I know."

Bálint had come to her in 2013 with a degree he wasn't using and a marriage that had just ended, and she had given him a key and told him the fiction section was alphabetized by a system she'd invented and would explain eventually, and eleven years later he still didn't fully understand the system, and she still hadn't explained it, and neither of them thought this was strange anymore.

The shop was called Kettő Könyv — Two Books — a name Eszter's mother had chosen for reasons that involved a joke about a marriage that Eszter had never fully understood and her mother had died before clarifying, so the name simply meant, now, the shop, the way a person's name stops meaning anything about them after enough years of just being what you call them.

They had almost closed in 2016, when the chain store opened two streets over and lasted four years before folding itself, and they had almost closed in 2020 for reasons that needed no explanation, and now this was the third almost, and Eszter found that she was tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.

"Mrs. Fehér will ask," Bálint said. "She'll want to know if she should stop putting things on hold."

Mrs. Fehér came in every Thursday and held four or five books for a week at a time before deciding against all of them, a ritual that cost the shop nothing and gave Mrs. Fehér, Eszter suspected, the sensation of being a person with unread books waiting for her, which was a different and better feeling than being a person who read.

"Don't tell her yet."

"She'll ask directly. You know she will."

"Then I'll answer directly and tell her I don't know, which is true."

Eszter went to the back room, where the accounts lived in a cardboard box that Bálint had tried, twice, to digitize, and she did the thing she always did when a letter like this arrived, which was to take out the ledger from the year her mother died and read a few pages, not for the numbers, which meant nothing to her anymore, but for the handwriting, which slanted the same way Eszter's did, which was the only proof she had that this had been inherited rather than chosen.

At six, Bálint locked the door and turned the sign, and instead of leaving he sat down across from her with two coffees, which meant he intended to talk about something, and Eszter braced for the conversation she'd been avoiding, the one where he told her he'd found something else, something that paid, something with a future that wasn't measured in almosts.

"I called my cousin," he said instead. "The one who does contracts. He says if it's really a sale, we have sixty days minimum before anyone can force anything, probably ninety. That's not nothing."

"Ninety days."

"It's not nothing," he said again, like he was trying to convince himself as much as her, and Eszter looked at him — at the gray that had come into his hair sometime in the last two years without her quite noticing when — and thought that whatever else this shop had failed to be, it had at least been the place where he'd stopped being the man whose marriage had ended and started being, simply, Bálint, who alphabetized fiction by a system nobody else understood.

"Ninety days," she agreed, and didn't say what she was thinking, which was that ninety days was exactly enough time to decide something and not nearly enough time to be ready for it, and that she had learned this same lesson twice before and clearly hadn't learned it at all.

Outside, the Danube did what it always did, which was continue, indifferent to almosts, and Mrs. Fehér's held books sat on their shelf behind the counter, waiting for a Thursday that would come whether or not there was still a shop to hold them in.

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