Book clubs social dynamics are interesting. We have fiction and nonfiction book clubs. We have a women’s fiction club called Women’s Wine and Lit—about twelve people, three of them men. There’s the Science Fiction Nerd Book club—about seven diehards, four men and three women. I even have a Classics-Only Group for Serious Readers. Seven women, one man, an ex-literature professor.

Sometimes the people in the book clubs will vehemently disagree. You want an argument? Try a book with a mix of religion and politics together and you can have a literary firestorm. One night a woman smashed her pumpkin bread into another woman’s face to “make her shut up.” They were neighbors, too. The neighbor with pumpkin bread on her face actually picked up a plate to swing it, but I caught it in midflight like a frisbee.

In a women’s-only ten-member weekly fiction book club named Book Babes, the members have been together about twenty years. They come from all of the islands.

They will ardently discuss every aspect of the book from character development to the theme, but they’ll later get into “women talk,” which is often hilarious. If their husbands/boyfriends only knew what their wives talked about in book club, they’d want to curl up and die.

I, or a member of my small staff, also host a chess group twice a month. One of our members won a junior national’s champion. Board Game Night on Friday nights. Trivial Pursuit on Saturday nights. And on Sunday night, after hours, we host about forty people who are starting a new church. The minister is young and smart and doesn’t beat people over the head with a Bible. Plus, he loves science and history, and buys a bunch of books from me on both.

We serve all the people in the groups scrumptious cake, tea, coffee, and other treats, and inevitably they buy books and other stuff on the way out.

In short, I do whatever I can to stay in business.

I’m at Evie’s Books, Cake, and Tea at least fifty hours a week. I love being here, I love being around books and other people who love books. Books distracted me from a lot of terror and fear and overwhelming guilt during my childhood and beyond, because I could dive into another world and disappear.

I do not like terror, I do not like fear or guilt, but I do like books. I read all the time and have stacks and stacks of books at home that often topple over. It’s almost embarrassing how many I have. I could well be a book hoarder, but I know this: Books have saved my life.

* * *

“Hello, Mom, hello, aunts,” I said, walking into Rose Bloom Cottage, the sprawling, quirky two-story white home that my mother and aunts grew up in. It is eighty-five years old and sits on twelve acres. Part of the property overlooks the ocean, where we have a small beach. You can sit and look at the lights twinkling on the other three islands nearby.