Gary looked up from the counter, where he’d been tabulating the trade-in price for Rollie’s books. “Is it really going to be a bank?”

“Looks that way.”

“Where are they going to keep the money? There’s not even enough room for a safe.” He shook his head. “It doesn’t make sense.”

Kyle shrugged. “I guess we’ll find out.”

“Oh, and the books?” Gary told Rollie. “Two dollars cash, six dollars in-store credit.”

“I’ll take the credit,” Rollie said.

“You want us to write you a credit slip,” Kyle asked, “or do you—?”

“I’ll pick out something right now.”

Nodding, Kyle left him to it, while Gary wrote the price of each book inside the front cover in pencil before shelving all of them in the Mystery/Suspense section.

Kyle put on a CD of Celtic music he’d bought at the Renaissance Faire in Phoenix back when he and Anita were dating, and the gentle sound of pipes and mandolin filled the store. He loved this music. Half of the songs were traditional, the other half originals, and the musicians were uniformly wonderful. He probably put on this CD at least once a month. Listening to it now, he wondered if the group had ever recorded another. Or if they even still performed together. The line between musicians who became successful, he thought, and those who didn’t was completely arbitrary. It had nothing to do with talent or technical ability and everything to do with luck. For his money, these guys were every bit as good as Mumford and Sons, but they’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and for all he knew they now spent their weekends watching football or shopping at Home Depot rather than playing music.

The thought depressed him.

It was much the same with literature. Some of his favorite books were by one-hit wonders, authors who’d had a single novel published and then dropped from sight. What happened to artistic drive when the talent behind it was not nurtured? he wondered. What were those authors doing now? Were they still writing, still trying to get published, or had they given up entirely?

The loss of the empty space next door had put him in a weird mood, and he was grateful when Rollie brought his purchases to the counter. In his usual meticulous way, Rollie had calculated the price of the two books he had chosen down to the last cent, even adding the tax, and when all was said and done, they owed him a nickel, which Kyle gave him rather than writing out a store credit slip.

The store was dead for the rest of the morning, until Walter Peters, the Baptist minister, stopped by shortly before lunch. He was the only clergyman in town who was a regular reader—or at least who bought his books locally rather than online—but the minister’s taste ran to nonfiction books on sports and Las Vegas, and the store hadn’t gotten anything new in either of those areas for some time. The minister browsed the stacks for ten minutes or so, although he still left without making a purchase.