But now, three years out, Copper Creek’s very presence in a bookstore embarrassed him. Not because he thought it wasn’t a good book—that hardly seemed to matter, somehow—but because he was pretty sure, whenever he did see it, that it was one of the same copies he’d seen the first time he’d looked. He was pretty sure he’d seen the same two or three thousand copies, and according to his royalty statements was seeing them still. Copper Creek was remaindered in hardcover, and its paperback release—a small run—had not been reprinted. So it was now like going home and seeing some high school friend who used to brag about big plans hanging around at a Sheetz gas station, or watching a graying hometown band play the same seedy bar. He felt like hiding the book now, or buying it at whatever discounted cost it was offered, taking it home, and peeling off the discount sticker. Sobering it up, like a drunken, bawdy aunt, among the O’Connors and Orwells and O’Haras on his own shelves. Sometimes he did this, and he wondered if he could deduct the cost of ashamedly buying his own novel from his taxes as a professional expense.

Occasionally—very occasionally—a bookstore clerk would notice that the name on his credit card and the name on Copper Creek’s spine matched, and would make a comment. “They don’t give you extra copies? Damn,” one particularly observant airport clerk had remarked. The worst and most common comment went something like this: “I gotta write a book one of these days” or, head-shakingly, “Man, if I ever write my book …” as if whatever book the clerk might write would obliterate every other existing book, as if Eric’s book—the handsome, remaindered Copper Creek—was actively interfering with the clerk’s book writing. If only the clerk didn’t have to sit around putting sale stickers on Copper Creek all day, he or she might actually get some writing done. Eric was always tempted to say, “Well, why don’t you just write the goddamn book?” or “No one cares why you got a neck tattoo!” But, being the mild-mannered book author he was, he would instead say thank you, no he did not need a bag, and yes he would like a receipt.

This feeling of outrage and disappointment was not something he could confess to anyone at the Ranch, not even Marianne, who had diligently worked on the same manuscript for years, without expecting anything in return. It was not a feeling he could share with people whose only goal was to write their one book and have it published. They would have to find out for themselves how each goal opened up into a bigger one, like hideously distorted nesting dolls, how ever-elusive publication became ever-elusive praise, prizes, more publications, bigger advances, a movie deal.