Check Inside the Books

The shop opens at ten, which means the shop opens at 10:20, which everyone on Calle Real understands except the shop's own signage. I have owned Silid Aklatan for nine years, inherited it from my Tita Loleng along with its debts, its cat, and its one unbreakable rule, hand-lettered above the register: CHECK INSIDE THE BOOKS.

Tita Loleng wrote the rule after the incident of 1987, which she never fully explained and I never fully believed — something involving a first-edition Noli, a land title, and a mayor's mistress, the three of which entered the shop inside one carton and left inside three separate scandals. "Books are envelopes, Odette," she used to say, tapping the sign. "The story is only the packaging."

(She also said the shop cat must always be named after a book part — hence Margination, and her predecessors Appendix, Errata, and the much-mourned Foreword — but that rule is not above the register. That rule is simply enforced by the cats.)

On the Tuesday this story starts, the bell above the door performed its one duty at 10:47, and a man came in carrying a balikbayan box the way you carry something you have decided not to feel anything about. Box men, I have learned, come in two kinds: the ones clearing a shelf and the ones clearing a house. You can tell by the knots. Shelf-clearers use tape. House-clearers use twine, tied and retied, because the box has been opened for one last look more times than they will admit.

This was twine. Retied twice.

"My mother's," he said, which box men always say, even the ones who mean my father's, because in this country the books belong to the mothers. "You buy?" I said what I always say — that I pay honestly for the good ones and kindly for the rest — and set the kettle going, because the second thing Tita Loleng taught me is that no one should watch their mother's library be appraised without a cup of something in their hands.

The books were good. Gardening manuals annotated in two inks, a rosary-flattened missal, four romance novels rebacked with electrical tape — read to death, the highest condition grade I recognize, whatever the trade may say. And at the bottom, wrapped separately in a rice sack, a 1968 high school yearbook from a town four provinces south of here.

CHECK INSIDE THE BOOKS. I checked. Page 63 of the yearbook was interrupted by an envelope — unstamped, unsealed, addressed in a schoolgirl's careful loops to a name that made the box man, who was reading over my shoulder as they always do, go very quiet. It was not his mother's name. It was his father's. And judging by the date, and by the fact that his parents — he said this slowly, sitting down at last on the stool I keep for exactly these moments — did not meet until 1974, the letter in my hand was about to make somebody's tidy family history roughly one love story longer.

"Tea first," I said, because some envelopes should not be opened standing up, and Margination, who knows her cues, came down from poetry to supervise.