Reading speed test

The bell above the door of Halloway's Books rang twice, the way it always did when the wind came in off the harbor. Nell looked up from the stack of returns she was pricing and saw a woman shaking rain from a green umbrella.

“I'm looking for a book,” the woman said, which made Nell smile, because that is what everyone says, and it is never quite true. People are usually looking for a feeling. They want the way a certain summer felt, or the voice of a grandmother who read aloud, or the particular hush of a snowy afternoon with nowhere to be.

“Do you remember anything about it?” Nell asked.

The woman thought for a moment. “There was a lighthouse. And a girl who kept a list of every ship that passed. I read it when I was eleven, and I think I have been trying to find it again for thirty years.”

Nell set down her pencil. Thirty years was a long time to carry a lighthouse around. She walked the woman past the cookbooks and the travel guides, past the table of new releases that smelled of fresh ink, to the back corner where the children's shelves leaned against each other like old friends.

They searched together for most of an hour. They pulled out books with blue covers and books with boats and one book that turned out to be about a very determined goat. The rain softened to a drizzle. Someone put the kettle on in the back room.

At last, on the bottom shelf, wedged behind a dictionary, Nell found a thin paperback with a cracked spine and a lighthouse on the cover. The woman held it with both hands and did not open it right away.

“What if it isn't as good as I remember?” she asked.

“Then you'll have two good memories,” Nell said. “The first time, and today.”