Ever Since I Can Remember

The Morrison reprints arrived on a Tuesday, forty-eight copies in two boxes that the UPS driver left on the sidewalk because the front door of Cornerstone Books stuck in the heat and Naomi Okafor had not yet gotten around to planing it down, though she’d watched the YouTube tutorial twice. She’d need a hand plane, which cost sixty dollars. She did not have sixty dollars for a hand plane. She had sixty dollars for the water bill, which was sixty dollars for the water bill.

She was kneeling behind the counter, logging the shipment in her inventory ledger — actual paper, actual pen, because the spreadsheet software had updated itself into an interface she refused to learn — when the bell above the door rang. She didn’t look up. She knew who it was.

Elliot. Tuesday regular. Sixth visit. Browsed for exactly twenty-two minutes. Picked up Song of Solomon, read the first page standing, put it back. Picked up something from the poetry shelf, held it for ten minutes, returned it. Bought nothing. Left. Said “See you Thursday” on the way out, as if this were an arrangement they’d agreed on.

She heard him move through the store. He had a particular walk — unhurried, specific, as though every step were a decision rather than a habit. He stopped at the Morrison shelf. She heard the soft friction of a spine pulled from between its neighbors.

She counted Morrisons. Six Beloved. Four Song of Solomon. Three Sula. One Tar Baby, which she kept in stock for reasons that had more to do with stubbornness than sales data. Two The Bluest Eye. She wrote the numbers in the ledger, the pen catching on a water stain she’d been ignoring since January.

Elliot put the book back.

She looked up. He was standing at the shelf with his hands in his jacket pockets, studying the spines like a man at a museum where he already knew the collection and was checking whether anything had moved.

“You know you can buy one,” she said.

He turned. He had a face that registered surprise slowly, like he’d forgotten other people were present and was recalibrating. He was — she catalogued this the way she catalogued everything, with the precision of a woman who kept books for a living — tall, broad-shouldered, dark-skinned, with close-cropped hair that was going gray at the temples in a way that didn’t track with the rest of him. He looked forty. His temples looked sixty. She’d noticed this the second time he came in and filed it under not your business.

“I’m working up to it,” he said.

“You’ve been working up to Song of Solomon for three weeks.”

“It’s a big commitment. You start Morrison, you can’t stop. I need to be sure I have the bandwidth.”

“The bandwidth.”

“Emotional bandwidth. She requires your full attention and she doesn’t give it back. Like certain people I could name.” He looked at her. “Present company unimplicated.”

Naomi closed the ledger. “You’re the only person I’ve ever met who uses ‘unimplicated’ in casual conversation.”

“Thank you.”

“It wasn’t a compliment.”

He laughed. It was the kind of laugh that sounded like it had been built over time, layered and worn smooth. She liked his laugh and resented liking it. She did not have room in her operational budget for liking the laugh of a man who came to her store twice a week and refused to contribute to her revenue.

He was looking at the ceiling. He did this every visit — tipped his head back and studied the exposed wooden beams as though they were trying to tell him something. The beams were original, 1923, installed when the building was constructed as a boarding house. She knew this because her aunt Vivian, who’d left Naomi the inheritance that became Cornerstone Books, had researched the property before buying it. The building had been a boarding house, then a dry cleaner, then empty for eleven years, then hers.

“The wood remembers the drought of 1876,” Elliot said, reaching up to brush his fingers across the nearest beam. His touch was light, reverent, the way a person touches a scar.

Naomi watched him. “That beam’s from 1923.”

“The tree wasn’t.”

She opened the ledger to the back page, where she kept notes that didn’t belong anywhere else — the plumber’s number, the date the roof last leaked, the name of the city inspector who’d been almost human to her. She wrote: Tuesday regular. Drought of 1876. Tree claim.

Below it, from previous weeks: Knows original floor plan — second entrance, east side, bricked up. References “pharmacy on the corner” — green awning — no pharmacy in my lifetime. And below that: Still hasn’t bought anything. Possible problem.

The letter from Meridian Development Group arrived on a Wednesday. She found it between the electric bill and a reminder from her dentist. The language was soft — exploring opportunities, discuss the property’s future, fair market assessment — which meant they’d already decided what the property was worth and the discussion would be about how quickly she could be made to agree.

She put the letter on the counter and looked at it the way she looked at the water stain in the ledger: a thing she’d been expecting that was no less terrible for being expected.

The church where her grandmother had been baptized was a condo now, three blocks east. Twenty-one units, rooftop deck, starting at $540,000. The barbecue restaurant where her mother had celebrated every birthday until Naomi was twelve was a boutique selling candles that cost more than her daily revenue. The shoe repair place, the laundromat, the West Indian grocery with the hand-painted sign — all of them converted or demolished or simply gone, replaced by things that were new and clean and expensive and for nobody she knew.

Cornerstone Books was still here. The lease renewal was in four months. She was, as always, six months from not being.

On Thursday, Elliot walked in and she watched him with new eyes. He went straight to the beams. He ran his hand along the wood. He walked the perimeter of the store slowly, stopping at the east wall — the one she now knew, because she’d checked, once held the second entrance he’d described.

He paused at the doorframe and traced the carved symbol there with his thumb. The Sankofa. A bird with its head turned backward, feet facing forward. It had been there when her aunt bought the building. Naomi had never looked into it. She’d noticed it the way you notice an uneven floorboard — a feature of the space, not a question.

“Who told you about the original floor plan?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“The east entrance. You mentioned it three weeks ago. You were right. How did you know?”

Elliot put his hands in his pockets. He had an expression she was learning to read — the one he wore when he’d said something he shouldn’t have and was calculating how much truth would serve as a plausible explanation. “I’m interested in old buildings.”

“So is Meridian Development Group.”

The name landed between them. She saw it register. Not guilt — she’d have expected guilt from a man caught scouting. Something else. Something she couldn’t catalog.

“You got a letter,” he said.

“How did you know it was a letter?”

“Because it’s always a letter first. Then a phone call. Then someone in a blazer shows up and says the word partnership until you can’t hear it anymore.”

She looked at him for a long time. “You sound like you’ve done this before.”

“I’ve watched it happen before.”

“From which side?”

He didn’t answer. He walked to the poetry shelf, selected the Lucille Clifton, held it. He stood there with the book in both hands, not opening it, and she could see the conversation closing in him — lights going off in sequence from back to front.

“Mr. Lassiter comes in once a month and takes one of those,” she said. She didn’t know why she said it except that the silence had become structural, load-bearing, and she needed to put something under it before it cracked.

“Takes?”

“Steals. A middle-aged man in a gray coat. He thinks I don’t see him. I’ve started leaving the Clifton slightly forward on the shelf so he doesn’t have to reach.”

Elliot looked at her. She expected a joke. His face was doing something different — not smiling, not sad, but open in a way that reminded her of the beams when the late-afternoon light hit them and you could see the grain.

“She was funnier than people give her credit for,” he said. Not quite offhand, not quite heavy.

“You talk about her like you knew her.”

“I talk about everyone like I knew them. It’s a character flaw.”

He put the Clifton back. Forward on the shelf, where she’d have left it.

The Morrison argument happened on a Tuesday. A woman named Rhonda, a semi-regular who bought one literary novel a month and always asked Naomi’s opinion, wanted to start Morrison but was intimidated. Naomi recommended The Bluest Eye — the tightest, the most devastating per page, a book that didn’t let you hide.

Elliot, who was pretending to browse the history section six feet away, said, “Start with Tar Baby.”

Naomi turned. “Excuse me?”

“Tar Baby. It’s where her prose is the most free. It’s messy and beautiful and it doesn’t behave.”

“Nobody starts with Tar Baby.”

“Nobody should start with The Bluest Eye either. You hand someone that book first and half the time they don’t come back. It’s too much pain too soon. Tar Baby has pain in it but it also has the Caribbean and a strange man hiding in a closet and sentences that feel like weather. It’s an entry point. It lets you fall in love with how she writes before she breaks your heart with what she writes about.”

Rhonda looked between them with the expression of a person who had asked a simple question and received a custody battle.

“Tar Baby is contrarian nostalgia,” Naomi said.

“It’s not nostalgia if you were there.”

The words landed wrong. Not wrong as in incorrect — wrong as in weighted, as if they carried a meaning he hadn’t intended to pack into them. He stopped talking. For a full minute he looked at the shelf without seeing it, and Naomi felt the conversation shift beneath her the way the floor shifted on humid days, old wood remembering a different shape.

“I mean,” he said. “As a reader. If you were there as a reader, when it first came out. The reception was —”

“You weren’t there when it came out. That was 1981.”

“I read a lot about that period.” He took Tar Baby off the shelf and handed it to Rhonda. “Trust me. Start here. If you hate it, she” — nodding at Naomi — “will sell you Beloved at a discount.”

“I will not.”

“She absolutely will.”

Rhonda bought Tar Baby. After she left, Naomi said, “You just made your first sale in my store and it was the wrong book.”

“There’s no wrong Morrison.”

“There are twelve wrong Morrisons and Tar Baby is number four.”

He was standing close to the counter now. She could see the gray at his temples, and up close it looked less like aging and more like weather — the kind of gray a building gets, not a person. She wrote in the ledger: “Not nostalgia if you were there.” Re: Morrison, Tar Baby, 1981. He was not alive in 1981. He is not sixty-five. File this.

“You know what I love about how you talk about books?” he said.

She looked up.

“You talk about them like they’re people who can let you down.”

She didn’t know what to do with that. She reorganized the display table. He watched her move books around without pattern or purpose and had the grace not to comment.

“You know someone named Dolores,” she said, not looking at him. She’d remembered it from two visits ago — his slip, then the deflection. “You said I was the kind of person Dolores would have liked.”

“I did say that.”

“Who is she?”

“Someone who built something. In a place where building was not easy and not safe, and she did it anyway, and it lasted longer than anyone expected, including her.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the truest thing I can say right now.” He pulled on his jacket. “See you Thursday.”

She confronted him on a Thursday in October. The Meridian letter had been followed by a phone call, which had been followed by another letter, which had been followed by a man in a blazer who said partnership three times in the first minute and opportunity four times and fair twice, which was how she knew the offer would be neither. She’d found Meridian’s public filings — they’d been buying property on her block for two years. Quiet acquisitions. Patient. The strategy of money that has time.

Elliot walked in at 2:15, his usual time, and she was standing behind the counter with the filings printed out and the ledger open to the back page where she kept his list.

“Who are you working for?” she said.

He stopped. He read her face the way he read book spines — carefully, as if something might have moved.

“I found the filings. Meridian has six properties on this block. Six. And you show up eight weeks ago asking about the building, the floor plan, the history, the lease —”

“I never asked about the lease.”

“You asked about the neighborhood. You asked which businesses were original and which were new. You asked how long I’d been open. That’s due diligence. That’s a report.”

“Naomi —”

“Don’t. You come in here twice a week and you’re charming and you know things you shouldn’t know and you never buy anything, and I have been so stupid. I’ve been sitting here arguing about Morrison with a man who’s pricing my building.”

Elliot stood very still. He had his hands at his sides, not in his pockets, and she noticed this because he always put his hands in his pockets. The absence was louder than anything he could have said.

“You should leave,” she said.

He didn’t leave. He walked to the folding chair she kept near the poetry section — the one she sat in during slow afternoons, the one with the wobble she’d stabilized with a folded receipt — and he sat down.

“You can call the police,” he said. “But I should warn you that I’ve been arrested in this neighborhood before and it was very boring both times.”

“Get out of my store.”

“The Sankofa on your doorframe. The bird facing backward.” His voice was different now. Stripped. The voice of a man setting down boxes he’d been holding so long his arms had forgotten they were heavy. “It was carved by a woman named Dolores Washington on the night of November 14th, 1919. Her son Clifford came home from France. He’d been in the 369th Infantry — the Harlem Hellfighters, though Clifford hated that name, said it was something white newspapers made up so they wouldn’t have to just say the regiment was better than theirs. Dolores ran this building as a boarding house. She took in Black travelers twenty-six years before the Green Book made such things official. She carved the Sankofa because Clifford told her about a man he’d met in Paris who had the symbol tattooed on his forearm, and it meant go back and get it, and Dolores said that was exactly what her son had done.”

Naomi didn’t move.

“There was a second Sankofa,” Elliot said. “On the back door. Same hand. She carved it the following spring. It was painted over in 1961 when the building changed hands.”

“Stop.”

“The beams above your head are Douglas fir, logged in the Cascades in 1922. The rings show a drought year in 1876 — thin growth, tight grain. I know this because I can read them the way you read a ledger. Not because I’m clever. Because I’ve been reading things for a very long time.”

“I said stop.”

“I’m three hundred and forty-seven years old.” He said it the way she’d heard people say they were diabetic — not dramatic, not pained, just practiced. The specific flatness of a fact stated so many times it had lost its ability to shock the speaker, though it still worked on everyone else. “I don’t know why. I’ve never known why. I don’t drink blood. I don’t turn into anything. I just don’t die and I don’t age and I have watched every neighborhood I have ever loved get swallowed, and I keep coming back to this building because the beams are original and the Sankofa is still on the door and you leave the Clifton forward on the shelf for a man who steals poetry, and I have been alive long enough to know what that means about a person.”

The store was quiet. Outside, a truck passed, its vibration traveling through the floor and into Naomi’s shoes. The late-afternoon light came through the front window at the angle that caught the beam grain, and she hated that she noticed this right now because it made everything he’d said feel possible.

“You’re insane,” she said.

“That is also possible.”

“People don’t live for three hundred years.”

“Buildings do.” He looked at the beams. “That wood has been here for a hundred and three years and nobody thinks it’s insane. It just sits there, recording time, and everyone walks under it without looking up.”

She picked up the phone and put it down. She picked up the ledger and closed it. She stood behind her counter in her store — her aunt’s store, her aunt’s inheritance, the building that Dolores Washington had made into a home for people who needed one — and she looked at a man sitting in a folding chair who was either delusional or the most exhausted person she’d ever met, and she couldn’t tell the difference.

“Leave,” she said. Quieter this time.

He stood. He folded the chair and leaned it against the wall, which was where she kept it, which meant he’d noticed where she kept it. He walked to the door. He stopped with his hand on the frame, near the Sankofa, and she saw his thumb brush the carved bird, and this time she understood the gesture was not curiosity. It was greeting.

“The back door,” he said. “Check the paint.”

She didn’t check the paint for three days. She went about the business of running a bookstore — stocking, counting, selling, logging — with the rigid focus of a woman using routine as architecture, building walls around a room she was not ready to enter.

On Monday she checked the back door.

The paint was there. Layered thick, slightly bubbled at the edges from years of humidity. She could feel the ridges of something beneath it with her fingertips — a shape, deliberate, the size of her palm. She went to the hardware store, bought a scraping tool for $4.99 and a bottle of paint stripper for $7.50. She worked on the back door for two hours in the alley behind the store, her knees on cardboard, the smell of solvent making her eyes water, the sounds of the block behind her — car stereos, somebody’s dog, the clatter from the Eritrean restaurant’s kitchen exhaust.

Under three layers of paint — white over green over white — the second Sankofa emerged. Smaller than the one on the front doorframe. The same hand. A bird facing backward, feet forward, the beak slightly open as if mid-sentence.

She sat on the cardboard and looked at it. Her phone was in her pocket. She did not call anyone.

On Tuesday she went to the D.C. Historical Society. She’d called ahead, asked about the 1400 block, asked about boarding houses, asked about a family named Washington. The archivist — a young woman who treated the inquiry with the seriousness of surgery — brought out a box of photographs from the Anacostia Community Museum’s overflow collection. Naomi found it in the third folder: a black-and-white image, 1923, the building she stood in every day. The sign over the door read WASHINGTON. A woman stood on the front step, straight-backed, unsmiling, with one hand on the doorframe.

On Wednesday she looked up Washington descendants in the D.C. area. She found a listing for a Veronica Washington-Banks in Southeast. She called the number. An older woman answered with the guarded courtesy of someone who still answered unknown numbers out of principle. Naomi explained who she was, where she was calling from, what she’d found under the paint.

Veronica Washington-Banks cried. She said her great-aunt Dolores was a woman who never backed down from anything, including a carving knife and a Douglas fir doorframe. She said she hadn’t known the second Sankofa existed. She said her family had lost track of the building in the 1960s when the neighborhood started changing the first time. She asked Naomi if she could come see it.

Naomi said yes. She hung up. She sat behind the counter with the ledger open and read her own entries: drought of 1876. pharmacy with green awning. not nostalgia if you were there. Dolores. She read them and each line was a record, each record a year she hadn’t been present for, each absence suddenly legible.

She found him on Thursday. He was sitting on a bench across the street from the store, in the spot where — she’d checked the transit authority archives online at two in the morning — a bus stop had served the neighborhood until the routes were redrawn in 1973. He was wearing the same jacket. He looked the same. Of course he looked the same.

She sat down next to him. She didn’t say I believe you. She didn’t know if she believed him. She knew that the Sankofa was under the paint. She knew that the photograph showed the Washingtons. She knew that Veronica Washington-Banks had cried on the phone with a stranger, and that no living person she could account for would have known what was under three layers of paint on a door that hadn’t been stripped in sixty-five years.

“Dolores’s great-niece is listed in the D.C. phonebook,” Naomi said. “I called her. She cried.”

Elliot turned his head. His eyes were wet, or it was the light.

“Good,” he said. Just: good.

“You owe me for the Morrison. You’ve been reading page one for three months.”

“I keep starting it because I keep trying to read it the way you would. The way you’d hear the sentences. The rhythm you’d find.” He looked at her. “I can’t get past the first page because every sentence makes me think of what you’d say about it and then I lose the sentence entirely.”

“That’s either the best line anyone’s ever used on me or the worst.”

“It’s not a line.”

“That’s what makes it either the best or the worst.”

The street was doing what the street did at this hour — the incense vendor on the corner folding his table, the woman from the Eritrean restaurant sweeping her sidewalk with the broom she refused to replace because it still worked, a group of teenagers passing with the boneless confidence of people who believe the neighborhood is theirs, which it is, for now, which is the only way anything is ever anyone’s.

“It’s Tuesday,” Elliot said.

“It is.”

“I have a question about Tar Baby.”

“You don’t own Tar Baby. You sold my copy to Rhonda.”

“I read it in 1981.”

The sentence sat between them. She let it sit.

“You’re going to age,” he said. Not a question.

“That is generally how it works, yes.”

“I won’t.”

“I gathered.”

He was quiet. A car passed on the street. The streetlight came on, the one that buzzed in a frequency she’d stopped hearing years ago but now heard again.

“Naomi, I don’t have a solution for that.”

“I didn’t ask you for one.” She looked at the store. The lights were still on — she’d left them on, the warm yellow that made the spines glow in the window display. The building was 103 years old. The lease renewal was in three months. The Meridian letters were still on her counter, next to the cash register, next to the ledger. “I run a bookstore in a neighborhood that’s being eaten alive. I have not once had a solution. I have a ledger and a stuck front door and a man who steals Lucille Clifton, and I open the store every morning anyway.”

“Come inside,” she said. “I’ll sell you Song of Solomon and you can read the whole thing. Not just page one.”

“That’s a big commitment.”

“I know.”

He stood when she stood. They crossed the street together, and she unlocked the door that still stuck in the heat, and the bell rang, and the store was open.