"Come on," Margot said, one hand on Sloane's arm, gentle and steering. "I've got everything I came for. Let's go get you into air conditioning."
Sloane let herself be steered toward the register.
She was still holding the Statistics textbook.
Three trips. That was what it took to get Margot's books to the car.
Forty-three books, packed into two boxes by the store owner with the efficient pleasure of a man watching his inventory move. The boxes were heavier than they looked, which was the defining characteristic of boxes of books - they always weighed more than you were prepared for, every single time, as if they were subject to a different relationship with gravity than other objects.
Sloane took the first box.
The walk from the store to Margot's Subaru was perhaps sixty feet. In direct July sun, with a box of books pressing into her forearms and the asphalt radiating heat through the soles of her sandals, it was not a comfortable sixty feet. She set the box in the back of the car, straightened up, and pressed her hands briefly to her lower back.
She went back for the second.
The second box was heavier. She discovered this about three-quarters of the way across the parking lot, when the weight shifted in her arms and the box lurched to the left and she made a quick, ungainly adjustment to catch it - it was not graceful, she was not going to claim it was graceful, there was a sidewalk moment that she hoped the general public of Barnett Street had not witnessed - and she got it stabilized and kept walking with the focused expression of someone who had absolutely not just almost dropped forty-three books on hot asphalt.
She set it down in the car. Straightened up again.
Margot came out of the store carrying the last armload - books that hadn't fit in the boxes, stacked against her chest with her chin resting on top. She looked at Sloane and said, "Nice recovery."
"I had it the entire time."
"The whole parking lot would agree with you."
"Good."
They loaded the last of it. Sloane climbed into the driver's seat and sat back and did not immediately start the car. She looked at the ceiling of the Subaru - there was a small library fundraiser sticker in the top right corner, a faded cartoon book, which was extremely on-brand for Margot - and she did not move for fifteen seconds.
Her back hurt. Her head hurt. Her arms hurt.
She was tremendously glad to be in a car.
She reached forward and turned the ignition. The vents blasted hot air for the four or five seconds that all cars in summer parking lots insist on before switching to cold, and then the cold came, and she tilted her face into the vents and breathed.
"Dinner," Margot said, settling into the passenger seat. "Wherever you want."
"Cold."
"Somewhere I'll need a jacket."
"Now you're speaking sense."
"With whatever you want on the menu."
Sloane closed her eyes for one more second and then opened them. "Accepted."
They idled in the parking lot for another minute while the car cooled down, and Sloane reached behind her seat to push one of the boxes further back and make room for her bag. Her hand landed on something that wasn't in a box. She felt the rectangular weight of a hardcover, loose, sliding slightly with the car's idle vibration.
She pulled it forward.
STATISTICS: AN INTRODUCTION. Third Edition.
She held it in both hands and looked at it, then looked at Margot.
"Did you pick this one?"
Margot glanced over. Frowned. She took it, turned it over, opened it briefly, and shook her head. "No. I wasn't in that section at all - I was all the way in the back, in literature." She handed it back. "It must have gotten mixed in when we were loading."
"It fell in the chaos," Sloane said. "When everything came down."
She turned the book over slowly. The back cover had a stain - a dark ring from the bottom of a mug, coffee or tea, pressed there and left and long since dried. The bottom corner of the front cover was soft with handling, bent and rebent until the cardboard had gone almost pliable. The spine was creased in two distinct places, the kind of creases that happened when you pressed a book flat and held it open for a long time. Someone had used this book. Not just owned it - needed it, returned to it, worked through it.
"We should take it back," Margot said.
"He won't know where it came from. He has no system."
"We could tell him."
"Tell him what? A book fell off a shelf, got mixed in with our boxes, we think it might belong to the sciences section but we're not certain which part?" Sloane looked at Margot. "That man will take this book back with the same expression he's had all afternoon. And then it will sit somewhere and no one will know it was ever separate from anything."
Margot was quiet for a second. "You're not wrong."
Sloane opened the front cover.
Top right corner. Dark ballpoint pen. Neat block letters, pressed firm.
B. FORSYTHE.
She looked at it.
"B. Forsythe," she said.
"Original owner, probably." Margot was checking her own phone, not particularly focused on this. "Or someone who took a class and donated it when they were done."
"B. Forsythe," Sloane said again. She didn't know why she said it twice. It was a completely ordinary name - the kind of name that could belong to anyone, a student, a professor, someone who had once needed to understand statistics well enough to crease the spine twice and stain the back cover with their morning coffee. Whoever it was, they had written their name in the front of this book in the deliberate way people wrote their names in textbooks, making a claim: this is mine.
It wasn't theirs anymore.
Something about that was - she couldn't name exactly what it was. Just: the book had mattered to someone. It had traveled here from wherever it had started, and it had ended up on a shelf in a store on Barnett Street, and then it had come off that shelf and landed on her head, which was not a dignified journey for anything.
"I'll keep it," she said.
Margot turned. "You'll keep a Statistics textbook."
"It hit me on the head. That's a relationship."