This isn't weird.

Five Dollars

The thing Millie came to enjoy most about the church-turned-bookstore was the cold. It must have cost a fortune in weather proofing and electricity bills to keep such an old building so thoroughly chilly, but she admired Eliza's dedication to protecting the books from the humidity. It was no small feat in East Texas.

As predisposed as Millie was to hate the cold, it was a glorious escape from the ever rising Texas heat. By the middle of summer, she could barely stand to step foot outside. But in the church, she could bundle up in a sweater and a scarf and pretend she was back in Oregon again. Her favorite thing to wear was a hideous red and green sweater adorned with an ostentatious sequined reindeer. Ben had worn it on their first Christmas together, and seeing how delighted she was by it, insisted that she keep it. It was garish, far too big, and Tess (who was blissfully unaware of where it came from) had been baffled by Millie's stubborn refusal to leave it behind. Eliza was deeply amused by it, and though she clearly suspected that it was more sentimental than ironic, she was tactful enough not to ask.

Within a few months, Millie's compulsive organization began to evolve beyond simply keeping the books visually tidy. She began, on a small scale, to organize the aisles more pragmatically, loosely grouping together books by binding, genre, and whenever possible, alphabetizing by authors' names. It would have been impossible to organize the entire collection without taking every single book off the shelf and starting from scratch—a job far too big to do alone—but at the very least, she could make the individual aisles easier to navigate.

Eventually, Eliza began to feel guilty about the hours of unpaid labor the younger woman was putting in at her store and offered to bring her on as a part-time employee, but Millie refused; she was well aware that the bookstore, already a money sink, couldn't sustain the cost of hired help. Besides, the work was for her own gratification. It was the only thing she ever had to look forward to, and the only time she wasn't consumed with grief over Ben and all the other friendships that she had let slip away. It was her escape, and she gladly would have paid out of her own pocket for the privilege of spending her time there.

And she found so many quirky treasures there. A religious tome from defunct a cult; the rambling, self-published memoir of a clearly schizophrenic man that inexplicably contained random pages that were just pixelated, poorly resized pictures of busty anime schoolgirls; a rulebook for an unlicensed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles tabletop RPG thats cover, when closely examined, depicted four surfing Raphaels sans the rest of the team. The careless oversight would annoy her for the rest of her life.

A few diaries had made their way into the mix. Millie once spent an entire day engrossed in the trials and tribulations of a very dramatic young girl who had carefully recorded every single day of her life from the eighth grade to her sophomore year of college. Another journal belonged to a depressed young man who spent twenty pages bemoaning the first time he had experienced erectile dysfunction, which happened to be on the night he had finally had the opportunity to bed the coworker he had been pining over for the past year. Millie would have felt sorry for him, but honestly, he kind of sounded like a jerk. His coworker had dodged a bullet.

One day in late August, she was idly running a finger over the spines of a row of books, calculating the best plan of attack for categorizing the contents of its shelf, when one book in particular caught her eye. It was an old copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, nondescript and vaguely familiar. When her fingertip landed on it, the hair on the back of her neck stood up. She wasn't quite sure why—she was never quite sure why—but her years at the bookstore back in Corvallis had developed in her a sort of sixth sense, a gut feeling that told her when she had stumbled upon something special, and at that moment, her gut felt like a windmill in a thunderstorm.

The world seemed to move in slow motion as she carefully removed it from the shelf. It didn't look like it had ever been read; aside from some light shelf wear on the bottom of the dust jacket, the condition was excellent. She recognized the cover, a minimalist vintage illustration of a tree set against a burnt orange background beneath the solid black rectangle bearing the title. Slowly—very, very slowly—Millie opened the front cover.