Broken Glass, Broken Hearts part 67

Of course my mom decides to responsible the one time I wish she wouldn't. "I can't make a decision for the life of me," she said to me, "and your sister wouldn't make the decision that's really what's best for this family. So I'm leaving this up to you. I hope you make the decision for everyone."

Great. No pressure, or anything.

I wanted to just say, "Oh, yea, we should move to grandma's neighborhood, it's a really great place," not only because I was desperate to move back to Angela, but also because I did love the area and New York didn't seem particularly practical. But my mom wanted to go to New York, I knew that much. And Milly, I was sure, would end up loving the state, especially NYC. I would be unhappy with either decision- guilty if I went to Angela, miserable if I had to leave her. So maybe I should just ignore my feelings and think of only what was best for my mom and Milly.

Unfortunately, that did not make the decision any easier.

The warming weather made the stuffy little bookstore even stuffier, so that

I found myself constantly fanning myself with pamphlets and emptying out the

water bottles that were kept in the mini fridge in the back room. Despite the

uncomfortable temperature, I came to remember why I had loved working at

the bookstore back in ninth grade. I remembered the day that Dustin came up

to me with the information for the job, giddy and bouncing. I didn't really want

to work at a bookstore, but I also didn't want to sit at home while Dustin got a

job, so I went to work with her. I was always the one who lounged around the

cash register, reading and loving the smell of all those pages, while Dustin

fluttered around, constantly rearranging books, making absurd patterns based

on character interests and the names in dedications rather than in alphabetical

order by author, frustrating customers constantly until Stephen finally put his

foot down and made her put the books back in ordinary order, leaving her only

to entertain herself by trying to memorize the acknowledgements in the back of

books as if they were monologues. I quit the job a while before she passed away,

in the summer before junior year, because I had heard that junior year was the

hardest, and I wanted to focus on school. I was planning on starting up in the job

again come summer, but then Dustin passed, and I didn't have the courage to go

back to the bookstore without her.

Now, though, here I was, sitting behind the cash register like I used to, reading

Linger by Maggie Stiefvater and smiling at the memory of my sister's peculiar

way of working. I had come a long way in the past year. And I had a good idea of

who it was that had helped me do that.

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