Cindy Jones - My Jane Austen Summer - A Season in Mansfield Park

"Can I come in?" Vera asked, her voice flowing over the transom. We had not spoken since my meltdown and I knew we needed to reconcile before I left. I'd been rehearsing potential lines in my head. Vera sat across from me on Bets's bare mattress, and from the way she leaned forward I sensed she had an agenda.

"What will you do, Lily?"

"I'm going home peacefully," I said. "I'll probably stay with my friend Lisa until I get a job," I added.

"But what will you do there?" Vera repeated, irritation in her voice I found out of place, considering.

"I haven't figured that out yet," I said. "For starters, I'll probably gather courage to deal with my new wicked stepmother and then hope a gray cubicle offers me a paycheck and benefits." I waited. "Why are you asking?"

"I've been thinking," Vera said. "And I have a couple of ideas." I watched from my bed as Vera stared into middle space. "The first idea is rather ambitious, really." She looked at me. "Perhaps we could move this whole thing to Bibliophile Books—do it in Dallas." Vera's eternal creative optimism surprised me as she waited for my reaction, the old spark waiting to connect.

"Produce Literature Live in your bookstore?" Perhaps the problem was not Vera alone. Perhaps the combination of her eternal creative optimism with my indiscriminate hopeful longing equaled danger. She hadn't meant me harm; she was reckless and I was naive. I sat up straight. "You're right," I said, "that's very ambitious."

"Yes." Vera rested her chin on her fist. "And I'm needed here," she said, looking at her feet, clearly expecting me to understand her meaning.

"Is Nigel okay?" I asked.

"No," Vera whispered. She looked up and shook her head, eyes glistening.

"I'm sorry," I said, my voice catching, my own eyes filling with tears. Perhaps I'd used her just as much as she had used me, casting her as my new mother, expecting her to lead me to a safe place where I could belong to someone again.

"I can't keep him alive, no matter what I do, no matter how hard I wish it away," she said, clearly worn down by the resistance campaign she'd mounted over the last months.

"I'm so sorry," I repeated.

"Nigel is going to stay in Hedingham and I would like to stay with him," she said, stopping to compose herself. "You know"—Vera looked at the ceiling, wiping her tears with her hand—"our marriage wasn't ideal," she said, "but I never imagined being in the world without him. And I'm quite beside myself."

I searched my drawers for a tissue. "Is there anything I can do to help?" I asked, handing her a towel I pulled out of my suitcase.

"Well," Vera said, wiping her eyes, "that brings me to my second idea." She paused. "And that is—why don't you manage Bibliophile Books for me?"

I imagined leaving my gray cubicle to spend entire workdays in the stacks.

"You remind me so much of myself at your age," Vera said. "You know, I married Nigel with the understanding I'd never have children. But if I'd had a daughter, I'd want her to be like you."

"Thank you," I said, touched by the tribute, but still thinking about a day job surrounded by books, talking about books, touching books; freely reading through my lunch hour. Working in a bookstore would be an all-day party with a diverse guest list: Natasha Rostov and Prince Andrei, Daisy Miller and Miss Havisham, Nick Adams and Captain Wentworth. Jane Austen might join us.

She looked at her hands. "Nigel and I will be sorting through the books here, deciding which to send to the store," Vera said.

I imagined Nigel ending his days scanning the titles of hundreds of books, opening his favorites and reading a line to Vera, saying good-bye to old friends. I thought of them sharing this distraction, quite happy, in a way I didn't have the experience to understand.

"Some will be sent to Texas as inventory for the store. It would be very helpful if you could be on the other end to receive them. Chutney can't cope with large shipments."

I imagined Chutney sneaking out to the Dumpster after hours, tossing entire boxes of musty books into its pit. "I would love to," I said. "What a privilege."

"You know," Vera said, "when the books started coming in, he gave them all to me. He never said so, but I think the books are my compensation."

I would have to think about that.

"And Lily," she said, fixing my attention. "I'm sorry for the way things went with Randolph."

"Oh, Vera."

"It was a farfetched idea." She stood and reached for my hand. "And I was being very selfish."

Without considering, I used my best British accent and channeled Mary Crawford, "Selfishness must always be forgiven you know, because there is no hope of a cure."

"Touche," Vera said.

Back in Texas, I drove through my former neighborhood, air-conditioning turned full blast. The changes in the season of my absence shocked me. The med student's little duplex on the left now sat vacant awaiting the bulldozer. A developer's sign in the next yard indicated imminent demolition, and a McMansion was going up where my duplex had existed, its construction begun during the summer. Gone were the casual days of twin porches offering two doors, two mailboxes, and two free neighborhood newspapers. The new regime dressed up; urgent flaming carriage lanterns and buxom petunia beds flanked solo porches whose portals could grace a temple. Titanic SUVs posed in driveways begged me to ask, What master of the universe dwelt therein? A Hispanic nanny pushed a double stroller out a front door.

I drove slowly past my dad's house, taking note of the "For Sale by Owner" sign in his yard. Dad always said doing it yourself was the way not to sell your house. Maybe he wasn't so keen to move.

I lived in Vera's apartment over the bookstore, managing the store by day, and reading from the unlimited supply of books in the evenings. Having sold my possessions before leaving for England, except for the box of keepsakes still locked in the trunk of my car, I kept remembering my things the way an amputee would remember a lost limb. It's in my closet , and then I would remember I gutted that closet and I didn't live there anymore. I had no clothes and no costume department to raid for just the right outfit.

I visited Karen and her family and we worked through our grief together, sorting through what china and photos she was able to save from the wreckage. Karen helped me with my project to donate copies of all my lost books to the Pediatric Oncology Ward of the Children's Hospital. We inscribed them in honor of our mother and whenever I had a new set to deliver, I arrived with enough time to read to whatever seven-year-old child, nauseated from chemo, felt well enough to listen to a story about twelve little girls in two straight lines or a monkey calling the fire department. I would pause briefly to compose myself each time I recognized my mother's voice.

Vera and I e-mailed regularly but the flood of new inventory required overseas phone calls for guidance. Several estates had donated books over the summer, and Chutney had parked boxes wherever she could find space, stacking books in the upstairs apartment when she ran out of room in the store. And now that Vera was shipping from Literature Live, we were drowning in books. Boxes piled in the aisles required narrow canals to travel to the cash register or my office.

"How are you, Lily?" she asked.

I immediately choked up. I'd declined my friend Lisa's happy hour invitation in order to be alone with a stack of musty books culled from the boxes of new arrivals—the smell of Newton Priors in their pages. Lisa would never understand falling in love with a clergyman I met in a deserted attic where we discussed his vampire novel-in-progress while My Jane Austen took notes.