The Customer Who Only Ever Came In During the Thunderstorms

I managed a used bookshop on a corner that flooded every time it rained hard, which in our town was often. It was a good job, quiet, the kind of place where you learn the regulars by the books they buy. And we had a lot of regulars. But the one I remember, the one I will always remember, only ever came in during the thunderstorms.

The first time, I barely noticed him. The rain was coming down in sheets, thunder rolling in off the hills, and the bell over the door rang. A tall man, long gray coat, water running off him in a way that seemed like too much water, like he had been out in it for hours. He did not browse. He walked straight to the back corner, to the poetry section, and he stood there. For an hour. In the dark, because the power always flickered in storms and half the shop lights would die.

When the rain stopped, he left. Bought nothing. Said nothing. The bell rang and he was gone.

It happened again the next storm. And the next. Always the poetry corner, always the length of the rain, always leaving the moment it cleared. My part-timer, a college kid named Theo, started calling him the Weatherman, and we laughed about it, mostly.

We stopped laughing the day I decided to talk to him.

It was a bad storm, the worst of the year, the street already turning into a river outside. He came in, dripping, and went to his corner, and I don't know what got into me but I followed him back and I said, "Sir, can I help you find something?"

He turned around slowly. And up close he was wrong in a way I could not put my finger on. His face was gray, the same gray as his coat, and his eyes did not quite track. And he said, in a voice like a door that had not opened in a long time, "You moved the Whitman."

I had. Two weeks earlier I had reorganized the poetry section. Nobody knew that. Nobody had asked. But he knew, and he was angry, truly angry, in a still cold way that was so much worse than shouting. "It was here," he said, and pointed at a shelf that now held Dickinson. "It has always been here. Put it back."

I said I would. I don't know why I said it, I just wanted him to stop looking at me. And he watched me, the whole storm, while I found the Whitman and moved it back, and only when it was in its old place did his shoulders drop, and only when the rain stopped did he leave.

I asked the old woman who owned the building about him. Described the coat, the corner, the Whitman. She got very quiet. And she told me that thirty years ago, before it was a bookshop, the space had been a different bookshop, run by a man who loved poetry, who kept the Whitman on that exact shelf, and who had died in the back corner one night during a storm, alone, waiting out the rain.

I put the Whitman back. I never moved it again. And whenever a real storm rolls in now, the kind with the thunder coming off the hills, I make sure that shelf is exactly the way he likes it, and I keep the back light on, and I do not go to the corner.

He still comes. Theo has seen him too. We do not talk about it. We just keep the Whitman where it belongs.