A Piedmont Lantern Story

Archie Singleton opened his bookshop on a Tuesday, which was the first thing folks found suspicious.

He chose the old Top Dollar Store building because it had good bones and bad memories, and he said books did better in places that had already learned humility. He swept the floor himself, set the shelves straight, and hung a hand-painted sign that read The Enchanted Quill, as if there had ever been another.

Jim Leroy Cartwright was the first customer through the door, which surprised no one who knew Jim Leroy; he always had his nose buried in a book.

He stopped short the moment he stepped inside.

The air smelled like paper and dust with something warmer underneath, like a summer attic that remembered secrets kindly. The shelves didn’t run straight the way Archie had arranged them. They leaned just enough to suggest that they might shift when you weren’t looking. The books sat where they pleased, sorted not by author or subject but by temperament. Jim Leroy could feel it in his bones.

Archie Singleton looked up from behind the counter, smiling like a man who already knew how this was going to go. Jim couldn’t help noticing how Archie’s garish purple and gold bowtie hung crooked.

“Take your time,” he said. “The right book knows how to wait.”

Jim Leroy reached for the first spine that caught his eye. The moment he touched it, he gasped.

Not loud. Just enough to draw breath sharp.

The book was warm.

Not metaphor warm. Actual, living warm, as if it had just been set down by someone who’d been reading hard. Jim Leroy opened it and found, to his astonishment, a passage describing a boy sitting on a porch in Piedmont, reading a book he’d found in a shop that had just opened.

He snapped it shut.

The cover now read something else entirely.

Jim Leroy laughed. He couldn’t help it. He laughed like a man who had just discovered a loose stair that led somewhere better than upstairs.

Mary Ola Abernathy, bless her heart, came in next, all dignity and caution, peering around like she expected something to leap out and sell her an insurance policy. She took three steps in and stopped cold.

“Oh no,” she said softly. “This place is thinking. Somethin’ just ain’t right up in here.”

She picked up a book and frowned. “This is my Mawmaw’s cookbook.”

Archie nodded. “The one with the chow-chow you never quite got right. This edition will help you make it just like your Mawmaw did.”

Mary Ola put the book back like it had burned her. She left five minutes later, pale and unsettled, muttering that some things did not need to be rediscovered.

The Fagan twins, Hattie Ruth and Takota, came in together and immediately split up, just like they always did. Hattie Ruth squealed with delight when a book whispered her name. Takota dropped hers like it had accused her of something.

“It showed me two choices,” Takota said later, shaking. “One that I didn’t take. One that I still could.”

Hattie Ruth bought her book and hugged it all the way home.

Hattie Ruth didn’t tell anyone at first. Not Takota, not her mama, not even Jim Leroy, and that alone ought to tell you something about the book.

She carried it home like you’d carry a kitten that might bolt if you loosened your grip.

The cover was plain cloth, the color of creek water in shade, with no title on the spine. When she opened it that evening, sitting on the edge of her bed with her shoes still on, the first thing she noticed was that it didn’t begin at the beginning.

It began with her.

Not her name, exactly. Just a girl who laughed too quickly because she was afraid if she stopped, the world would notice what she hadn’t said yet.

Hattie Ruth felt her throat tighten at that. She looked around the room cautiously, not really knowing what she expected to see. With nothing appearing out of the ordinary, she turned back to the book in her lap.

The book was about a woman who had lived three doors down from herself, though the address changed from chapter to chapter. In one chapter, the woman stayed. In another, she left. In another, she almost did and then didn’t, which turned out to be its own kind of leaving.

Each chapter showed a small, ordinary choice. Speaking up. Holding back. Saying yes. Saying no. Turning left instead of right on a road she’d walked all her life.

None of it was dramatic. That was the miracle.

The woman in the book didn’t become famous. She didn’t run away with anyone. She didn’t burn the town down or save it. She simply learned, slowly and without apology, that joy didn’t require a permission slip.

By the time Hattie Ruth reached the last page, the woman was older. Not bitter. Not regretful. Just steady. The final line read:

She didn’t live loudly, but she lived whole.

Hattie Ruth closed the book and held it to her chest, heart thumping like she’d had a good dance.

Takota, watching from the doorway, felt a chill she couldn’t name and stepped back.

Hattie Ruth slept that night with the book under her pillow.

And in the weeks that followed, people noticed small changes. Hattie Ruth said what she meant more often. She laughed less defensively. She stopped asking Takota to decide first.

The book never changed after that. It didn’t need to.

It had already told her the story she was ready to hear.

Takota, oddly suspicious of the shop, crossed the street to avoid it for at least the next month.

By sundown, the town had an opinion.

Singleton’s Books made Jim Leroy feel ten feet tall and curious as a cat in a pantry. It made Mary Ola nervous. It made Hattie Ruth hopeful and Takota cautious. It made other folks cross themselves or cross the street.

Archie Singleton closed up at six and turned the sign to Tomorrow.

“That’s the trouble with good books,” he said to the empty shop. “They don’t behave the same way for everybody.”

Inside, the shelves shifted slightly, as if settling in.

Downtown Piedmont had gained a bookshop.

Whether it wanted one or not.