The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu Read Free Book Online

all collectively taken flight and migrated to another climate. Around the circle, the question is still asked, although not as frequently: what happened to all the hos?
     
    In the afternoon a short line of kids on their way home from school jostles to get in. The children fill the store with their outsize presence, shouting and screaming at one another because everything to them is urgent and desperate. One of them, a bald-headed boy with wide, emphatic eyes that remind me of Naomi’s when she wants something from me or her mother, picks up a candy bar and slides it into the sleeve of his puffy coat, where it disappears into the warm nook of his bent wrist. He looks up at me for a second to see if I’ve caught him. His eyes say it all. They say, “This is what I want. All you have to do is let me have it.” I agree, and with a smile and a simple nod of my head, he walks off. He’s happy, and for a few seconds I’m happy for him.
    Just as quickly as the crowd of children appeared, it vanishes, disappearing into the neighborhood in discrete clumps of twos and threes, with a few children wandering alone in the rear, their trail suggestive of a hierarchy of social order that leaves some muttering songs and games to themselves and others basking in the glow of friends and admirers. I’m left alone; the rest of the afternoon is so quiet that I can finish reading the paperback novel I checked out from the library the day before. From the first day I opened the store, I’ve kept a book close at hand so that every hour of even the quietest days has been filled with at least one voice other than my own. My first, a present from Joseph, was a paperback copy of a V. S. Naipaul novel. On the inside he wrote in his usual overstated manner: To a new beginning, Stephanos. The journey is not over yet . It was a not-so-subtle reference to my similarity to Saleem, the store owner in the novel, but more important, one of the few openly hopeful and enthusiastic remarks ever to come from Joseph’s lips or hand. For that reason alone I’ve kept the book prominently displayed behind the counter all these years, and while Joseph and I have never talked about the book, every now and then he’ll enter the store with his arms open and declare, “Saleem, you’re both still here.”
    “Of course we are,” I always tell him. “Where else do we have to go?”
    Over the years I’ve read roughly one book every two days, few of which I have ever owned. No one tells you this at the beginning, but the days of a shopkeeper are empty. There are hours of silence punctuated briefly with bursts of customers who come and go within the span of a few minutes. The silence becomes a cocoon in which you can hear only your voice echoing; the real world in which you live begins to fade into a past that you have tried to put to rest. I began to check books out from the library in groups of four in order to make sure I had more than enough to read for the week. I knew I had time, and on particularly slow days, I had more of it than I knew what to do with, a problem that posed a risk greater than I was willing to bear. I felt it especially in the early days of the store. Left alone behind the counter, I was hit with the sudden terrible and frightening realization that everything I had cared for and loved was either lost or living on without me seven thousand miles away, and that what I had here was not a life, but a poorly constructed substitution made up of one uncle, two friends, a grim store, and a cheap apartment.
    When asked by my uncle Berhane why I had chosen to open a corner store in a poor black neighborhood when nothing in my life had prepared me for such a thing, I never said that it was because all I wanted out of life now was to read quietly, and alone, for as much of the day as possible. I left him and his modest two-bedroom apartment in the suburbs in order to move to Logan Circle, a decision he has yet to understand or forgive me for, despite