Unexpectedly, a customer came into the shop. Rona had reached that stage of the afternoon when the silence had started to become a noise, a quietly hissing vacuum in her ears, and the shelves of the shop seemed to sag gently beneath the weight of their books, as if steeling down for a nap. Rona was yawning herself when the customer walked in, and she hurriedly stifled the yawn and laughed in embarrassment, but the customer seemed not to notice.

Normally customers came in and browsed the shelves, usually in silence or sometimes, if there were two them, carrying a conversation into the shop from the outside. This customer, however, was from a rarer group: those who knew exactly what they wanted; and in fact he was part of an even rarer sub-group: those customers who knew what they wanted, but seemingly didn't know how to look for it on the rows of shelves arranged alphabetically by author's surname.

So, when he asked, Rona had to answer that sadly, no, they didn't have a copy of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, by Raymond Carver.

"Or even just collected stories? Or selected stories?" the customer asked hopefully.

"No, doesn't look like it" Rona sighed, shaking her head and scanning the shelves twice more even though she knew the answer from the first time. "We've got Raymond Chandler" she said, as if that might help.

"Not the same person" the customer said ruefully.

"No" Rona agreed.

"I've been looking everywhere" the customer continued. "I don't know why. I just suddenly got this idea into my head that I wanted to read that story. I read it years ago, I loved it. I've never read anything else by him. I should, I think."

"Have you tried looking online?" Rona suggested. "I mean, for the whole story? Somebody might've copied it up."

"Should you be telling me that?" the customer pointed out.

"Probably not."

"Maybe I can try something else" the customer said, putting a positive spin on the situation.

"Chekhov's good, I hear" Rona said. Guy had said that, once - though not in so few words.

"Was he American too?"

"Russian, I think" Rona said. She was more sure of that than she sounded, but she didn't want to intimidate the customer with her knowledge of books - especially given that the majority of that knowledge was begged, borrowed, or stolen.

"But I don't read Russian" the customer complained.

"It's been translated" Rona explained.

"Oh, yes. Of course." The customer looked at the shelves hopefully. "Do you have any?"

Rona looked at the shelves too, with rather more purpose. "I thought we did" she said, but she couldn't see it anywhere. She didn't realise that her predecessor at the shop, obediently following the unusual spelling of the author's name on the cover of the old edition that they had, had shelved it under 'T' for 'Tchekhov', where even now the book still rested, untouched and unnoticed for a year or more, alongside a copy of the Soul of Kindness by Elizabeth Taylor.