Open book tattoo on the torso

The book is still on the counter at the Saltbush Café, open where you left it, face down on the Formica like a bird with its wings spread. Dell says nobody has touched it since Tuesday. The manager wants it binned, so I told him I would take it off his hands, which means I am now the sort of woman who carries a stranger's sea stories across two state lines in her rucksack.

I have read the first forty pages twice. The print is small and the ink has gone grey at the edges, the way everything does out here where the sun bleaches the signs and the paint. The writer keeps returning to a lighthouse on a coast none of us will ever see, and every time she does, the keeper's wife leaves a lamp burning in the window. I caught myself checking the road lights each evening as if one might be meant for us.

Yesterday a truck pulled in with a driver who asked whether anyone had seen a paperback with a torn cover. I said I had it. He leaned on the counter, turned the pages gently with two fingers, and said, "She never finishes the lighthouse story, you know." I asked how he knew. He said he had read it in his cab eleven times and had never once reached the last page.

So I am keeping the book for now, and I am sending you this letter, folded inside the back cover where the pages thin out. Read it somewhere with a window. Don't skip ahead.

Yours, Ruth