On the backwards bookshelf

Down on her luck. That is how people who knew Lilly Cook described her, and she was tired of it. Tired of the frowns and the pitiful looks. Tired of people judging her for being 37 and single. It may seem depressing, this life of hers, and it was, but that was not for others to decide. And yes, it may seem that she is “down on her luck”, if luck was something she believed in, which it wasn’t. To have lost her job, house, car, and boyfriend all in one year does seem awfully unlucky. But shit happens. And all of Lilly’s shit happened to happen in the same horrific year. It had nothing to do with luck, because luck does not exist.

Lilly was a creature of habit, so the morning and afternoon of April 17 went the way that every morning and afternoon went. Lilly woke up at 7:45 am in her small bedroom/living room/kitchen, she had been inhabiting this studio apartment for nearly three years but it still lacked any touch of personality. There were no framed pictures on the gray walls, no worn blankets or throw pillows on the couch, no dishes in the kitchen, or clothes strewn across the floor. The only abnormality of this particular studio was the bookshelves which were filled with hardcover books without their dust jackets. The books were placed into the bookshelves with their spines to the back and their pages facing outward. Anyone who saw her bookshelves would have thought them odd, but no one saw her bookshelves because no one came into her studio apartment. On the morning of April 17th, Lilly rolled out of bed, popped a pod in her small black Keurig, and put half an everything bagel in the toaster. She grabbed two eggs from the refrigerator and cracked them easily with one hand into a small gray bowl. She turned on the stove and whisked her eggs with a fork, added a little milk, whisked some more, and then smoothly poured them into the pan sitting on her gas stove. Her bagel came out perfectly golden brown, warm to the touch, and she dumped her slightly runny scrambled eggs on top. She sat on the single bar stool at the end of her wooden island on wheels and ate silently, sipping her coffee occasionally. When she was finished, she washed her dishes and put them away, returning the kitchen to its regular, empty state. She pulled on a pair of clean blue jeans and a black sweater, grabbed her backpack and keys, and walked out the door.

The next eight hours of her day were barely worth mentioning. Lilly sat at her desk at her temp job entering data mindlessly into the computer. She ate her packed lunch alone in the corner of the break room and then went back to her desk. She entered data monotonously for many more hours before getting up, putting on her backpack, and walking silently out the door. She took the 9 bus to a stop three blocks from her apartment building.

Her day begins when she arrives home. Each afternoon she locks the door behind her, scrolls through Postmates until something looks good, orders a meal for one, and then she waits. While she waits, Lilly reads. Particularly, she reads the book to the right of the book she read the night before. On this Thursday evening, the book she removes from her backward shelves is a small 5 by 8.25 inch book, with a soft black leather cover. She did not recognize the book, but any book is hard to recognize without its dust jacket so she was not concerned. She opened the cover gently, there was no title, instead, there were four lines for a name and possibly an address or an email; the lines were blank. Lilly was starting to get confused, wondering what sort of book had a space for one's name. And wondering even more, that if this was a journal as she suspected, why was it in her apartment? Lilly did not buy journals because she did not write in journals, she thought her thoughts, she didn’t write them down. Cautiously, she turned the page and found her suspicions to be true, it was a journal, and she was shocked to find a handwritten note sprawled across the page. She began to internally debate whether or not she should read said letter. On the one hand, while journals were, in her opinion, stupid, they were also very personal. On the other hand, this journal was in her apartment, on her bookshelf, so she had every right to read it. It was not her fault that someone could have been so careless with their personal belongings. With this thought, she began to read,

My dear child,

I am very sorry to see that your life has not gone as you expected. It is most unfortunate, this world that we live in, but we must accept that we do not always have control. This may be a difficult time for you, and that is understandable, but please remember that I am here. You may not want my help, but you will always have my love. Do as you please with the contents of this notebook. I do not care how you live your life, daughter, I care about you.

With much love,

Your Father

Lilly sat and stared at the page in front of her for a few silent moments. Eventually, intrigue got the best of her and she placed her finger on the top right corner of the notebook, lifting the soft, thin paper and flipping it over. On the next page, pressed up against each side, sat two 100 dollar bills. She quickly flipped to the next page and found it to be identical to the last. Each page of the notebook revealed another one hundred dollars, up to the very last page. There was no more writing, nothing to explain the unexpected money within the journal. Not knowing what to do next, Lilly began to count, 100, 200, 300… 20,000. The notebook contained 20,000 dollars. Lilly was dumbfounded, she flipped through the pages and reread the letter over and over again. She questioned who it was from and who it was for but there was no way of knowing. Not only had this person been careless with their personal journal, but they had also lost $20,000! Lilly was not responsible for stupid people’s stupid actions, and so, she decided that the money was hers to keep. After all, one could not be expected to give away such a fortune when the balance of one's bank account was $54.38. This was exactly what Lilly needed to get rid of the world's pitiful looks, what she needed to turn her life around. So that is what Lilly Cook did with the contents of the journal, she turned her life around.

Occasionally, she wondered how she could have come to end up with that little black notebook. It must have been luck, but Lilly Cook did not believe in luck.