The Bridge Read Online Free PDF

bookstore. A place that defined downtown. If people knew he was in trouble, they’d help, right? They’d come together and do whatever it took to save The Bridge.
    Donna kissed him good-bye, pulled up the hood of her winter coat, and headed out into the cold. When he was alone again, Charlie thought about the town coming together. He walked slowly to the window and watched Donna hurry around the corner, out of sight. On both sides of the street, people were walking and laughing and drifting in and out of the small boutiques along the avenue, shopping bags draped on their arms.
    Who was he kidding?
    People rallying around a bookstore? Things like that only happened in the movies. If The Bridge closed, people wouldn’t notice. They would move on and find their books somewhere else, same as any other city in America that lost a bookstore this year. They’d jump on Amazon or get a Kindle for Christmas,and Franklin would go on as if nothing had happened. And that would be that. Charlie Barton and The Bridge, and every memory of anything wonderful that happened here, forever drowned in the flood.
    He moved back from the window and shuffled to the checkout counter. The structure was built-in, so it had withstood the rains, and with it, the one item he intended to save. He opened the swollen top drawer and carefully, gingerly, pulled out the scrapbook. Water had risen past the counter and the drawers, but somehow, the scrapbook wasn’t destroyed. He ran his hand over the stained canvas cover and the blurred image of The Bridge, the way it had looked in 1972—when Charlie first leased the old house and opened the shop.
    The picture on the front of the book was unrecognizable, but between the covers, the photographs remained remarkably unscathed. Charlie opened it and lingered on the first spread. The scrapbook was from a widow named Edna Carlton who had lost her husband in the Vietnam War. In her loneliness and grief, Edna had found her way to The Bridge. “The books, the coffee, the conversation, all of it has been wonderful,” she had written across the top of the first page.“The Bridge has given me a second chance at life. Fill this book with the stories of old souls like me. People who sometimes need a place like this to bridge yesterday and tomorrow. People looking for a second chance. Thank you, Charlie.”
    Below the inscription, a photo showed Edna Carlton sitting demurely in the upright chair that once stood at the far corner of the store. She held a used copy of Little Women in her hands, a story that helped her get through her husband’s death. Charlie couldn’t read the title of the book. The picture wasn’t that clear. Quite simply, he remembered Edna and the book that had spoken so deeply to her.
    The way he remembered all of them, generations of regulars who had found a home away from home at The Bridge.
    With great reverence, he thumbed through the book, stopping at the photo of the businesswoman Matilda Owens, who had used The Bridge to study for her law degree in the nineties. Last Charlie heard, Matilda had made partner at a law firm off Michigan Avenue in Chicago. Next were a banker and his wife, who had used The Bridge as a romantic hideaway where they often read to each other. Charlie couldpicture them, whispering beautiful passages from Wuthering Heights , together at the end of the old worn sofa that used to sit near The Bridge’s fireplace, finding their way back to the feelings that marked the start of their own love story.
    Charlie worked his way to the end of the scrapbook and stopped cold, his heart heavier than before. On the last page were two of his favorite people, a couple of college kids who had hung out at The Bridge for most of two years. He ran his thumb along the edge of the photo. Saddest day ever when he heard they separated. He used to tell Donna that the two of them were what love should look like.
    Molly Evans and Ryan Kelly.
    They had signed their names beneath the photo, but