Photo by Claire Carusillo.

June 12

Our shop is in an old service station in a charming alpine town nestled within Utah’s Wasatch Mountains. Here’s the oomph of it: Avery, the only person who works here besides Galen and me, sells coffee in a waiting room we’ve converted into a bar. In the first garage bay, Galen sells skateboards and enormous pairs of shorts. In the second garage bay, I sell books and art supplies and an assortment of Korean-formulated sunscreens. Some people have been calling the shop “maximalist,” but I’m actually quite particular about the goods we hawk.

Sarah’s in from New York to help with our grand opening, and she prices our whole drinks menu and sets up the receipt printer. I’ve known her since I was nineteen, and she’s been doing stuff that I don’t want to do for fifteen years now. Once, during the pandemic, we went glamping near Moab and almost died overnight from carbon-monoxide poisoning caused by a backfiring tent stove. I thought it was because we’d eaten too much bread pudding before tucking in. She got us two free nights in an upgraded safari tent. 

The first book I sell on our first day in business is a used copy of Fart Proudly: Writings of Benjamin Franklin You Never Read in School, for seven dollars. It goes home with a high school English teacher on a daytime date. The next is a used copy of The Land of Little Rain, by Mary Austin, also for seven dollars, to a studious young college student. The third is a copy of Stephanie LaCava’s I Fear My Pain Interests You, which goes to a girl who pays with her own money even though her parents are present. She seems to be around thirteen, and I worry for a moment that she’s not old enough to read a book with so many lecherous older men skulking through its pages. But nobody ever monitored my reading when I was that age, and I turned out pretty much fine. I read a lot of Janet Evanovich’s bounty hunter series.

We look at the sales report at the end of the day. The only thing that moves more units than iced lattes are rolls of washi tape printed with bears playing the drums.

June 13

Turns out the people can’t get enough fly-fishing guides from 1973.

Photo by Claire Carusillo.

June 15

Galen’s been obsessed with the song “Reno,” by Doug Supernaw, for the past six months. Neither of us has been to Reno, but I think it would be funny to get married there. Last fall we went to West Wendover, a bleached-out casino town just over the border in Nevada, on our way to see Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels. A guy from New York City offered us “herb” inside one of the tubes, and I accepted. There wasn’t any good souvenir shopping.

The song “Reno” is about a woman paramour who is apparently as callous and cruel as the city. (“You know the lady’s a lot like Reno / She ain’t got a heart and she don’t care when you’re down / Just like the lights of a casino / She’ll pull you in and play with you awhile / But there ain’t no way to win / I know she’s a lot like Reno.”) We’ve read that Reno’s mayor banned the song from radio play in 1993. Supernaw shot back. It wasn’t personal: Reno was the only city he knew that rhymed with casino. That’s just how the chips fall sometimes, brother.

In the shop, Galen talks to a family visiting from Reno and plays the song from the iPad. They don’t seem to recognize it. The only song he listens to more than “Reno” is “Brigham Young,” which was recorded in the sixties by a folk singer involved in the Salt Lake music scene named Rosalie Sorrels. Written in 1870, Sorrels’s version goes like this:

Brigham, Brigham Young
It’s a miracle he survived
With his roaring rams and his pretty little lambs
And his five and forty wives

Number forty-five’s about sixteen
Number one is sixty and three
And among such a riot how he ever keeps ’em quiet
Is a downright mystery to me
For they cackle and claw and jaw, jaw, jaw
Each one has a different desire

I later learn that Rosalie Sorrels passed away in 2017 at her daughter’s home in Reno.

June 19

On Fridays and Saturdays for the past year, Sprinter vans of women in mid-market prairie dresses get dropped off in the center of town and beeline to a farm store owned by a beautiful former ballerina with millions of Instagram followers. 

Her arrival in our small town last summer alarmed and dismayed me: I wanted to be the most notorious adult blond in the area. I am thirty-four, unmarried, and cohabitating with a forty-year-old skate rat; when we moved here from New York, for the first time in my unremarkable-but-peaceful-enough life, that was enough to make for a scandalous backstory.

The ballerina’s also blond acolytes have made parking at the nearby post office an all-day project. But now I kinda like having them all around. And the ballerina seems pretty committed to the farming thing, even if there have been a few missteps with regard to raw milk processing.

June 20

Eight skaters and one beautiful dog in an arm cast tumble out of a diesel truck. The dog is named Laika. They drove up from Salt Lake to take in a bit of mountain air and buy some of our branded merchandise. The shop grows anarchic and clangorous with so many boxy tees and “Yeah, mans” flying around. They eventually leave us for sandwiches and the nearby creek. It’s hot out. While peeing, I watch a just-uploaded Instagram video of them ripping cigs and baptizing one another in a stone reflection pool a customer of ours built into the riverbed.

An hour later, Max, a straggler in their crew, shows up with a baby raccoon he’s rescued. Because of a skate emergency, he can’t stay long, so he nestles the baby in a Home Depot box out back. Galen keeps showing the raccoon to the children visiting the shop, and for about thirty seconds, I try to put a matronly stop to it, jaw jaw jawing about how word will get out that we’re operating an illegal petting zoo on our ninth day in business. But then I, too, catch baby raccoon fever, and watch Rigby take an hour to eat a quarter of a banana.

Photo by Claire Carusillo.

June 21

We’ve been invited to our first party in Midway, at a remarkable home with a kitchen-island-size cheese plate and a DJ barn. During cocktail hour, we discover that most of the attendees left the Mormon Church in the past decade or so. They’re all forthcoming about their personal lives and the fact that they’re learning how to socialize with drink for the first time in their mid-fifties. Galen doesn’t drink, but I have three White Claws and talk to so many interesting dads. 

June 24

Orange smoke from forest fires is enveloping our valley, but incidentally, it makes the pink-stained plywood in the book room glow.

I stay up too late reading Kaitlin Tiffany’s feminist, Warren Commission–questioning tome The Housewives Underground. I recommend it to Mary Ann, a former children’s librarian who moved here from Dallas. I don’t tell her that back in the day Kaitlin and I worked on different floors of the same office, and that she and Lizzie Plaugic cold-Slacked me, asking me to join their writing group, possibly changing the trajectory of my entire life.

Mary Ann tells me she was there the day Kennedy was assassinated, working admin as a college student at Parkland Hospital. Of course, her memories of the weeks when Texas governor John Connally, who was allegedly punctured by the same magic bullet that had just killed Kennedy, was legislating from his hospital bed don’t jive with what the Warren Commission reported. She says she was part of the team that procured a phone line for him. 

I text Kaitlin and ask her, as a friend, not an author or an expert, what she thinks happened that day. She asks me my theories. I don’t feel comfortable sharing them until I learn more about Fidel Castro’s household staff at the Habana Hilton.

June 25

An email hits our shop inbox from our hacky sack manufacturer, an empath. It begins:

“Galen—I hate that I have to write you this email.”

The custom-crocheted sacks have been held up in customs.

 June 26

Smoke everywhere, still. A huge sign is erected on Main Street alerting us to a $1,000 fine for lighting fireworks. In the past eight summers of living with Mars, our Jindo dog, I’ve come to hate them anyway. He’s jumpy and has seemingly learned to open locks with his mind. 

July 1

Elliott and Rebekah invite us to a barbecue at their house in Wallsburg, a tiny farm town tucked into a mountain pass halfway to Provo. We’ve become obsessed with Wallsburg town lore because a) Butch Cassidy’s gang used to hide out there, allegedly, and b) its streets now seem to be governed by packs of semiferal dogs. 

The three hundred residents of Wallsburg are currently mobilizing against a newly created “preliminary municipality pilot program,” which gives access to two developers in Utah each calendar year to establish new towns on undeveloped land without the voting consent of nearby neighbors. Elliott and Rebekah used to run a hyperlocal newspaper called the Little Valley Dispatch, where they got to the bottom of such matters. Now, they’re focusing on raising two children and being software engineers.

We eat burgers made from a Jersey cow that used to be their across-the-street neighbor. I’m warned against approaching Mr. Handsome, their adult ram, because he’s a literalist. Mars, who was also invited to the barbecue, won’t stop hissing at their cat Maomao.

July 4

Now I’m avoiding the mayor’s calls and texts. He’s got a great deal of books on silver mining, a personal interest of mine, but we can’t seem to find the time to get over to his house to look at them.

We approve Mars’s request to work from home. This is the polite way of saying that he won’t stop barking at small children and for now is not fit to be a shop dog. Later, we discover that he ate part of our bedroom window shade. 

July 6

Four-sixths of my immediate family are in Utah to help with the shop. Alex and Ani, my brother and sister-in-law, are off somewhere being Swedish businessmen. Julia, my sister, who designed the shop interior for us, flew in from Denver and affixes hand-painted STAFF PICKS and EMPLOYEES ONLY signs to fixtures and walls. She suggests a DAD’S PICKS sign, as our dad has just donated twenty-five David Baldacci books to our collection. He sits in the corner eating an enormous sandwich while reading Stanley Tucci’s What I Ate in One Year.

Mom gets behind the bar with Avery and takes payment. Galen even overheard her asking, “Would you like room for cream?” to a guy who ordered a coffee. Total natural. 

July 7

Day off. At the pool, we pass around Mom’s Kindle (font size 3000) to read David Sedaris’s essay on Lily, the purple-haired teen avatar who hosts a podcast on Duolingo, in The Land and Its People. Julia and I have been using Duolingo to relearn Spanish, and we both think Lily should ditch her K-pop–obsessed bestie Zari—she seems a little immature.

July 10

Brandon the physical therapist comes in wearing the same shirt as Galen. It says I’M CRYING BECAUSE I LOVE SKATEBOARDING SO MUCH. 

July 11

Avery, Galen, and I go to the crick with Charlie and Ozge after we close up the shop. To celebrate one month in business, we show them a little local secret called “taking the autobahn.” The way I like to do it is to wrap a gnawed pool noodle around my waist and jump into the river to be washed away by the current until the riverbed gets shallow enough to scrape against my ass cheeks. Then you walk back up the river, against the current, and do it again until you start bleeding.

July 12

We sell a brand of skater-owned hot sauce called Satan’s Drain Cleaner, and we’ve been asked if we were a Satanist business. I honestly hadn’t thought about it. Probably not.