A blue tablecloth. Seven stacks of books in columns, built like a Tennessee skyline, five titles deep. A placard on the left: Lost Little Girl. Shamus Award. Best First PI Novel of 2021. A small basket of Hershey’s candies sat in the middle. Like it was an afterthought. Or perhaps an invitation.

But behind it all, Greg Stout looked up, smiling as we walked in.

Alissa and I hadn’t planned to make a stop at Barnes and Noble. I had been invited, via email, to stop by. So we walked in through the main entrance and saw the sign. Book signing. Local author. 1-4 PM. She pulled me toward the table. Not because we needed a book, but because she knows me — as a storyteller — and it was the right thing to do. Writing. It’s a lonely business. You pour yourself into words and phrases, shaping something you hope approaches genius, only to watch the world treat it like a paint-by-number a six-year-old finished on a rainy Saturday afternoon. But you keep going.

You keep painting after the rain stops. And words deserve a canvas. Even if it ends up looking like a painting by Jackson Pollock.

That’s why I stopped in.

Greg shook my hand — firm, friendly — while talking to Alissa. “I keep trying to get him to come to another meeting,” he said. He’s Vice President of the Southeast Missouri Writers Guild. The man building the room where local writers gather was making his pitch to my wife, for me, while I stood right there.

Alissa’s eyes moved across the table. Long Time Gone. The Gone Man. Woman in the Wind. She picked up Lost Little Girl, read the back, and set it down.

“I don’t read stuff like that,” she said. She’s a trauma therapist and registered play therapist. The book’s territory — sex trafficking, abuse, a missing teenage girl — isn’t escape for her. It’s the people she worked with when she counseled people at the Southeast Missouri Network Against Sexual Violence, SEMO-NASV.

Greg nodded. “Yeah. I gotcha. Then that’s the wrong one to start with.”

A woman standing nearby, Greg’s age, maybe older, leaned in. “I’ve read all of them. They are fantastic.”

“But they aren’t a series you have to read in order,” Greg assured Alissa. “You won’t miss anything if you read them out of sequence.”

She picked up Goodbye Is Forever.

“Let me sign it,” Greg said, opening the cover and scribbling his name inside.

We walked out a few minutes later, Alissa with a new book under her arm. For me, it was the little thing. The satisfaction of showing up for a fellow writer. Of doing one small, right thing for another writer who shows up too — just to sit, at a table, with a basket of candy, waiting for strangers to stop by, talk about the work, and grab a book before they leave.