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For the irrepressible Lucinda Hammond, her station at the cash register of a run-down convenience store in Arcadia, Nova Scotia, offers a wide window onto an improbably hopeful world. With sassy humor undaunted by diminishing profits and lowered expectations, Lindy (as Lucinda is called) carries on the tradition of a store-keeping family that stretches back three generations and spans more than one hundred years.
Blunt and funny, Lindy copes day after day with the store's declining sales and her own middle-age anxiety. Then, one day she finds her heart racing ahead of her tongue when a burly construction boss named Wilf comes to call. Aunt Ruby does not approve, or comprehend. At ninety she has fallen under dementia's sway, yet in her own mind she remains utterly lucid as she recalls her length of days and wraps herself in a wondrous quilt sewn decades earlier by her mother, Euphemia. Into that quilt's purple sky, the unhappily married Euphemia threaded her private dreams, while in a weathered ledger book she recorded, alongside the store's daily receipts, the surprising family secrets that will one day set Lindy free.
