My spirit was bent over double in the spring of 2004 when I walked into Edgartown Books on Main street, which last week announced it is closing. At the time I yearned for a nourishing distraction and some pocket change besides. I figured art gallery or bookstore. The people at Edgartown Books took me in and, with nary a reference check, gave this perfect stranger the key to the door and the code to the cash register. Wow. After forty-some years of seasonal visits, I thought I knew a place. I was wrong.

I wanted distraction and got it in spades. Memorial Day weekend was dizzy with seasonal arrivals who seemed to need all their summer reading immediately. Some were regulars and well acquainted with my colleagues. Hi Marcia. Hi Susan. How did the knee surgery go? How was Sarasota this winter? And so on.

I was introduced and my name remembered when the customer returned. I began to get an inkling that I was family. Indeed, not counting two high school girls working inventory, our snug workforce was a menopausal sisterhood with similar issues; husbands, ex-husbands, floundering young adult offspring and older parents to keep close tabs on.

If one of us suddenly started fanning herself in front of the air-conditioner, the rest of us totally understood.

The whole of the Island came through the bookstore that summer, or at least representative samples of the Island’s varied groups. Fisher dudes who couldn’t read enough about fishing. Toddlers clutching new chew books. Waitresses from Eastern Europe who devoured Nicholas Sparks paperbacks. Elderly matrons and their caregivers. Smug eighth-graders who finished their required summer reading by mid-July. The Harry Potter set, competitive and voracious. The August people (I would finally get what an August person was). Teenage girls peeking at mature books their parents would never approve of if we told them, which we didn’t. Day-trippers asking for the Philip Craig mysteries the tour guide told them about. And Phil Craig himself, beefy in body and heart, signing books as fast as we could sell them.

Inevitably, I was partial to customers who loved to read what I loved to read. We were soul mates, cooing about the latest Wally Lamb or raising eyebrows about Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. Nevertheless, to assist all of the customers without faking it, I strived to keep current with the spy thrillers, the beach reads, the political tomes, the graphic novels and the rest of it. If the latest rave by the New York Times Book Review had yet to arrive, and if a customer moaned, we picked up the phone and called Bunch of Grapes. If they had the book they held it until the customer made it across Island.

“Aren’t they your competitors?” a mystified man once asked.

It was that, or lose him to Amazon. The threat of e-readers wasn’t even a notion.

Customers of renown tended to slip in early in the day. Working the late shift, I generally missed them and suffered the gloating from the morning crew and the silly grins in their photos with Bill Clinton. But I do claim encounters with Meg Ryan and William F. Buckley, Jr.

Thinking himself incognito in shades and a stupid hat, Mr. Buckley approached the counter one day and asked if we had a book of a certain title. I knew darn well he was the author.

“Yes, we have it,” I replied gently, “but I suspect you’ve read it already.”

Imagine, if you can, Bill Buckley looking sheepish.

Sometimes lucky browsers browsed to the serenades of the Vineyard Sound, crooning a cappella in the neighboring park. Perfect beach afternoons rendered the store and all of Main street deserted and boring. Rainy days were deliciously mad. Come evening, moviegoers dashed in to buy the book that inspired whatever film they had just seen across the street. Revelers from Alchemy, feeling way too good, spilled across our threshold and bought books by heaping stackfuls. A gentleman might stop in to browse biographies after dining at the Yacht Club. You could always tell a yacht man; his blazer would have the telltale wrinkle at the hem that only a yacht closet can make.

As the clock tower at the Whaling Church struck ten, my shift mate and I ousted the bookworms lost in their reading upstairs, locked ourselves in, and hung the Closed sign. We balanced the cash drawer and grew fuzzy-brained if the source of an error eluded us. A big daily haul thrilled me, though this was merely sporting knowledge with no uplift whatsoever for my pay. I spent much of that pay on — what else? — books.

In the years since 2004, it has been a rare visit to Main street when I haven’t stopped by the bookstore. Sure, I browsed the shelves and bought a book now and then. But mainly I entered to hear the jingle of the bell on the door, feel the silky pine beneath my soles and see if an old friend was behind the counter or to meet a new hire. I came to time-travel back to that season of distraction and contentment that soared above my expectations. I was always disappointed if I found the store closed.

And now, going forward, I’ll be disappointed constantly. Until someone revives the place. Or until I just get over it.