| When he moved to Vermillion, South Dakota, from Chicago five years ago, Mike Phelan discovered the town had a university, locally made bread Oprah Magazine once declared the best in the world, and an author who’d won the National Book Award. But Vermillion didn’t have a bookstore. No university town should exist without a bookstore, he thought. So Mike opened one. He wanted to stay here for the rest of his life. But in the morning, his wife and son would head east with a trailer, and soon, Mike and his daughter would follow with a truck. Mike had tried to assure his daughter she wasn’t the reason the family was leaving South Dakota, but the 10-year-old was savvy. She knew the state had passed a measure preventing transgender young people like her from using girls’ bathrooms. And she knew that right after that law passed, her parents had said they were moving. Vermillion wasn’t just losing a random family. It was losing beloved community members, and if the sale didn’t work out, the town would lose its bookstore, too. |
