by ACF Bookens
“Back at ya, kiddo,” he said. I slammed the door, and he pulled out.
I must have been smiling because when I turned around, I heard my worst nightmare say, “It’s not bad enough that you blew off your own parents on their one full day in town, but you come back grinning like the cat who ate the canary. I’m disappointed in you, Anastasia.”
I had frozen in place when my mother started talking, and I had one foot on the curb and one still in the street. I was staring right at her, but I could not make words come out of my mouth. She was right, but there was no way I was going to tell her that. I’d never hear the end of her gloating. So I opted for ignoring her. Well, not her, but her words.
“Oh hi, Mom. I thought we were meeting at seven. Did you need something?” I smiled and resumed my approach to the shop door.
Mom then stepped in front of me. “I demand you tell me where you were. You said you couldn’t—“
I didn’t let her finish. “Mom, it’s been over twenty years since you had the right to demand to know my whereabouts.” I opened the door to the shop and let it shut behind me as I stalked to the backroom, where I closed the door and locked it while I gathered my temper. I couldn’t believe I had just said that to my mother, but the nerve of her. She had shown up unannounced, expected me to drop everything for her, and then had the audacity to challenge me about how I spent my time.
I had a pretty good righteous tizzy going until I realized that she was right, at least in one sense. I had lied to her. I had tried to avoid an awkward conversation with a lie, and now here I was with a full-blown conflict . . . and my mother’s hurt feelings. Righteous indignation disappears quickly when you realize you’re in the wrong.
I took a deep breath and was just heading to open the door when someone knocked. “Ms. B, it’s me. I’m so sorry. I should have texted you to let you know that Mom brought them by for coffee and so she could brag about you a little bit. She didn’t know you’d be gone—“
I opened the door and looked at Marcus. His face was drawn with worry. “I know, Marcus. How could she? Your mom is so sweet to spend the day with my parents, and here, I’ve put you all in an awkward spot.” I let out a hard breath. “Let’s go up front, and I’ll get this all straightened out. Don’t you worry.” I put my hand on his back and rubbed small circles.
When we got to the register, my mother was there with her head on my dad’s chest, and Josie was wringing the life out of scarf. All three of them opened their mouths to speak, but I raised my hand over my head, palm up, and they each stopped.
“Mom and Dad, I owe you an apology. I should have simply told you that I wanted to spend at least part of my day at the shop and that I was a bit put out by you showing up here unannounced and expecting me to drop everything. I do appreciate you coming to visit though.”
I turned to Josie then, leaving my parents to react however they would. “Ms. Dawson, I’m so sorry my lack of forthrightness made for this awkward moment. Thank you so much for taking my parents around St. Marin’s and showing off my work here in the shop in a way that I was afraid to do. You are a good friend.”
Finally, I looked at Marcus. “You have done a stellar job on this your first day as assistant manager, Marcus, and I put you in a terrible position. I’m so sorry. Thank you for wanting so badly to make things right.”
I then looked at each of them and waited. Marcus raised a hand and gave me a high five before sliding behind the register. Josie kissed me on the cheek and then walked into the café. Mom and Dad looked at each other and then at me. I didn’t know what to expect. I had a slim dream that they might say they understood, that they were sad I couldn’t talk to them openly, and that while they were hurt that I lied, they would try to do better.
Instead, my mother looked me in the eye and said, “I can see that your juvenile investigatory instincts are more important than your parents’ valuable time. We’ll be going back to Baltimore now. You can come see us when your schedule permits.”
Then, she turned around and walked right out the front door, leaving Dad standing with his arm still in the position that he’d held her in. He gave me a shrug and followed her out.
I kind of wanted to cry, but I’d been the brunt of my mother’s overblown anger far too often to be able to get very worked up over it now. I’d apologized. I’d tried to empathize with her feelings. She just simply was not capable of trying to understand mine. I didn’t like that, but I could do nothing to change it – goodness knows I’d tried my whole life – so I took a shuddering breath and went to straighten up the romance section. All those happily-ever-afters had to give me hope, didn’t they?
* * *
At seven, I turned off the neon OPEN sign, thanked Marcus and Rocky for another great day, and waved Daniel inside. Taco trotted in ahead of him as usual and sniffed out Mayhem over in the psychology section.
I took out the bottle of Chimay that I was gifted by a grateful book buyer a few weeks earlier and that had never made it home, grabbed two coffee mugs from the café, and pointed to the chairs in the fiction section. Daniel looked puzzled, but he took a seat, accepted the mug I handed him, and let me fill it up. I filled my own mug and dropped into the chair across from him.
“So no dinner with your parents tonight?”
I started to cry as I told him the whole story. He let me get it all out – both tears and words – and then he said, “Screw them. You messed up. You apologized. You needed to be heard, too, and they couldn’t do that. So screw them.”
I took a big sip of my beer and thanked the Trappists for their dedication to fine ale before I said, “Screw them.” And then cried a bit more.
Eventually, though, I ran out of tears and got around to telling Daniel what Woody and I had learned at the Harris farm today. “I can’t really call it a farm, though,” I said after I gave him the lowdown on the oil wells. “It’s more an estate really with a farm décor theme. It was like something out of one of those HGTV shows where they do a farmhouse remodel on the 65,000-square-foot mansion by incorporating shiplap and lots of porches.”
Daniel laughed, “You make fun, and yet we have watched exactly nineteen versions of that same show.”
I smiled. “It just doesn’t make any sense. I mean if everyone knows about the oil, why were Pickle and Bear talking about it like it was some great secret? And why wouldn’t Miranda just come clean about the inheritance rather than acting like she had nothing to gain? Surely, even she knows that honesty in a murder investigation is your best bet?”
“Maybe she doesn’t know?” Daniel said as he put the mug of delicious ale to his lips. “Maybe she doesn’t know she’s a millionaire now?”
5
I came to work on Tuesday morning feeling a little down. Over the years, I’d come to terms with who my parents were and that they weren’t the parents who were going to show up for the big moments in my life with a bouquet of flowers and enthusiasm. But sometimes, especially when I knew I’d tried to avoid who they were instead of just dealing with it, I let my disappointment in them get to me.
But I had a business to run, and for yet another reason, I was grateful for this little shop, these people I worked with, and most of all for the books. Books had always been my refuge, a safe space where I could let my large, powerful emotions have free reign beside the characters on the pages. This morning, I arrived at the shop a few minutes after nine and grabbed Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass off the shelf, turned to what I thought was one of the most heartbreaking passages in literature, and let myself sob alongside Lyra.
By the time Marcus arrived, I was feeling better, all my emotions poured out and not repressed, and ready for the day. It didn’t hurt that Marcus bounced through the door with Taco at his heels and said, “New book day, Ms. B” with the enthusiasm of Tigger.
“I see you brought reinforcements,” I pointed at the lumbering form of Daniel’s Basset Hound.
“I figured we could use his ability to sleep as the reverse psych
ology of motivation.”
I laughed as Taco dropped onto his side, missing the dog bed on which Mayhem lay with everything but his tail.
Tuesday always was my favorite day in the bookshop – all those new titles to display, all those customers coming in with excitement for their favorite author’s new book. I couldn’t stay melancholy with all that to look forward to.
Marcus and I busied ourselves with helping customers and rearranging the new titles table at the front of the shop. Rocky supplied us with cups of her new dark roast from the local coffee roasters and lemon scones that were just the right balance of tart and sweet. Nothing like good books and baked goods.
Just as Marcus was about to take his lunch, Galen Gilbert came in with Mack, and we had a low and rather slow dog version of the running of the bulls among the bookshelves as Taco, Mayhem, and Mack played. Taco was a usual fixture at the shop now as it was far safer for everyone if he was here and not leaning against car jacks in Daniel’s shop. Marcus took it as part of his duty as the renter in Daniel’s apartment to pick up the pup each morning, and the two had become fast friends.
Now, he was corralling the three pooches to the bed in the front window before he went out the door with a wave.
Galen was, hands down, my favorite customer. He was, first and foremost, a mystery reader, but he also liked “expanding his horizons,” as he put it and asked me often for recommendations. Last week, I’d put Edward Ball’s Slaves in the Family into his hands when he said he wanted some history but nothing dry. Now, I was eager to hear what he thought.
“Well?” I asked as he leaned against the counter by the register. “Did you like it?”
He looked down at his hands and cleared his throat. “Not exactly, Harvey.” Then he looked up through the top of his eyes and said, “I loved it. What a brilliant amount of work Ball did, and I loved how honest he was about his family’s legacy as slave holders. Wow. I’ll be thinking about that one for a long time.”
“I thought you’d love it. It’s so good. I wish more people knew about it.”
Galen grinned and held up his phone. “They do now.”
On the screen was an image of a person’s shoulder just outside the front of my store with the sign clear as day, and I laughed. “I need to hire you as my PR manager, sir.” He handed me the phone, and I read his glowing caption that had, in the first five minutes, 656 likes. “You are a master.”
“I can only do my work with the support of worthy experts like you.” He laughed and headed off to the mystery section.
I did a lap around the shop to tidy and say hello to the folks reading and browsing among the shelves, and when I circled back, Galen had returned to the register with his usual stack of titles. “You’ve read Lauren Elliot, I presume,” he said as I began to ring up the books, sliding my twenty percent employee discount into the mix as a bit of gratitude for his publicity.
“Just this first one, so far. But I loved it.” I slipped Murder by the Book into the tote Galen always brought with him and finished ringing up his other purchases. “Thank you, Galen. For everything.”
“My pleasure, Harvey. Really. You’ve made my life better with your shop, and Mack loves coming here, too.” We looked over to see Mayhem giving Mack a face bath with her tongue. “Plus, the free spa services are a delight as well.”
I laughed and waved as he clipped a leash onto a lumbering Mack and headed out the door.
As usual, the day got busier as people took lunch breaks and coffee breaks and “book breaks,” as the woman who ran the yarn shop down the street called her daily visit to the shop. Plus, a number of folks who stopped by told me they’d seen Galen’s posts about the shop and finally decided to visit since they lived nearby. Every time I saw some young twenty-something come into the store and hold up Galen’s Instagram feed to show me why they were here, I wondered if they knew who was behind that beautiful assortment of images and book recommendations. Galen used Mack as his profile pic, and I thought that was probably a thoughtful choice.
* * *
A bit later in the day, I was straightening up the children’s sections that had been beautifully pillaged by the after-school crowd when two men came in. The slimmer of the two was a white man, about sixty or so with a moustache that turned up at the ends, and the other was a balding black man with just the beginning of a potbelly. “Pickle and Bear!” I didn’t mean to say their names – especially their nicknames – out loud, but clearly I had, because they both turned toward me as I prized myself up from the floor by the easy readers.
“You must be Harvey Beckett.” Bear put out his hand. “We’ve been meaning to stop by and say hello. My wife simply raves about you and your shop.”
For a split second I thought about playing dumb, but given that I’d just shouted their small-town nicknames across the store, I figured the jig was up and shook his hand saying, “You must be Bear. I mean, is it okay if I call you Bear?” I sucked my breath in through my teeth.
“Unless you’re my mother and prefer Berrington Rutherford Johnson.” He laughed. “Everyone calls me Bear.”
I smiled. “I don’t know. Berrington Rutherford has a certain ring to it.”
“My mother believed that names set up a person for life, giving them power and stature that supports them each day. She was thoroughly disgusted when the nickname Bear arrived as I started kindergarten and became notorious for giving ‘bear hugs’ to all the girls.”
“A ladies’ man from a young age, I see.” I winked. “It appears your mother and mine shared that perspective. My given name is Anastasia Lovejoy.”
Bear’s eyes got wide. “That is quite the name.”
“Indeed it is. You can see why I stuck with Harvey.”
The other man put out his hand, and I shook it. “Pickle Herring, ma’am. I probably don’t have to explain . . .”
I gave him a wink. “I think I got it.” I swung my arm in an arc behind me. “What brings you into my fine establishment, gentlemen?”
“Can’t two people just want to visit the newest shop in town?” Bear looked at me slyly.
“Of course they can, but if you don’t mind me saying, I do believe you are the first pair of men – who weren’t a couple – who have come into the shop. Unless there’s something you haven’t revealed to the town yet.”
Both men leaned back and laughed. “You are not the first person to suggest this possibility, Harvey, but no, just friends here,” Pickle said.
“To be truthful, we heard that you were curious about some treasure over at Huckabee Harris’s house,” Bear said with a small smile.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. There were no secrets in St. Marin’s, but still, I thought we’d been pretty discrete, at least about how Bear and Pickle were connected to our visit yesterday. I sighed. “You found me out. Word travels fast around here.” I pointed to the café. “Buy you a cup of coffee?”
The men looked at each other and shrugged. We took a table by the window, and given that the gossip train had already run its way right back to me again, I figured our public conversation would either be the source of great speculation or silence the chatter.
As I went up to the counter to get our coffee, Rocky said, “Pickle and Bear are notorious pranksters, Harvey. Even worse than the sheriff. I’ll put on these lids to keep your coffee from being laced with salt or something.” I brought three cups from a fresh pot of that delicious dark roast back to the table and set them down before going back for a small carton of half and half and a sugar jar.
“Let’s lay it all out there. Who told you I was, er, investigating?”
Pickle looked at Bear and then over at me before saying, “Mum’s the word. We don’t reveal our sources.” He gave me a wink. “Besides, it doesn’t really matter. Everyone at breakfast heard the story.”
“So I’m the talk of the town, huh?” I joked.
“Have been for about a month now, my lady,” Bear said.
I blushed. “Well, I hope the rumor
s are making me out to be amazing.”
“How could they not?” Bear laughed and took a sip of his coffee.
“So you two want to get into the oil business.” I said with a smile as I took my first sip.
“Oil? What are you talking about, woman?” Pickle said as he leaned forward in his chair. “We aren’t interested in any oil.”
I almost spit out my coffee, but managed to swallow it first. “You’re not interested in the oil at Harris’s place.”
Another look between them. Another shrug. “Whatever gave you that idea?”
I tried to put together the train of thought that had made that seem so obvious, but as I did, I realized I’d jumped a lot of tracks to get to that particular station. My turn to shrug. “It seemed like buried treasure, I guess.”
“You know Miranda gets all that, right? And we’ve got no problem with that. She’s got enough problems, and maybe that’ll be a way for her to solve some of them.”
I put up a little mental note to come back to Miranda’s problems, but I didn’t want to lose the treasure track again. I suddenly had an idea, and I tried not to snicker when it came to mind. “You’re looking for Confederate gold.”
Without a second’s pause, Bear shouted, “Darn tootin’ we are, young lady! Even have a map.”
Pickle snapped, “Bear!”
I looked from man to man, trying to get a read on these two fellows who appeared far too smart to buy into that fool’s legend. The scowl Pickle was giving Bear after he mentioned that map looked pretty serious. “Don’t worry, fellas, I won’t be horning in on your treasure hunt. But you do know that most of those rumors,” I wanted to say all of those rumors, but didn’t like to dash people’s hopes, “aren’t true, right?”
Bear looked at me like I was pointing out the earth was flat and said, “Of course we know that. We’re not just some country bumpkins who fell off the turnip truck.”
I smiled at the lovely mix of metaphors.
