I brought the woman over to our YA section, but she turned up her nose at the “trash” available and picked up some moldy old thing from our clearance table, whose only redeeming feature was the five-dollar price sticker.
“Good choice,” I said, ringing it up. You can only offer your expert advice; you can’t make them take it, especially if something else is cheaper. When I put the book into a bag, I slipped in a flyer for some better stuff, the paper discreetly folded in half.
The woman thanked me and started to leave the shop, looking very pleased with her decision. I hoped her niece would genuinely love the bargain book, which was not about cute vampires, but an English translation of a Swedish book about a young man coming to terms with degenerative eye disease; however, I had a bad feeling it was the sort of thing that scares kids away from books, much like outdated high school English curriculums and E. Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News.
“Oo-OO-OOH!” the woman exclaimed on her way out the door. She was ooh-ing the person coming in, not me.
She held the door open for a man carrying a lavish bouquet of peonies and other pink and white flowers, blossoms and leaves hiding his face.
My heart jumped up. It’s happening, I thought.
The flowers lowered, past dark brown hair.
This is it. We’re falling in love, I thought.
The flowers lowered some more, revealing eyes a bit less twinkling-with-lust than I expected.
Nope. Not happening.
Brown mustache.
It wasn’t Dalton Deangelo, but his trusty butler and driver, Vern.
With a heart full of hope, I peered behind Vern, but he was coming into the bookshop alone.
Frowning, he put the vase of flowers down on the counter between us. “You ran away last night. I was supposed to see to your safe return home.”
I held out my hands. “As you can see, I’m in one piece.”
“Mr. Deangelo requests your company on Friday afternoon, if you can make yourself available.”
“Three days from now? What does he have in mind?”
Frowning under his bushy, ultra-serious mustache, Vern said, “That’s confidential.”
“Ooh. Mysterious. And so dramatic! Is Dalton always so dramatic?”
“Also confidential.”
I plucked the card from within the flowers and opened it up. The note read: Thanks for the fun.
Thanks for the fun?
What the fudge did that mean? Was fun code for blowjob?
Without Dalton’s gorgeous face in front of me, I felt differently about him. His charm was now coming second-hand from his butler, and Vern had a charm-dampening effect. With his grouchy face, Vern was the cold shower of charm.
Charm.
What would the pink-haired lady who gave the charm workshop advise me to do here? Dottie would want me to play hard to get.
“I’m really busy,” I said, handing Vern a business card for the store. “Have Mr. Deangelo phone me when he’s got the time.”
Vern took the card, his face grim. “There’s no need to play games,” he said. “It’s quite clear to me that you like Mr. Deangelo, and I’ll tell him as such.”
“Fine, do that.”
“Why is everyone in this town… so odd?”
I put my hands on my hips. “Oh, no, you didn’t. Vern, did you just insult all of Beaverdale?”
“I suppose not,” he grumbled. “It’s just that…”
“What?”
“I thought people in small towns were supposed to be friendly, but hardly anyone’s been friendly to me.”
“You can’t just expect people to show up at your door with pie. You need to make the first move. Take an interest. I know you’re not here very long, but check out the community cork board on our wall and find something you’re interested in.”
He walked over to the board and started looking, his hands folded behind his back. I let him have his moment as I cupped the beautiful flowers and fluffed up the arrangement. Flowers. From my gentleman friend! How old fashioned and wonderful.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Vern take down one tear-tab for a community event, and then another. This made me smile, and I was already smiling from the heavenly scent of my flowers, so my face nearly broke from smiling.
Just then, the door jingled and another person came in.
“Good day,” Vern said with a curt nod, and he scurried away.
“Not a customer?” asked the man who’d just come in. He was a slim man with ginger hair—my father. “He didn’t leave with a book.”
“Dad! Don’t worry about it. We’re doing fine, and sales are steady.”
He pointed to a light switch next to the front door. “Want me to turn this off?” Without waiting for a response, he flicked the switch off, which turned off the flood lights that lit up the exterior sign. We didn’t need the lights on during sunny days, but they kept the store from being invisible in the evenings and through drizzling Washington winters. The owner, Gordon Junior, had been meaning to put the lights on a light-sensor switch, or a timer, but hadn’t gotten around to it, what with all the wine tastings next door. We just left the lights on all the time rather than forget to turn them on when needed, but this didn’t sit well with my father, who believes that a penny saved is a penny earned, and that there’s no penny more shiny and proud than a penny saved on the electricity bill.
“Dad, it’s pretty cloudy today. Might start raining any minute.”
He leaned over to inspect the window display, then glowered up at the halogen spotlights. “If you retro-fit some compact fluorescents in there, it won’t heat up and fade the book covers so much.”
“Then what will be my incentive to change the window display?”
He stared at me like he couldn’t believe we shared DNA.
After a moment, he cocked his head to the side. “Is that the air conditioning running? You could just open the door for a bit. Air the place out at night, get it good and cold, then pull the blinds until you get here in the morning.”
“Dad, you do realize it’s not my bookstore, right? I get paid the same no matter what the electricity bill is.”
He scratched his head, looking very much the absent-minded professor. My father and his business partner run a niche business selling parts for radio-control helicopters, or as I like to call them, “flying chainsaws.” They rent office space just down the street from Peachtree Books, so it wasn’t unusual to have him pop in like this.
“Your mother wants you to bring your new boyfriend to dinner Friday. She hardly got to talk to him at your cousin’s wedding.”