Henry could remember the light in the old man’s eyes.
Barbara shook her head to hold in the tears. “He was broke. He had gambled every last dime away. Horses. Poker. He loved the risk. That was the way he always ran his business. You know about all that, but the money he put aside for Mom—that disappeared too. She had made investments, but the taxman came after he died. Dad hadn’t paid some tax or another when he sold his company. The IRS came after their property. She never told me. She just paid for it all. And in the end, there was nothing … I’ve been helping her since then, of course—but she’s feeble now. She has dementia. Now—” she took another gulp of air. “And now I can’t help anymore. It’s as if now, I’m feeble too. …”
He moved over to the couch and held her as she shook with short breaths and tears.
This was a different Barbara than he had ever known. If she had needed him a little more once upon a time, things might have been different. As she calmed, he wondered if he had changed as much. He knew if he spoke, she would focus on what he said, and regain some measure of the self-control she cherished. And he had in inkling of a new idea taking shape.
“You have a few more cards to play—a few more options. Your hand isn’t all that bad. Downsize. Have a real sale. Fifty percent on everything. Then move to a smaller space. Pick the parts you like the best, and get rid of the rest.”
She began to interrupt. “But we’ve worked so hard …” Her voice was trapped in her throat.
What was he going to say to that? She had worked more than twenty years away.
Oddly, his only thought was from a favorite book that he had just read again that summer. “You’re a rancher. There’s a drought. You do what you have to do, so that when it rains again, you’ll still be there to feel it on your face.”
Those were not exactly the right words for it.
She hit him with a blank stare of skepticism. Her hands mashed the tears on her cheeks. She sniffed. “What do you know about ranching, city boy?”
“I was reading a book. Elmer Kelton. The Time It Never Rained. It’s Albert’s favorite Western. Read it. It’ll buck you up.”
A brief smile crossed her face. He realized how warm she felt.
She broke away from him, pulled tissues from her pocket, and blew her nose.
“You can’t get everything out of a book.”
“No, you can’t. But I’m just telling you to change a little. You’ve already changed. You took Sharon in as a partner. I would never have believed that. But you’re going to have to take a few more steps. You can’t run a museum for the public to come and see what an old bookstore used to look like. You have to make yourself new again. Reinvent yourself.”
She blew her nose again and tilted her head at him.
“Henry. Twenty-three years! In October it will be that long since you came in the door, skinny as a wet dog, and asked for a job. You haven’t changed one damn bit. Why do you think I can?”
He had the best answer to that.
“Because I know you can. You can do anything you want. You always could.”
She wiped her nose a last time.
“Right!” She gave that a single affirmative nod. “But I need some help. Not just with money. With Sharon. It’s a miserable partnership. We don’t argue that much, really. We just don’t speak most of the time. I already told her we might have to move the business. She became irate. She wants me to find some additional capital so we can hang on until this slowdown is over. She thinks she can build enough internet sales to make a difference. She thinks moving will be a disaster. And she wants to sell CDs, for God’s sake … and I’m not so sure she’s wrong. But she’s not the same as she was. She’s very protective of her territory. Before she became a partner, she was easy to deal with. She was precise. Orderly. But since then, she’s the one who’s really changed. She doesn’t get to work on time. The cataloged books are a mess. I think it’s psychological. Her life was overturned when Jim died. I suppose he was more responsible for keeping her life together than I realized.”
Henry hesitated with his thoughts. “What can I do?”
“You can talk to Sharon for me.”
He sat back and blew air. “I think I should keep my distance from Sharon. She seems to be in heat. You don’t need me involved in that. All you need is a little money and some reasonable advice.”
That made Barbara smile broadly. The smile was a little lopsided. Her teeth were slightly crooked because her father had refused to keep paying the orthodontist after the first year. It was the smile Henry had once succumbed to after resisting for too long. Not at all perfect. If he had given in to it sooner—if they had married long ago, what might have happened?
She took his hand and squeezed it. Her hands had always been warm.
“It’s all right … I was just hoping your grumpy old Uncle Jack had finally died and left you his rare collection of early-twentieth-century bottlecaps or something.”
She still remembered his tales of Uncle Jack, the default cause of all family problems when he was growing up.
“My dad has dibs on those. He swears he going to outlive Jack to get them. He always thought they were his anyway.”
“I remember.”
Henry sat forward. He really had only one offer to make.
“But I do have an idea. Tell me what you think of this—you know my client list? That’s all I have, really. It’s up to about seven hundred and thirty-five dealers now. I can select things out of your online catalog and put them into mine. I won’t even have to redo the listing. Sharon has done all the hard work already. I’ll just remove the price. You’ll have to let them go for a lot less than you have them listed for now, because I’ll be selling to other dealers, but they’ll bring in some quick cash. I’ll sell them for you, and you won’t have to have a general sale right away. You can plan your next move.”
She stared at him a moment, her face slack.
“But what about the long term?”
“In the long term, we are all dead. The economy has been down since at least September eleventh and all that. It’s coming back. It has to. I agree with Sharon about that. Business will get better as people feel looser with their pocket money. It will give you more time to think. But it will never be what it was. And if it’s time to fold the tent—you’ve had a good run. If there aren’t enough people out there who can read outside the box of the bestseller list, then maybe you can downsize, maybe you can find a size that suits the few people who do. …”
Her eyes were fixed on his in a way that hurt.
“That’s so sad, Henry. That’s what we were trying to stop from happening at the very beginning. It’s what you could see coming years ago. That was what we used to talk about late at night.”
“We did .… And you did it. You made things happen the old way for a while. But I think all of that may be over now.”
Chapter Fifteen
Henry was discouraged. He had chosen fifty books listed at the Alcott & Poe website to put up for bids on his own, and Sharon had been unable to find eleven of them in the shelves of the office where the rare and delicate books were kept. He already knew that the business problems of the last few years had forced Barbara to cut the staff. Two student part-timers were not enough support. This, coupled with Sharon’s other difficulties, left little time for housekeeping.
He had remained too long in the upstairs office, trying to help. Finding piles of regular overstock mixed with cataloged books, he had separated them. Double-stacked shelves rose well beyond his own reach and required the constant shifting of a ladder. Books which had been recently pulled out to show potential customers had not been put back correctly. Odd volumes missing their mates were shuffled in with broken bindings needing repair. The eccentric sizes of older books created space problems on shelves designed for the usual octavo and quarto dimensions of modern volumes. His interaction with Sharon had disintegrated into bickering.
“That shouldn’t be there!” Followi
ng him from shelf to shelf, Sharon restacked what he had moved. “Why did you put that there?”
“It was already there. I just put it back where it was before.”
“It couldn’t have been. It belongs with the biographies.”
The edge in her voice was sharpened by the quickness of her response.
In the narrow spaces, the pale blue of her eyes caught little light from the fluorescent fixture above. There was no room for the two of them to pass each other without being much too close.
It was for that reason he had finally retreated down the stairs to sit with Barbara at the front desk, leaving his list with Sharon to search alone. She would be able to spot the titles faster in any case, having handled them before.
“She’s angry,” he said to Barbara from where he sat on a stool at the far end of the counter to watch the daily passage of humanity while he waited. Barbara sat behind the cash register, pricing a small stack of newer titles. She seemed uncomfortable with him there. If he remembered correctly, he had not been behind this counter since the day he had left his old job at Alcott & Poe.
A Mozart violin concerto on the radio was too loud for the quiet of the store. The store cat, a short-haired orange tabby named Homer, tried to climb Henry’s leg. Henry brushed him off, and the cat jumped into Barbara’s lap instead.
Barbara answered without looking at Henry.
“She is. We surprised her with this idea. She doesn’t like it.”
“I felt like I was a hunter in a mother bear’s den.”
There were two mother bears in this den, he thought.
Barbara worked her fingertips around the cat’s ears, to the animal’s obvious pleasure. “I suppose things look worse than they really are. Sharon usually finds any title we need in a few minutes. It’s just the problem of managing all those books in too little space. Especially the pamphlets. I hate the ephemera. Some of those are only a few pages long. They disappear in the cracks. Maybe that’s why I like the modern first editions. They’re easier to deal with—easier to find, easier to describe, easier to ship.”
They could both hear the sounds of shifting and moving from the office above.
“But everybody has those,” he said. “I was picking out the other stuff, because they’re titles you don’t see as often. And for price. They’ll bring higher prices. I picked out over fifty titles that are worth over two hundred dollars each at retail. And there’s more. You can’t have stock like that sitting upstairs for years when you’re in a financial crisis. There might be half a million dollars of retail stock in that room alone.”
Barbara knew this, of course. And she understood that she was going to get far less for these books as Henry sold them off. She must have been torn by the ambivalence, but she was settled on the idea now.
Barbara greeted the few customers coming in and asked if they needed assistance.
One young woman stopped and stared about herself, mouth open, then spoke out loud to no one in particular.
“Is this a library?”
Barbara smiled but did not answer. It was better to pretend the question was a joke than to accept the fact that so may people on the street had no idea what a bookshop once looked like before the age of chain stores and plastic shelving.
The register remained quiet.
Henry looked back down an almost empty aisle at one of the part-timers as she put stock up on a high shelf. Was that girl really so young, or was he getting so old? He hooked his thumb toward her and turned back to Barbara.
“Sharon has to find more time to keep things in order. Couldn’t some of the students help her?” This question sounded rhetorical even to him.
Barbara’s tone of studied patience made it obvious.
“No. She won’t let them. They really don’t know enough about it all. And besides, Sharon actually does put in a lot of time. She catalogues at least twenty books a day. She’s not punctual anymore, but she stays late. And I don’t think she sleeps well. She always seems tired to me.”
It was Barbara who looked tired to Henry, more than just a slump to her shoulders. The cat looked back at Henry, unconcerned by their worries.
Henry said, “Tell her to take a break. Take a vacation. It’s summer. Things are slower now, right?”
“She took a vacation, in the spring, but it didn’t seem to help. She came back looking as tired as when she left.”
He could not help but think that it was Barbara who needed the vacation. “Is it the store that has her worried? Or the book?”
It was probably just the money, Henry thought—almost always it was money that worried people. He was happy to be out of that loop.
Barbara’s sigh harmonized with the purring of the cat. “I’m not sure … I told you she’s changed since Jim died. She doesn’t talk to me like she used to. For years, I felt like her older sister—the way she used to come to me all the time with her little problems.”
Henry began, “It’s still only a couple of years since Jim—”
Barbara interrupted, “Psychologizing is easy, of course. But I’m beginning to think she’s getting worse, not better. I suppose she really was dependent on Jim, and of course he took advantage of that. He was a difficult guy.”
Barbara would have her own definition of difficult.
Henry asked the obvious. “Did he fool around?”
She gave a short laugh. “Only with his students.”
“How do you know?”
Barbara shrugged. “That’s how he got Sharon. Isn’t it?”
“But she stayed with him.”
“She couldn’t let him go.”
“And now she’s dependent on you.”
“I suppose .… When things started getting pretty slim around here, I suggested she might want to keep her eye out for other opportunities, because we might not make it. That’s when she came back with the offer of a loan.”
“But that was a good thing wasn’t it? Would you have been able to hang on over the last two years without it?”
“No. But now she has what’s left of the money from Jim’s insurance tied up here, and things have only gotten worse.”
He wondered how it was so damned easy for money to get in the way of friendship. “So, she’s under a new strain and there’s no place to turn, with Jim gone. You don’t think she can handle it. But you’ve been in that position for years, Barbara. You’ve been carrying this load by yourself from the very beginning.”
Barbara ignored this. “But, that’s not the point—”
“No. That’s just you,” Henry answered.
A woman approached and stood, book in hand, waiting for help, as if unsure how the process worked.
Barbara shook off her thoughts and smiled.
“Can I help you with anything?”
The woman tapped the cover of her book with an index finger.
“I was wondering if your prices are fixed. This one seems a little steep to me.” There was a whine to the woman’s voice.
She put the book up on the counter and Barbara opened the cover. It was a recent copy of a bestseller, in fine condition, already marked down.
“It seems about right. It’s half price.” Barbara watched the woman’s eyes. The customer pulled the book away again and opened the cover herself, flipping pages carelessly, as if they had little value.
“Barnes & Noble has the same title brand new for one third off. Shouldn’t it be at least half of that?”
“But this isn’t Barnes & Noble.”
“I know where it is.” The woman answered quickly.
Barbara’s voice changed. Henry knew she was not in the mood for this kind of exchange.
“Then you know we can’t price our books like Barnes & Noble either.”
“Maybe if you made them cheaper, you’d sell more.”
“You mean, lose a little bit on every sale, but make it up on volume?”
The woman offered a blank stare to the common joke.
“So, can you go down on this a li
ttle?”
Barbara’s smile froze in place. Henry did not know where she found the reserve.
“Maybe it would be better to pick out something less expensive. We have a great many paperbacks.”
The woman slapped the cover shut and threw it back on the counter.
“I don’t need some smart-ass clerk telling me what to buy.”
She left. Barbara shook her head and put the book aside. Henry rose from the stool.
“It takes all of ten minutes behind the desk here to remember just why I left in the first place. I guess I’d better be going now. Tell Sharon I’ll come by tomorrow for the books.”
Barbara smiled weakly and looked away, as if looking for something to do. The cat had disappeared.
Outside, Newbury Street was filled with young women intent on buying shoes, and panhandlers leaning themselves at the young women. Street musicians who had never learned more than the effect of percussion on plastic and metal buckets overwhelmed other street noises. In the ten or fifteen minutes he had been behind the counter, no one had bought a single book from Alcott & Poe. Across the street, a steady stream of kids left a more fashionable store with small plastic bags stuffed with CDs and DVDs. It was not a picture Henry liked.
The bright orange of a parking ticket glared in the sun from his windshield at the meter. He had stayed a little too long.
He grabbed the ticket, read the fine, and then had the odd thought that orange might look good in a pinstripe against the green up the side of the truck. He would have to think about that.
Traffic had slowed on Massachusetts Avenue, narrowed by construction. Henry shifted down to second gear and rode the clutch. The engine muttered but offered no objection. He liked the sound, and fed the engine just enough gas to keep it going. Muttering. That was something funny, after all. It was his grandfather MacNeill, who had once owned a truck just like this one, and so often muttered to himself. Mac, it was said, was an unhappy man who lived twenty years after his wife passed, and never saw a happy day without her. In the picture of Henry’s mother when she was a girl hanging from the side of the truck, Grandpa Mac was staring forward, but Henry always imagined his muttering. Henry’s mother had escaped into her books from an early age after her own mother had died. She was always happiest with a book in her hands. Now the irony was that his own father lived on, alone, as his grandfather had. But then, Henry’s father never muttered. He seldom even spoke. His lips went flat and his face whitened, and anyone seeing him knew he wanted to speak. It was not the words he lacked, or the thought. It was purpose, as if it were no use to speak because nothing would be changed by it. The words would trap in his throat, cutting off his breath. Henry had seen it so many times.
A Slepyng Hound to Wake Page 14