The Bookish Life of Nina Hill(48)

Polly looked exasperated. “That’s not the point. I’m saying life is unpredictable. Any number of random things could happen.”

“Of course,” said Nina. “My plan is based on averages and experience. It takes that much time, like, most of the time, so I plan accordingly. I can be flexible. I can roll with the punches.”

Polly snorted. “What about when Phil got worms and you had to take him to the vet?”

“That’s a great example,” replied Nina, starting to be a little stung. “I cleared my schedule completely that day. No hesitation at all.”

Polly laughed. “Yeah, because you couldn’t work out how to reschedule everything to allow for the vet appointment, so instead of trying, you canceled it all.”

“What’s your point?”

“My point is that you’re inflexible.” Polly smiled at Nina. “And that you’d rather blow it all up than spend time fixing things. But it doesn’t really matter, unless you care that you missed out on a date because of it.”

Nina shook her head. “He wasn’t right for me, anyway. He didn’t read.”

“Reading isn’t the only thing in the world, Nina.”

“It’s one of only five perfect things in the world.”

“And the other four are?”

“Cats, dogs, Honeycrisp apples, and coffee.”

“Nothing else?”

“Sure, there are other things, even good things, but those five are perfect.”

“In your opinion.”

“Yes, of course in my opinion. Everyone has a different five perfect things.”

Polly thought about it. “I can get behind that. Mine would be movies, steak frites, Jude Law in his thirties, clean sheets at night, and indoor plumbing.”

“Mine would be making a profit, keeping a bookstore open, books that get shelved, orders that get filled, and employees who don’t stand around talking,” said Liz as she appeared suddenly behind them.

“See?” said Nina airily, picking up a list of customer orders. “Everybody has five.”





Sixteen




In which Nina reads, and texts, and reads again.

There are people who have no time for books. Nina had met those people; usually they came into the bookstore to ask for directions and would then look about confusedly when they realized they were surrounded by these strange paper oblongs. Maybe they had rich fantasy lives, or maybe they were raised by starfish who had no access to dry printed material, who knows, but Nina judged them and felt guilty for doing so.

She had always been a bookworm. There was a picture hanging on her bathroom wall that showed her lying on a rug somewhere, fast asleep, surrounded by books. She had been around one, maybe. She was still traveling around with her mom at that point, going where she went and sleeping where she slept. But even then, the only constant thing—apart from Candice Hill and her camera, of course—had been books. On her shelves somewhere she had The Tale of Peter Rabbit (the single story, not a collection) in English, French, Tagalog, Russian, Greek, Hindi, and Welsh. They hadn’t visited all those countries together, but once Nina was settled in Los Angeles it became somewhat of a thing for her mom to send her Peter Rabbit from wherever she was working. Nina still found herself occasionally hunting online for languages she didn’t have, although it felt like cheating to order them all on eBay. Besides, she didn’t have the shelf space.

Shelf space was always a problem for the dedicated booklover. Nina had three large floor to ceiling bookcases, a stroke of good fortune that made her friends gasp when they first walked into her apartment. One entire bookcase was Book of the Month selections, which was a problem, because they kept coming—monthly, naturally—but space was running out. Louise had given her a membership when she turned eighteen, and she had tried very hard to restrict herself to only one a month, but that still meant she now had over 120 beautiful, hard-backed books in that one section alone. Another section was books that had been signed by their authors; again, an easy hundred of those. She was strict about only including books she’d had signed in person; buying them already signed didn’t count. In a totally separate, smaller, glass-fronted bookcase were rare first editions or interesting printings, which was a much smaller collection, because Nina could only afford those occasionally. One time an elderly customer who’d been coming to Knight’s for years brought her a first edition of The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran, and pressed it into her hands.

“I’m too old to read the print now, Nina. You should have it. I was given it when I was not much more than a child, and it was special then. I think my mother bought it when she was young.”

Nina had been incredibly touched. “But don’t you want to give it to your son?” She’d met him, once, when he came in with his mother, but she couldn’t remember much about him.

The lady had smiled and shaken her head. “He would be more impressed that it’s worth a little money than by the book itself, and that’s not right. You take it, then I know it will be well taken care of.”

And it was, carefully covered with an acid-free slipcover and frequently admired. It contained Nina’s favorite saying: You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts. She wanted to wear it on a T-shirt, embroider it on a pillow, or maybe tattoo it on her wrist. But the trouble with wordy tattoos is that people start reading them, then you have to stand still while they finish, and then they look up at you and frown and you have to explain yourself . . . Way too much human interaction, plus also the needles, the pain, the fear of the needles and pain. So, no tattoo, but an embroidery wasn’t out of the question.