Save Me from Dangerous Men (Nikki Griffin #1)(12)
“Angry is normal. I get it.”
“I guess.” She sounded exhausted. “I should head back home.”
I squeezed her hand. “You’ll get through this.”
Five minutes later I was headed toward Berkeley. I had a few things to wrap up at the bookstore and then was thinking about a movie and Chinese food. Saturday afternoons were supposed to be quiet.
Supposed to be.
I had yet to meet Gregg Gunn.
9
“Hi, Jess. How’s business?”
“Hey, Nikki! It’s been busy, all the Cal kids settling into fall term. Can’t believe we’re almost through September already.”
The Brimstone Magpie was a used bookstore on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. I’d been lucky and bought the shabby two-story building just before East Bay prices really skyrocketed. Now, no way I could have afforded it. Until the next big quake, Bay Area real estate seemed to only be heading up. At the time, I’d thought the building would be a good way to collect steady money from a long-term tenant. The large street-level space was filled by a trendy bakery with a five-year lease and plans to expand. Then came the recession, and suddenly nobody was jumping to buy six-dollar lemongrass shots or gluten-free birthday cakes anymore. The bakery folded fast.
With the bakery gone and no other prospective tenants in sight, I’d started using the empty space for storing books. I acquired too many books and was constantly getting more. I couldn’t help it. I loved books. Boxes and boxes from garage or library sales, the free books put up in Craigslist ads, along with walking into every bookstore I passed. So eventually I had put up a few shelves, then a few more. An armchair so I could sit with a cup of coffee and read. I paid for the damn space, I’d figured. Might as well enjoy it. And then one rainy winter day a woman holding a dripping umbrella hurried in and asked how much was the copy of Bleak House that she’d seen from the street. I’d never sold a book before. I told her to give me whatever she wanted. She checked her purse and asked if five dollars was okay. I said why not. She paid. My first sale. More people came in, both locals and the university crowd. I started leaving a pot of coffee on the counter. Bought a few more chairs. Put up a few more shelves. At some point, I realized I’d better get a cash register.
The timing was oddly lucky. After Borders folded along with many of the independent bookshops, people started realizing that bookstores weren’t exactly guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. All over the East Bay there was a concerted effort to buy local. I started selling more books. I didn’t really worry about cash flow or balance sheets. I just liked the idea that people could walk in and read. People started arriving with books to sell, more came in from estate sales, book drives, all over. I talked to local libraries and put up signs. So many books piled up that I had to rent storage space in Oakland to hold the stacks I hadn’t had time to sort. I hired a couple of part-timers who came and went before eventually realizing that I needed a full-time manager. I ran an ad and Jess answered it on the second day. She was my age, a raven-haired Los Angeles native who’d walked in wearing cobalt Prada glasses, a miniskirt, and high black boots. During what passed for the job interview she had announced herself as a lesbian with a degree in architecture that she’d never used, a fondness for single malt scotch and rescue animals, and a distaste for cheap coffee, social media, and Lakers fans. She also told me that she expected equity after the first year, zero micromanaging, and permission to bring her cat to work.
I’d hired her on the spot. One of the best decisions of my life.
We got along. She knew when to let me be. Didn’t come running in every two seconds with some breathless question about restocking. Pretty soon she was running the place far more efficiently than I ever had, dealing with accounting and insurance and a hundred other details I never would have thought about. Business picked up. Customers liked the coffee, the armchairs, the casual vibe. And Jess’s tendency to expel anyone who answered their cell phone while in the store. Sales increased. A year passed and I made her a partner. It wasn’t just the sales bump, or that we got along.
Jess understood that I sometimes did other work. She understood that sometimes a woman would come by the store needing something other than a book.
Jess was okay with that. We shared certain views.
“Any good weekend plans?” she asked, turning from a high stack of newly arrived paperbacks that she had been sorting.
“Catch a movie tonight, I think.” Remembering, I laughed. “And apparently I have a date on Monday. Don’t ask me how the hell that happened.”
Jess grinned. “How the hell did that happen?”
I rolled my eyes. “Why do I tell you anything?”
“You on Match, Nikki? Or Tinder? Going for some casual love?”
“Ugh. Please.” I went over to the espresso machine, a Lavazza. A big brass Italian model that was the pride of our shop. We officially offered an espresso to customers who made a purchase, but usually just ended up giving out a lot of free coffee without bothering to toe the line. “Want one?”
“Always.”
I made two, bending down to scratch Bartleby, the bookstore’s resident cat. He was a gray, yellow-eyed cat, and he meowed as I scratched between his ears, his fur warm from the morning sun. True to her word, Jess brought him into the store every day, where he prowled amongst the shelves and took naps of tremendous length, often, for obscure cat reasons, directly atop the register. Maybe he liked to keep track of things more than he let on.