Family by Caroline Leavitt

Author:Caroline Leavitt [Leavitt, Caroline]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Family
ISBN: 9781941088173
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 1987-11-15T05:00:00+00:00

TEN

Nick couldn’t help it, but he always thought of the bookshops he visited as his own. He knew all the layouts; he knew the windows and how light struck the displays; he knew where the dust was most likely to settle. Every visit, he gave himself lots of time so he could prowl about the shop and see how things were doing. He made minihomes of each shop, relatives out of every buyer, and he felt this tremendous flush of pleasure every time he walked through a door, every time a buyer walked toward him with a hand out to grasp his.

Really, he considered the book buyers caretakers of his shops, and he enjoyed giving them advice. He didn’t like the way a new line of books was just junked onto the shelves. He hated a window cluttered with tiny Styrofoam men holding up the books. Some of the buyers listened. One girl was just as happy to have Nick climb into the greasy front window to set up a display the way he said would do the most good. She was just as content to have him be the one to pick out all the dead flies that had kamakazeed into the fluorescent lights. The truth was, she didn’t give a hoot what he put into the window as long as he was the one doing it.

Nick talked to the customers. He’d try to figure out what kind of book they needed to read and then go and find it, popping it into a pair of surprised hands. He found comic novels for depressed-looking women; he pulled out murder mysteries for bored-looking men; he suggested kids’ books to grandmothers. Once, he started telling a little girl one of the stories he had told Robin a long time ago, but halfway through it he began to feel guilty, as if he had somehow betrayed something, and he had to excuse himself, making up something about needing to see someone in the back.

But lately there were complaints. At one shop, he had seen a thin, anemic-looking blonde in a white coat hunching surreptitiously over books. Curious, he trailed her a little, until he got close enough to see her unfurling a long loop of pink stickers with JESUS SAVES printed on them. She was furtively pasting them into the pages.

It enraged Nick. He knew you couldn’t pull off a sticker without lifting up print, too. He saw the books she went after—books on abortion, books by Sartre, for Christ’s sake—and he grabbed the girl’s arm. “Hey, who you touching?” she said, jerking around, socking him squarely in the eye before she sprinted out of the shop.

The buyer, a new man, gave Nick a paper towel soaked in cold water for his eye, already blooming into blues. He was cross, though. He told Nick it was none of his business, that what he should have done was just call the manager. “It’s not your responsibility,” he said, miffed. “And we never touch customers.

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