“Are you a real doctor?” a woman asked.
As opposed to an imaginary one?
“I have a PhD in German history.”
The knitting circle tittered and nodded. Nervous perspiration formed along Martin’s hairline, and he was grateful when Cassidy appeared through one of the stacks. She swooped in with a question for Mrs. Green about plans for an upcoming Halloween display, effectively diverting the spotlight off of him.
“She likes the status of having you around,” Cassidy said, after the knitting circle had left.
“Who?”
“Mrs. Green.”
“I told her she didn’t need to call me Doctor at my interview.”
“She’ll never call you Martin, trust me. It’s not glamorous enough.”
He wasn’t glamorous. He was just Martin. Even when he’d finished his PhD, it had been uncomfortable when people had addressed him as ‘Doctor.’ The title had always felt borrowed, like sooner or later someone would remember that he shouldn’t be in the room and send him away.
He’d been right about that, in the end.
At four o’clock, after the poetry group left, the shop got quiet.
“Did we actually sell any books today?” Martin asked.
Cassidy nodded. “The mommies always buy a few. And I sold a couple more while you were eating your lunch. And these came in.” She thumped a palm on a banker’s box that sat on the counter. Martin lifted the lid. Inside was a selection of ancient cowboy novels. The covers were worn around the edges and the pages were yellowed.
“Will these sell?” He flipped the first one open. The copyright said 1962.
“Probably not. But Mrs. Green has a policy that we don’t turn books down.”
“But if you can’t sell them, what do you do?”
“Well, some of them—” She was drowned out by the groan of hinges. A man in a blue polo shirt and wire-framed glasses came through the shop’s front door.
“Hey Dad!” Cassidy hopped down from the stool she had been sitting on.
“Ready to go?”
“Let me get my bag.”
She was leaving? Martin’s throat went tight. The shop was quiet, but she couldn’t be leaving, could she? It was his first day. Who left someone alone on their first day?
Cassidy dropped her heavy ring of keys on the counter next to the cash.
“You’ll be fine. The little key locks the register, and the big one locks the front door. Make sure you turn off the coffee maker and that’s pretty well all you have to do.”
“Aren’t there—aren’t there—” He thought back to the years he had worked in the campus bookshop. “Don’t we need to cash out or something?”
Cassidy waved her hand as she headed toward the door. It had seemed so ridiculous that he had been left in the charge of this girl, but now she was leaving him! He dug his fingernails into the old wood of the counter to keep from running after her.
“Mrs. Green does all the accounting on Sundays. Just put all the receipts in the drawer and lock it up when you’re done!”
The hinges shrieked once more as Cassidy’s father followed her out to the street, and Martin was left alone. The store, with its towering shelves, loomed over him. Despite his earlier anxiety at dealing with more than one person at a time, Cassidy and the various groups of locals had kept the place feeling busy all day. Now he was very aware of the empty silence.
There were thousands of books and not a soul to talk to. The old building had a whole selection of creaks and pops that sounded intermittently. Each one made Martin flinch. He stared as people passed by on the street. Not one of them so much as paused to look through the window, and he was left with a strange sense of invisibility.
Needing a distraction, he made his way to the kitchen and only got turned around once near a shelf labeled ‘The Dog Doesn’t Die.’ He washed the single coffee pot and the mismatched mugs the mothers, knitters, and poets had left behind over the course of the day. It didn’t take nearly as long as he wanted it to, and soon he was making his uncertain way back toward the front of the store.
