‘Yep,’ she says, her phone hovering over the credit card reader. ‘I used to live in DC, but I left when I broke up with my ex. Coming back to see if I can rekindle the flame.’
People really will tell their booksellers anything.
‘Rekindle the flame with DC?’
Amanda pockets her phone and laughs. ‘No, I think that’s a lost cause. With my ex.’
Lexi hopes it isn’t obvious how hard she is swallowing.
‘Oh, wow.’ She hands Amanda’s books over to her in a white paper bag, stickered with the shop’s logo. ‘Well, good luck.’
Lexi’s hand itches to grab her phone and text Sam.I think I just met your ex?OrDid you know your ex is in town?OrAmanda is prowling the neighbourhood!But, of course, he probably knows already. Probably invited her himself. Probably told her to come to the shop on a reconnaissance mission and to further punish or discombobulate her.
Well, joke’s on him: she’s already at maximum discombobulation.
Lexi is so discombobulated, in fact, that when she heads back down to the office she doesn’t notice straight away that Pippin isn’t in his basket. To be fair, it’s around midday, and sometime around now is when he usually rouses himself from his slumber, has a big stretch, which Lexi, of course, narrates–Biiig stretch!– and he either jumps onto her lap or has a wander around the shop, looking for a patch of sun to enjoy, or rubbing against the legs of friendly-looking bookshop browsers.
Sometimes, he’ll retreat immediately to the office after the trauma of being manhandled by an overly enthusiastic child, but mostly he happily wanders among the bookshelves for a while before taking a break on the sofa in the young adult section, snoozing but ever alert to the constant possibility of those overly enthusiastic children.Yes,she imagines him thinking,I do have beautiful patches of ginger and black and white. Thank you for noticing. Yes, Iamspecial: only one in 3,000 tortoiseshell cats are male, and yet here I am.
Pippin’s getting old now: twelve years old and serious, no longer the playful kitten he was when her grandmother first got him. Lexi had her best DC trip that summer: not only did she have the shop to roam in, she also had a kitten to cuddle with when she got tired of talking to customers or, more likely, when they got tired of talking to her, an over-enthusiastic twenty-year-old who didn’t yet know she was a bookstore-owner-in-training.
Like Pippin, and like Lexi, the shop has matured and evolved. Along with the redecoration when she took over, Lexi rearranged the sections a little, making more space for romance and for non-book merch like socks and tote bags and puzzles and journals – fun things beloved of bookworms but that also happen to have a higher profit margin, helping to keep the bookshop thriving.
Socks aren’t enough, now, though: they need something more drastic. And because Lexi is thinking about that all day, it takes her until closing time to realise she hasn’t seen Pippin since the night before. She tries not to panic: there’s a million places he could be, places he probably explores endlessly after everyone else has gone home: the overstock cupboard, the staff kitchen, the gap under the stairs.
Lexi walks around shaking his dry food and making kissing sounds with her mouth: ‘Pippin! Pippin! You’re not in trouble, I just want to know where you are.’ But when he doesn’t appear, Lexi’s panic rises, and so do her tears. As if it wasn’t enough that she’s sinking her grandmother’s beloved shop, now she’s lost her beloved cat, too?
More shaking, more crying out: nothing.
He’s not on or under the sofa.
He’s not crawled below the shelves in the room of advance review copies.
He’s not hiding from any overly enthusiastic children in the stockroom.
He’s nowhere.
Crap.
Lexi texts Erin:If you were a bookstore cat and you’d decided to have an adventure, where would you go?
She texts her sister, a little less light-heartedly:Help! I’ve lost Pippin!
But it’s 1a.m. back home, and her sister is asleep, and it’s date night here and Erin’s out with John. So Lexi does the only reasonable thing: she sits on the bottom steps and cries. Then, when it turns out that hasn’t really helped either, she does the whole calling/shaking/kissing noises routine again.
Still nothing.
Defeated, she locks up and leaves. It’s not exactly as if she can sleep here on the off chance Pippin decides to materialise overnight. He’s always been an indoor cat, but after twelve years of that maybe he’s decided to go and see the big wide world. Lexi wishes he’d asked her first, given her a chance to warn him about the dangers of that world and to let her talk him out of that.
Firstly, there are cars. Cars! Lexi isn’t sure that Pippin has ever seen a car before, and certainly not in recent months. What if he doesn’t know to get out of the way? Her heart is thumping now. She’s too scared to look at the pavement or the road. What if she finds her little furry companion squashed? She can’t bear it. The only acceptable way for Pippin to die is peacefully in his sleep after a long and happy life. But it would be preferable if he didn’t die at all, and certainly not in the midst of the bookshop falling apart and Lexi’s heart being broken by the man responsible for that.
Unless it’s an omen. What if it’s an omen? An omen that no matter what Lexi does, the shop is doomed? Ugh.
Lexi feels so lonely, walking home to an empty house, after dark. She thinks again about England, her sister, her niece and nephew. Her sister has a spare room. She could land there, sort herself out.
And then she feels bad for even thinking of herself when Pippin is out here, all alone and no doubt terrified... or at least hopefully, because the alternative is unthinkable.
Usually, Lexi listens to a podcast on her way home, but today she has her ears open to anything that might alert her to him. When she gets home, she’ll post on social media and ask for help from the local blogs: a bookshop cat is an institution, after all, and a tortoiseshell is pretty recognisable. But, in the meantime, she tries to stay alert.
