The Noel Letters (The Noel Collection #4) - Richard Paul Evans Page 0,21
appreciates it.”
“I’m sure he does too,” she said. “So did you come to check out your bookstore?”
“When did you know he was leaving it to me?”
“He told me a few months ago.” She put her hands on her hips. “How long has it been since you’ve been here?”
“It’s been about sixteen years.”
“That’s a chunk of time. It’s probably changed a little.”
“It’s changed a lot,” I said. “Or maybe I forgot what it looked like.”
“May I help you with anything?”
“Actually, I came to help you.”
Her eyebrows rose. “Yes?”
“I figured as long as I’m here, I might as well work.”
“You’re not headed back to New York?”
“Not for a while. I’ll probably be staying until the New Year.”
Wendy looked at me as if she were processing what that meant. I couldn’t tell if she was happy with the idea. “You want to work here through the holidays?”
“If that’s okay with you.”
“We could definitely use the help,” she said. “Besides, it’s your store…”
“About that,” I said. “I may be the owner on paper. But you know how things run. I don’t want to get in your way. This is more your store than mine. You built it.”
“Your father built it.”
“With your help,” I said. “So, when I said I came to help, I meant it. You’re the boss. Put me to work.”
She looked at me skeptically. “You’re saying I’m the boss?”
“That’s the deal.”
“All right. We’ll see how that goes.”
“What can I get started on?”
“I just got in a shipment of books, so if you wouldn’t mind watching the front, I can start unpacking.”
“You want me to just stand here?”
“Basically. If someone comes in, you can help them find something. As a side benefit, it keeps shoplifting down.”
“Do we have a lot of theft?”
“Not a lot. But we live on thin margins, and they usually try to return what they stole to us.”
“That’s ironic.”
“What’s ironic is the most stolen book is the Bible. And anything by Kurt Vonnegut.”
“I don’t see the connection.”
“There isn’t one.”
“My father loved Vonnegut.”
Wendy smiled as if I were telling her something she knew better than I did. “I know.”
“So what do we do if someone tries to return something we think they stole?”
She pointed to a small sign taped to the cash register. “No receipt, no returns.”
“Won’t they just take it somewhere else?”
“Yes. But at least we got them out of the store. And most thieves are lazy. They’d rather just take their loot back to where they got it. So, hopefully, they’ll go somewhere else next time.”
I looked over at a young woman perusing a row of books in the self-help section. “She looks like a thief,” I said facetiously.
“It means she’s using our store as a showroom. She checks out the books she’s interested in, then after she leaves, she’ll buy them online, where she can get them for less. Sometimes they don’t even wait to leave the store.”
“How can you tell?”
“She keeps taking pictures of books.”
I looked back over at the woman. She was holding her phone up to a book. She saw us looking at her and put her phone down. Wendy turned back to me. “So, in the unlikely event that her perusing turns to purchasing, do you know how to take payment?”
“No.”
“It’s not hard. I’ll show you this afternoon. In the meantime, you can come get me.”
“Is there anything else you need me to do?”
She looked around. “I need to change that table display of Halloween books to holiday books. Do you have any experience with displays?”
“I’m sure I could figure it out.”
She looked unconvinced. “Tell you what—just take the books off the table and stack them on the floor for now, then take the books out of those boxes and put them on the table. I’ll finish up later. If you have any questions, you know where to find me.” She walked to the back of the store.
I began taking the books off the table. There were four boxes marked christmas books. They were mostly classic Christmas tales.
We had more than a dozen customers over the next three hours, more than I expected. A little after noon I found Wendy in the back. “What do you do for lunch?”
She lifted a brown paper sack from her desk. “My lunch plans are right here. I thought I was working alone this morning, so I brown bagged it.”
“I think I’ll walk over to that bread place and get something.”