went from broke-ass loser to billionaire CEO. Saying sorry was never good enough. Losers said sorry. Real men showed that they were sorry, and this was just the first step.
“What are you doing?” she muttered to me without even looking at me.
“Helping you shelve these.”
“You know the Dewey Decimal System?”
“That a fancy way of saying alphabetical order?”
“It’s more complicated than that.”
I looked over at all the books. She was shelving a bunch of books that started with “W,” and she was clearly just alphabetizing them.
“So…” I said, picking up one of the books. “Waterways of the Chesapeake Bay, in alphabetical order I’d put this right here, in front of Windmills in the Netherlands, or in the fancy Dewey Decimal System, would it go...after?”
She glared at me. Okay, so she was looking at me. Yes, it was a glare, and I was pretty sure I could even hear her teeth grinding together, but she was at least looking at me rather than ignoring me. “Fine,” she said. “It’s just alphabetical order. Since it’s so easy, you can do it without talking or looking at me.”
“My Daddy said he’s going to say sorry to you, Miss Lacey Larsen.”
Lacey looked up at Naomi and smiled, but it was the kind of smile you’d give when you ran over someone’s dog with your car. “Oh, um, I’m going to sign your books soon, sweetie. You can just call me Miss Lacey. You don’t have to use my last name.”
“I call you Miss Lacey Larsen, because that’s the author name on the book.”
“Naomi,” I whispered. “See all those super cool kids activities over there. In the Kids’ Corner. Why don’t you go check those out?”
“But I want to make friends with Miss Lacey Larsen.”
I took Naomi by the hand and guided her into the Kids’ Corner. “Sweetheart, I’m trying to say sorry to Miss Lacey Larsen, and I appreciate your help, but grownups can be very complicated. Think of it like playing Jenga. You like Jenga, right?”
“I make the tower FALL! DOWN!” She shouted the last few words, and she made a big pantomime of a Jenga tower collapsing with her hand.
“That’s right, and me making Lacey understand that I’m sorry is kind of like playing Jenga. Except I need to gently pull pieces out without making the tower fall down. Since you’re so good at making it fall down, I think you should play here while I do my thing. We good?”
“We good,” she said.
“I’ll be right over there.” I pointed back to where Lacey was. “I can see you from there.”
She was already walking over to one of those motorized plastic fishing games setup on a table. Two kids with magnetized fishing poles were struggling to catch a single fish. Naomi picked up a fishing pole by the wrong end and offered her “help” to the other kids.
I walked back toward Lacey, who was nearly finished shelving up all the books.
“You’re like twenty minutes early for Reading Hour,” she said. “Don’t guys like you think time is money?”
“I have all the time in the world.”
“Because time is money, and you have all the money in the world. People like me have no time or money. That’s the way of things.”
I winced. There was only one book left, and I grabbed it before she could.
We were close to each other now. My eyes fell to her legs. She was wearing a pencil grey skirt with black pantyhose. She had a flannel shirt on, and I noticed that quite a few buttons were undone. My eyes wandered toward her cleavage, and her hand guardedly pulled her shirt up as I looked.
“The Wonderful World of Sourdough Starters,” I said, reading the name of the book out loud. I got back down on my knees and found the place for it. “I keep hearing about those, but I never know that they actually are.”
“What?” she asked.
She was looking at me over her glasses now. They had fallen down the bridge of her nose, and her deep brown eyes were looking right at me. I could smell her too. She was wearing perfume, which she hadn’t been last week.
“Sourdough starters,” I said, “what are they?”
“I have no idea.”
I reached back toward the shelf for the book and talked to her as I searched for it. “Hm, want to get the book out and—”
I looked up, and she was already walking away. There was that ass again. One advantage of her hating me was that I’d get to see