Sophie jumped as she heard the beep of the horn from the drive behind the farmhouse. Locking the farmhouse door behind her, she hustled over to the passenger side of Matt's car, her messenger bag banging against her side, filled as usual with notebooks, a bottle of water, the Gaskell novel and about fifty pens. As she climbed into Matt's car, she glanced up to see her neighbor looking at her from his side of the fence. With a tentative wave, she smiled brightly at him.
With what appeared to be flushed cheeks, he ducked back behind the barn and disappeared out of sight.
Hrmph, she thought to herself as she climbed into Matt's waiting car. So much for a warm Welsh greeting from my dear neighbor, she thought ruefully. I'm guessing we won't be exchanging cupcake recipes or anything…
Sophie closed the car door and turned to greet Matt, putting Nasty Neighbor Man out of her mind entirely as she focused on the day ahead of her. "Good morning," she said with a warm smile.
"Sleep well?" Matt asked as he put the car in gear and steered them into the narrowest of lanes and towards Hay.
"I napped a bit too long yesterday morning, so I had trouble sleeping last night. I'm sure I'll be mainlining caffeine all day to keep awake," she said cheerfully. "I'll apologize now in case I get super jittery later."
"There's a great…um…coffee shop just down the road from the store," Matt said, his cheeks coloring slightly. "Nice…coffee."
Sophie noted his suddenly shy, stammering demeanor, but said nothing. "Cool. Thanks for the tip – I'll have to check it out later this morning," she said with a frisson of anticipation at the thought of entering the bookshop. "After I look around the shop for a while, formulating a plan."
Matt appeared to swallow thickly at the mention of a plan, but said nothing.
Within minutes, they were parallel parking his tiny car on the narrow street in front of Belletristic, her auntie's pride and joy of a used bookstore for the last forty years. Sophie only had dim memories of the shop – mostly abstract images of enormous bookshelves and a cash register from the olden days that she loved to play with all day while Auntie Barbara chatted with customers and let her pull books off the shelves to look at. She imagined it had changed quite a bit since her childhood, however.
Oh, how she was wrong.
From the bell above the shop door to the same antiquated cash register from her youth, little had changed at Belletristic from when Sophie was a little girl playing on the floor with a set of Barbies.
Matt immediately headed for his appointed post at the front counter – a glassed in cabinet on which sat the register, a few bookmarks, an enormous stack of books and a few discarded coffee cups, which Matt hastily threw into the bin behind him. With a small nod of her intention, Sophie began to slowly wend her way through the shop.
A converted apartment, the shop was a series of high-ceilinged rooms – both an upstairs and a downstairs – filled from floor to ceiling with wooden bookshelves. The rooms were loosely divided into categories – fiction, non fiction, biographies, paperbacks, first editions, trade paperbacks – but with no real alphabetizing or organization beyond rough groupings. A librarian's nightmare, Sophie thought with a private smile.
The walls of the shop were dingy, and the wooden floor scuffed and scarred from years of people dragging their feet as they stared at book spines and deciding on their purchases. Most of the shelves had holes from where books had been pulled out but not restocked, and there was no room for displaying titles, or showing off covers to potential shoppers. There was no furniture but the shelves themselves, and there seemed to be a healthy veneer of dust on almost every flat surface in the shop.
Sophie examined the upstairs, finding much the same upstairs as down, and then walked back down the stairs to the stockroom, afraid of what she would find lurking behind the heavy wooden door, squeaky from disuse.
Boxes and boxes and boxes of books greeted her, all in various stages of sorting, pricing, labeling and arranging. She knew that Auntie Barbara seemed to have an unending flow of titles coming into the shop, and that Matt did the best he could, but this sort of system would make even someone with the constitution of Richard the Lionheart quake in his boots.
Sophie sighed softly, and then returned to the front counter, taking in the curled and stained flyers and posters on the bulletin board behind Matt's head and the peeling bookmarks and stained glass countertop that appeared entirely cheerless.
This was going to take some work, Sophie thought resolutely. But nothing was insurmountable…not even that back stockroom, she supposed heavily.
What on earth had she gotten herself into?
She knew that Auntie Barbara hadn't been able to be as active in the last few years, but she just wasn't expecting to see little to no changes from years ago, as well as the lack of decorating, merchandising, and even just dusting in the shop, which really was filled with the most fantastic array of books.
Still, nothing a swipe (or two…or three…) with a Swiffer and a can of paint couldn't improve…
She wondered how Matt hadn't noticed the dingy interior while working here day after day, until she had walked back into the front room to see Matt happily absorbed in a novel the side of a Volkswagen, a steaming cup of coffee beside him and two customers roaming contently through the "stacks".
If she could sit and read all day with a never ending supply of books, she might let the world fall away too…
But turning this run down shop into a cash cow was her task, and she was ready to give it her all – for Auntie Barbara's sake, as well as her own.
"Well…" Sophie said, plastering on a cheerful smile for Matt as she rounded the counter to sit beside him. "This is going to be fun!"
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