chapter Five
The sound of an old-fashioned jangling alarm clock woke me from a deep slumber. I snaked a hand out from under the covers to turn it off, then flung the comforter back and sat up, stretching as I yawned. It was time to face the day. I hopped out of bed and went through the morning rituals of washing and dressing, holding a couple of different blouse options in front of myself in the mirror with one hand while I brushed my teeth with the other hand.
And then I was out the door and down the stairs. I waved to the mailman as I made my way down the front steps of the brownstone. “No bills for you today, Katie!” he called out to me.
Strange, I had the oddest feeling that I was hearing bouncy music playing behind me all the while. After fighting off an eerie shiver, I told myself I probably just had a song stuck in my head.
I rounded the corner and popped into the neighborhood coffee shop. “Hey, Katie, I’ve got your usual ready,” the waitress called out. She took the paper cup from the counter and turned to hand it to me, but she stumbled and the cup went flying. I had visions of ending up covered in coffee, but at the last split second, a hand shot out and caught the cup.
“Here you go,” my rescuer said, handing it to me. I found myself looking into dark blue eyes, and it seemed as though time came to a standstill. I blinked and saw that the eyes were set in a handsome face topped with dark hair. He was as frozen as I was. And then reality returned with a crash.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Katie!” the waitress said, rushing over to check on me. She blushed to the roots of her curly red hair. “I am such a klutz sometimes. Did I spill any coffee on you?”
“No harm done,” I assured her. I turned back toward my rescuer, but he was gone. I felt bad that I hadn’t even thanked him. Or gotten his phone number. Or married him. Ah, well, I supposed it wasn’t meant to be. I took a sip of the coffee and said, “Just right. Thanks, Perry!”
The sense of background music had faded slightly during that scene, but it returned as I continued down the sidewalk, heading toward work, only a little late this morning. The regulars were already in the park across the street from the store, including the two men who spent their days playing chess there. I paused for a moment with the strangest feeling of reverse déjà vu. Instead of getting the sense that I’d seen something before, I felt like I hadn’t seen it before, even though I knew I had.
I finished my coffee as I stared up at the bookstore. Three stories full of books, with a bonus coffee shop, had seemed like my idea of heaven when I first went to work there. It was supposed to have been a temporary job, but I was closing in on a year with no sign of anything better on the horizon. With a dejected sigh, I drained my cup and tossed it in a nearby trash bin before heading across the street and into the store.
I took the stairs up to the second floor where the coffee shop was, grabbed my apron from the back, put it on, and adjusted my name tag. “And good morning to you,” my coworker—and best friend—Florence greeted me. “I’ve already got the regular, the decaf, and the coffee of the day brewing. Do you want to take care of the bakery case? The delivery’s already come.”
“Yeah, sure, I’ll do that,” I said.
She blinked, frowned, and sniffed as I spoke. “You’ve got coffee breath!” she accused.
“Do I need a mint?”
“You had coffee on your way to work in a coffee shop? Again?”
I glanced around to make sure there weren’t any managers in earshot. “You know as well as I do that our coffee is nasty.”
“All coffee is nasty to me. I can’t judge degrees of nastiness.”
“Don’t tell anyone!” I begged as I opened a bakery box and started arranging pastries on the trays that fit in the display case. “But really, we resell second-rate pastries—at a huge markup—and we make terrible coffee, and people still buy it because it’s supposedly gourmet and because having coffee in a bookstore makes them feel smart.”
She filled an insulated carafe with the regular coffee. “And this store would’ve gone under ages ago without us. The coffee shop is our biggest profit center, believe it or not.”
I stopped working and glanced over at her. “Do you ever feel like working here is giving you bad karma? Shouldn’t we be doing something more worthwhile?”
“We’re keeping a bookstore financially viable. That makes us deserving of a Nobel prize. We’re practically heroes!”
“I guess that’s one way to look at it. We’re subsidizing literacy. But that doesn’t make the coffee any better.”
Then we had to stop criticizing our employer as the store opened for the day and patrons came pouring in for their morning caffeine fix. I wanted to stand on the counter and tell them where they could go for better coffee and pastries. If it got me fired, then maybe I’d be forced to find a better job. But I was too busy to give in to the temptation. Those lattes didn’t make themselves.
At last, the morning rush ended, and we had a chance to catch our breath before the lunch rush. Florence wiped down the counters while I cleared tables, stacking the abandoned books on a shelving cart. Florence glanced into one of the carafes and said, “There’s about a cup left. Do you want it, or should I just throw it out before I make a fresh pot?”
“Is it the regular or the coffee of the day?”
“It’s the regular.”
“I’ll take it.” My morning coffee had already worn off, and it was hard to get away for a coffee break when you worked in a coffee shop. I stood behind the counter, sipping the burnt-tasting coffee, while I perused the classified ads in a newspaper a patron had left behind.
“Still job-hunting, I see,” Florence remarked when I circled an ad. “Are you going to actually apply for any of these, or are you going to talk yourself out of it again?”
“The result will be the same,” I said, sighing.
She snapped me with a towel. “How do you expect good things to come to you when you have that attitude?”
“I don’t think my attitude has much to do with it. I’m not even getting interviews anymore. There just aren’t any advertising jobs. I’ve been trying for almost a year.”
“And it’s become easier for you to stay here. It’s a comfort zone.”
“Here? Comfortable? Are you insane? Of course I want to get out of here.”
She glanced around, as though making sure we weren’t being overheard, then bent toward me and whispered, “Well, you might want to start applying again or networking or putting up billboards, or whatever it takes to find something, because I heard we’re being sold.”
“Sold? To one of the chains?”
“I don’t know, but whatever it is, things are bound to change.”
“If it stays a bookstore, they’ll keep the coffee shop. As you said, we’re a profit center.”
“But bookselling isn’t exactly a growth industry these days. They may just want the real estate.”
I groaned and leaned down, resting my forehead on the newspaper. “Just what I needed. Maybe I should accept Josh’s proposal and become a housewife. It doesn’t look like I’m going to succeed at anything else.”
“My, that does sound romantic,” she said dryly. “You didn’t tell me Josh proposed.”
The memory of it was hazy, like it was something I’d dreamed rather than experienced. “Well, it wasn’t really a formal proposal. More a suggestion. I think I said something about my job hunt, and he said if I married him, I wouldn’t have to worry about it.”
She fluttered her hand against her chest. “Be still my beating heart. How did you not swoon and fall at his feet?”
“Shut up!” I scolded her, even as I couldn’t help but grin at her theatrics. “I think he was raising the topic. Who proposes out of the blue without having discussed anything about marriage ahead of time? I’m sure the real proposal, when it comes, will be very romantic.”
“Yeah, he’ll tell you you’re a failure, but he’s willing to support you.”
“That’s not what he meant,” I insisted, my cheeks flaming. “And I have no intention of letting him support me, but it might be nice to have the pressure taken off the job hunt and to have more time to work on my résumé and go on interviews.”
“You’ll get the time if the store closes, though that probably won’t ease the pressure.”
“The store’s not going to close,” I muttered, returning to the classifieds. And would marrying Josh really be that bad? He was smart, attractive, successful, and he was a decent guy. Heart-stopping romance was the kind of thing that only happened in movies. And in coffee shops, I thought, remembering the moment that morning when time had stood still as I looked into those dark blue eyes and felt like destiny had caught up with me.
*
Contrary to Florence’s fears, nothing much seemed to change after the sale went through later that week. There was a memo from the new owner saying it would be business as usual for the time being, and life went on. Josh didn’t bring up the topic of marriage again, so I started to think it must have been a joke or an offhand remark, not something I should take seriously. And that meant I really needed to find a job.
I was going through my ritual of reading the classifieds during a mid-morning lull while Florence took a break when a voice said, “Job-hunting?”
I looked up to attend to the customer and had that same time-standing-still feeling when I looked into his deep blue eyes. Was he the guy from the other coffee shop? I couldn’t even remember his face, so I couldn’t be sure. It wasn’t a good sign if I was swooning over every pair of blue eyes that crossed my path. I knew that should probably tell me something, but I preferred not to think about it. “Can I help you?” I asked, dropping the newspaper.
“How’s the coffee here?” He must have noticed my hesitation because he grinned and said, “And be honest.”
“Well, it’s not really to my taste. It’s kind of, um, strong.”
“Burnt?”
“Enthusiastically roasted.”
“What about the tea?”
“It’s actually pretty good, but it’s in bags so you have to brew it yourself. We don’t brew tea here. You can see the kinds there in the rack.”
“Then I’ll have a tea.”
While I filled a cup with hot water, he leaned against the counter and said, “I thought books and tea went together, and you know, I can’t think of a bookstore that sells real tea in their café. It’s just tea bags.”
I handed him the cup and he selected a tea bag while I rang him up. “If we upgraded the tea, we’d have to upgrade the scones, and where would that leave us?” I quipped, then realized a second later that I was probably speaking out of turn. I shouldn’t be criticizing the merchandise I was selling.
“The scones aren’t good?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.
“It’s not that they’re bad. They’re just, well, probably better for keeping the tables level than for eating. I suspect the bakery sends us their day-old stuff and figures we won’t notice.”
“Then I think I’ll skip the scone today,” he said as he paid for his tea. He nodded toward my newspaper, with several jobs circled in red. “Are you trying to flee the bad coffee and scones?”
“It’s not that. It’s just that this was supposed to be a temporary job while I looked for a real job in my field. That’s taken a bit longer than I planned.” I squinted at the newspaper as I had the sudden feeling that there was something odd there. Was the newspaper classified section really the best way to find a professional job?
“How much longer?”
I snapped back to the present, blinking. “Nearly a year. I gave myself a year, and I have three weeks left.”
“Then what happens?”
“I guess I give up and leave the city. Or I suppose I could get married and become a housewife.”
He dunked his tea bag into his cup and swirled it around. “I would think that finding a husband would be just as challenging as finding a job,” he said, watching his tea rather than looking at me.
“Oh, I’ve already got that covered. I think. It wasn’t exactly a formal proposal, but my boyfriend and I have been talking about marriage.”
He gave the newspaper another look. “Your field is advertising?”
“Yeah. More on the strategy side than the creative—deciding what approach to take and how to target it rather than actually dreaming up the ads.”
“Well, good luck with that,” he said with a smile as he walked away, pausing to drop his tea bag in a trash bin.
“He was cute,” Florence remarked as she returned from her break and tied her apron back on.
“Yeah, I guess he was. Nice, too.”
“And he seemed interested.” She raised an eyebrow and smirked.
“I have a boyfriend. Which I mentioned to him, so it’s not even like I was flirt-cheating. He was just making conversation. He got tea, and he had to wait for it to steep, so I’m sure he was just killing time.” So why were my cheeks burning up?
“Uh huh,” she said, then she switched gears. “Did you hear about the mandatory employee meeting tomorrow morning?”
“How early?”
“Eight sharp, before we open.”
“Ugh.”
“Brace yourself. They’re having it here, and they’re serving coffee to the crew, so we get to be here at seven thirty to get ready.”
“We’d better get to clock in for that.”
“That’s probably the least of our concerns. The new owner is going to address us, and you know what that probably means.”
“He’s going to talk about the changes he wants to make?”
“Yeah, like closing the store and doing something more profitable with the space.”
“You’re such a pessimist.”
“Realist,” Florence corrected. “This is my third bookstore job. I just wanted this one to last me through grad school.”
“We’ll be fine,” I insisted. I wasn’t sure if I really believed that or if I wanted to believe it.
*
I woke the next morning—to that godawful alarm clock—with the sense that I’d had exceptionally vivid dreams of an entirely different life. There had been danger, and there had been moments when I was scared out of my mind, but there was also something nice about it, a sense of accomplishment. I lay there for a moment, trying to recapture the images and feelings, but they dissipated rapidly. The really weird thing was that those images were still sharper than any attempt I made to remember events from longer than about a week ago. I was way too young to have developed Alzheimer’s disease, and besides, that was supposed to work the other way around, where the distant past was sharper than the more recent past. I supposed it was normal for the past to grow foggy with time, but I would have thought that a year ago would be clearer than this.
With a sigh, I got out of bed and got ready for work. As I dressed, I thought about how nice this apartment was. It was a full floor in an Upper West Side brownstone, one that hadn’t even been carved up into studios. How could I possibly afford this place without a roommate while working in a bookstore coffee shop? Then a blurry-edged memory of finding this dream rent-controlled place popped into my head. Oh yeah, that’s what had happened. I put on my coat and headed to the store.
I didn’t have time to stop for my unauthorized dose of caffeine, so I was bleary-eyed when I stumbled my way up to the café, where the tables and chairs had already been arranged like a university lecture hall. Great, I thought, one more thing we’d have to fix before we opened for the day. I had started the coffee brewing when Florence showed up, laden with bakery boxes.
“To get them this early, I had to pick them up,” she explained.
“I wonder if that means they’re actually fresh.”
“Gee, I hope not. I have some pictures to hang and I need something for pounding in the nails.”
We set out enough plates and cups for all the employees, and I had just enough time to get a head start on serving myself some coffee, which was as bad as I remembered, even when it was freshly brewed. I took off my apron before taking a seat at the back of the café. The rest of the staff came in, with much grumbling and speculation about what we’d learn from the meeting. I wasn’t sure which outcome I really wanted. I didn’t want to lose my job, but if I did, that might force me to overcome the inertia in my life. I might someday look back on this meeting and realize it was the best thing that had ever happened to me.
The room filled, and the various department managers came in and sat near the front. Once everyone was seated, a familiar man stepped in front of the group and said, “Good morning, everyone. Thank you for coming in early today. I’m Owen Palmer, your new owner.”
It was the dark-haired, blue-eyed customer I’d chatted with the day before. I was so very, very fired. I wondered if maybe I’d at least get credit for honesty. That was the only way I could imagine my job being saved. I hoped someone left a newspaper behind this morning. I’d definitely need to review the job ads.
He talked about keeping the store open in spite of the challenging economy and mentioned a few changes to help us be more profitable. Most of it had to do with more creative shelving and how we could take advantage of the fact that we didn’t have to abide by top-down dictates like the chain stores. We could shelve books where our customers were most likely to discover them, even in multiple places around the store. It wasn’t exactly an earthshattering idea, but it wasn’t something too many other stores did. He talked about getting employee input on purchase decisions and offering incentives for hand-selling books.
I tensed when he got around to discussing the coffee shop. I didn’t think he’d fire me now, but I prepared myself for a lecture on providing a positive customer experience. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but our coffee is lousy,” he said. There was nervous laughter from the group, and I cringed. It wasn’t my fault, but would he see it that way? “We need to revamp our coffee shop, and we’ll be considering new suppliers.” I wondered if the revamp would include employees who didn’t peruse the classified ads while on the job or openly criticize the coffee to customers. But all he discussed was the quality of what was offered, not the employees. He’d probably fire me privately, in a one-on-one meeting later that day.
The meeting wrapped up, and everyone headed to their respective jobs, or to home, if they had later shifts. Most of the booksellers were already talking excitedly about how to rearrange the sections. Florence and I were less excited, since it was our department that had been singled out as a failure. Not that we disagreed—we avoided our own coffee shop—but it didn’t bode well for the owner to criticize us.
We hurried to get the café set up for the store opening. In spite of the nasty coffee and stale scones, we had our usual morning crowd. In this city, I was surprised that people hadn’t found better options, since I passed several on my way to work in the morning. The whole time, Owen Palmer hung around, lingering over a cup of coffee at the outermost table while he watched the flow of customers.
When the rush had died down and we were getting ready for the morning coffee break crowd, Owen came over to us. “Which of you is the resident coffee connoisseur?” he asked.
“She is!” Florence said, pointing at me and making herself scarce with a wink over her shoulder.
“I guess I am, though I wouldn’t call myself a connoisseur. I just drink it,” I said. “She doesn’t. She doesn’t even drink caffeine, if you can believe it—and she’s in grad school.” I was babbling, giving him information he didn’t even want, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself.
“Then I’ll want you to help me in selecting new suppliers and revamping the shop. We do good business, but I think we could do better if we had better stuff to offer.” He frowned. “In fact, I’m not even sure why anyone comes here at all. There’s better coffee at just about every corner deli.”
“I think people feel like getting their coffee here makes them smarter, or something,” I said without thinking, then mentally winced. I shouldn’t be shooting off my mouth to my boss. He was just so nice that he lulled me into honesty. He was so good-looking that he addled my senses somehow. Then I wondered if maybe he was that guy who’d made the world go still that morning at the diner.
“Image means a lot,” he agreed. “And that’s another thing I wanted to talk to you about. Would you mind holding off on your job search for a little while? I think I could use your expertise while we revamp the store. I’m hearing rumors that one of the chains is going to open a branch nearby, and I want to make a big splash before they can get established.”
“So you’re not firing me?” I blurted.
“Is there a reason I should?” he asked, with a mildly amused smile.
“No, no,” I hurried to say. “But you didn’t see me at my best yesterday.”
“You were honest with me about the product you were selling and steered me to something I’d enjoy more.”
“And I was job-hunting on the job,” I said without thinking, then winced. What was it about this guy? He seemed to deactivate all my filters.
“The way I see it, it’s my fault if I can’t keep my employees happy enough to want to stay or if I can’t recognize talent and make the best use of it. So, this afternoon I’d like you to join me for some meetings with potential vendors and then what are you doing for dinner?”
“Dinner?” I parroted dumbly.
“I’d like to hash out some advertising and marketing ideas. It might be easier to do that away from the store, and if I’m asking you to work beyond your usual shift, I should at least buy you dinner.”
He sounded all-business, which dashed the romantic fantasy that had sprung unbidden into my brain. And then I remembered Josh. My boyfriend. The one I had a date with that night. “Oh, tonight. I can’t,” I said, stumbling over the words. “I have dinner plans already.”
“Then maybe we can talk tomorrow afternoon here at the store. My schedule will be a little more open then.” He grinned, and a slight flush washed over his cheeks. “I’ll buy the coffee, though that’s probably more of a threat than an incentive.”
“Okay,” I said, even as I felt a sting of disappointment that I didn’t want to analyze too closely. Getting my head turned by my new boss would be a very bad idea.
But there was just something about him …