The Wrong Shelf

Eugene was twenty-three years old and he had been single for two years, which he thought about more than he wanted to admit. His last real thing had been a college fling when he was twenty-one, a girl named Mae who liked him okay but not enough to stick around after finals. Since then, nothing. Not even a bad date. His phone gallery was mostly pictures of alternators.

So when his phone hit eleven percent in front of a bookstore he had never planned on entering, he sat there in the driver's seat and laughed at himself.

Here's how he got there. It was a Tuesday, slow week, one job in the morning and nothing else. Then his phone buzzed with a text from a number he didn't have saved. "Delivery is here, come around the back whenever, door's unlocked!" He had been bored enough to reply "on my way" before he even thought about it. Who questions free money? He grabbed his tool bag and drove twenty minutes across town to an address that turned out to be a nail salon.

The lady at the nail salon looked at him like he had three heads. "Delivery? Honey, we didn't order anything." He showed her the text. She read it, frowned, and said the number was probably one digit off from some delivery guy they were actually expecting. Great. So Eugene had driven across town for nothing, and worse, he had told a stranger "on my way!" to a job that didn't exist.

He was sitting in his van trying to decide if he should text the number back and explain, when he noticed the block he was on. Sleepy downtown strip, half the storefronts dark, a laundromat, a place that sold vapes. But one shop had its lights on and a hand-painted sign that said Second Page. Used books. The window was full of stacked paperbacks leaning against each other like drunks at a bar.

He wasn't going to go in. He had no reason to go in. But he had an hour to kill and his phone was at eleven percent, and the whole place smelled like old paper even through the door, and somehow his feet just carried him over before his brain signed off on the plan.

Standing there with his hand on the handle, he caught himself thinking, when was the last time he felt even a little spark about anything? Not just about people. About anything. Work was work. Evenings were whatever was on TV. Two years of flat line. He was kind of embarrassed to be getting worked up over a used bookstore, but there it was. His chest did a little thing. He hadn't felt that in a while!

He went in.

The door had a bell, an actual bell on a spring, not an electronic chime. Inside it was crowded, warm, dim. Shelves everywhere, mismatched, some leaning, stacked double deep in places. A rolling ladder against one wall that looked like nobody had climbed it in years. There was a lamp with a green shade on the counter and behind the counter stood a woman sorting a stack of hardcovers, and she looked up at him with an expression he couldn't read at first.

Then he could. It was amusement.

"Let me guess," she said, setting down a book with a cracked spine. "You're the delivery guy."

"I... what?" Eugene looked down at his tool bag like it had betrayed him. "How did you know that?"

"Because you have the look of a man who got a wrong number and is now questioning his entire life. Also my actual delivery guy is three hours late, so I've been mentally rehearsing this conversation." She came around the counter. She was tall, dark hair pulled back with a pencil stuck through it, wearing a cardigan with the sleeves pushed up. Her name tag said FRANCESCA, Second Page, Owner, in handwriting that had clearly been done with a Sharpie and hope. "You're not him, though. He drives a white van and he's about seventy."

"I do drive a van," Eugene said, and then felt stupid about it. "But it's gray. I'm a mechanic. Mobile mechanic. I got a text about a delivery, said 'on my way,' drove to the address, and it was a nail salon. So I'm apparently just wandering the neighborhood responding to texts meant for other people now."

Francesca laughed. Not a polite laugh, a real one, the kind that made her lean on the counter. "You told a wrong number you were on your way? You committed to it!"

"Well, yeah. I thought it was work. I'm self employed, every text could be four hundred dollars."

"That's the most depressing economics I've ever heard. Wait, so how did you end up here? My shop isn't anywhere near a nail salon."

"Two blocks over. I was sitting in my van feeling sorry for myself and then I was walking toward your door. I don't fully remember deciding."

"Huh." She looked at him a second longer, and in that look there was a kind of sizing up that wasn't rude. "Well, you're here now. You want coffee? I make terrible coffee and I drink a lot of it."

"I feel like I should say yes to that for story purposes."

"Correct answer. Sit anywhere that isn't a book pile. The book piles are load rated, I don't want to test it."

There was an old armchair near the back that had lost its fight with time, one arm worn smooth. Eugene sat in it with his tool bag between his boots and watched her fuss with an electric kettle behind the counter. The store really was a mess, but the kind of mess that felt sorted in her head somehow. History here, poetry there, a whole shelf of nothing but books about birds.

She brought two mugs over, sat on the arm of a sagging loveseat across from him, and blew on hers. "So. Eugene."

"How do you know my name?"

"You texted it to me. 'On my way, this is Eugene with the van.' Very formal. Very professional." She grinned over her mug. "I'm Francesca. I own all this. I'm twenty-six, I've run this place for three years, and I have exactly one employee, who is me."

"Twenty-three," he offered. "Mobile mechanic. It's exactly as glamorous as it sounds. I sit in parking lots a lot."

"Do you like it?"

"Most days. Today I got scammed by a typo, so, mixed reviews."

She laughed again and he felt that chest thing twice in one day, which had to be some kind of record. He kept waiting for the part where she got bored of him and went back to her books, because that was usually how these things went for him, but she kept asking questions. About the van. About the weirdest job he'd ever done. There was one, a guy in a gated community with a Ferrari he never drove, and Francesca cackled and said rich people were hoarders with better storage.

Somewhere in there she mentioned, in the same flat tone she used for everything, that she was trans. It came up because he asked how long she'd had the store and she said three years, and that she'd moved to this town six years ago "for the surgery, stayed for the rent." She said it like she was telling him the weather, and he appreciated that a lot, because it meant he didn't have to make a big face about it. He just asked what the rent was like and she said criminal and they moved on.

An hour went by. Then close to two. His phone was dead. The coffee really was terrible, instant, too weak, and he drank two mugs of it anyway.

"So let me get this straight," Francesca said, standing up to shelve the stack she'd abandoned earlier, talking with her back half to him. "You drove across town for a fake job, wandered into my store to kill time, and now it's almost four and you've told me about the Ferrari guy and your dead phone and you drank my terrible coffee on purpose."

"When you say it like that it sounds like I have no life."

"I mean it in the nicest possible way. It's the best afternoon I've had in months." She slid a book into place and turned around. "Usually it's just me and inventory and the guy who comes in every Thursday to ask if we have books about ships. We don't. He asks anyway."

"Every Thursday?"

"Every Thursday. He's very committed. I respect it."

Eugene laughed and rubbed his thumb along the handle of his mug. He thought about the flat line, two years of it, and how his chest had done that little thing twice now, sitting in a stranger's cluttered bookstore on a Tuesday. It was kinda ridiculous. He was gonna have to text the wrong number back eventually and thank whoever it was.

"Your phone's dead," Francesca said, watching him. "You should probably stay and look at books while it charges. I have a charger behind the counter. That way this whole disaster wasn't for nothing."

"That's fair. You drive a hard retail pitch."

"I do everything hard. It's the only way a shop like this survives." She pointed a finger at him. "Pick something. Anything. First purchase at Second Page, that's a whole ritual, I'm very serious about it."

He got up and wandered into the fiction section, past the leaning paperbacks, thinking that he had absolutely no plans tonight and that for once that felt like a good thing instead of an empty one.

She was halfway through telling him about the Thursday ship guy's latest visit when the shelf let go.

It wasn't a slow slide or anything dramatic. One minute Francesca was leaning her hip against the poetry shelf, gesturing with her mug, and the next there was a groan of cheap particleboard and about forty books came down on her like a small avalanche. She yelped and stumbled back, and Eugene was across the aisle before he even thought about it.

"Are you okay?"

"I'm fine. I'm fine, the shelf is not." She was standing there with a paperback dangling from her hand and dust in her hair, laughing at herself. "This happens like twice a year. I keep meaning to fix the brackets. I never fix the brackets."

"You gotta fix the brackets."

"You gonna make me?"

"I'll fix them right now, actually. I have a whole bag of tools and a guilt complex about leaving jobs half done." He was already crouching, starting a pile of the fallen books so nobody broke an ankle. She knelt down across from him and they worked through the mess together, her stacking, him carrying stacks to the loveseat, trading comments about titles. Half the poetry section had spent years filed under F for fiction, apparently, and she held strong feelings about whoever did that.

"I did that," she admitted. "Six years ago. I was just slapping books anywhere."

"You've been here six years?"

"The store's mine for three. I rented the apartment upstairs first. It's tiny and the pipes scream."

By the time the floor was clear he'd found the actual problem, a wall anchor that had pulled half out of the plaster. His drill made the whole store smell faintly of drywall dust, which mixed with the old paper smell weirdly well. Francesca held the shelf level for him while he drove the screws back in, and their hands were both on the bracket when he set the last one.

Her fingers were over his. Just for a second, maybe two, because she pulled back to grab another book. But that jolt went up his arm and landed somewhere in the middle of his chest, and he sat there staring at a screw like it had personally insulted him. Two years. Two years of nothing, and now a bookstore owner's knuckles had knocked the wind out of him.

"Good as new?" she asked.

"Good as new. That anchor was garbage, though. Whoever did this used, like, the cheapest thing at the hardware store."

"That tracks. That was me."

He laughed and started reshelving the poetry in actual alphabetical order, since he was there, and she sat on the rolling ladder's bottom step and supervised and drank her cold coffee. Somewhere around the Rileys she looked over at him.

"You're good with your hands. Obviously. That's your whole job."

"It's the whole personality too, honestly."

"I was gonna say, it must be nice having a useful skill. My useful skill is knowing that the ship guy's name is Jose and he'll be back Thursday."

"Jose." He cracked up. "Okay, I have to come back Thursday now. I need to see this."

"He'll pretend he doesn't want anything, then ask about ships. It's performance art."

He slid the last book into place and dusted his palms on his jeans, and she was still looking at him, and the look had changed somehow. Softer, or steadier. He didn't know what to call it.

"Your phone should have enough juice to leave now," she said. "It's been plugged in a while. Or you could come back to the office and I could make you a fresh cup of the world's worst coffee. Those are your options."

"That's not really an option. That's a threat with a gift shop."

"Exactly. Come on."

Her office was through a door behind the register, down two creaky steps, and it was somehow even more of a disaster than the front. Boxes of unsorted stock, a desk buried under invoices, a corkboard with about a hundred pinned receipts. There was one folding chair and her desk chair, and she waved him into the desk chair and perched on a stack of book boxes like it was furniture she'd chosen on purpose.

The kettle lived in here too. She made the coffee, and it was somehow worse than the first batch, and he drank it.

"So can I ask you stuff, or is that rude?" he said.

"Ask me whatever. I'll tell you if I don't want to answer."

"How'd you end up owning a bookstore at twenty-six? That's not a normal path."

"I inherited the building from my aunt. Not a blood aunt, she was my mom's best