Chapter 5
T he bookstore was closed for the night. The shutters pulled, the coffee pot for customers turned off. The floors swept and the rugs vacuumed. The random books that lurked on various services like literary bugs had been scooped up and shelves.
The only light came from the break room, where laughter and the sound of drinks being poured. Music thudded out of a crackling wireless speaker.
Inside the employees-only room, a sarcastic half-plan was beginning to take form.
The bulletin board had been cleared of everything, save for a picture of Barret. Strands of red string stretched in a rough pentagram shape, held in place by tacks. At each tack was another small bit of information. A list of his known addresses. That ridiculous tower he'd built outside of town. His companies (along with a smaller, branching line of strings that included his wider holdings). A picture of his car, his suit and his shoes, plus a digital advertisement for the watch he wore in most photos.
There was scribbling on his face.
The DNF scattered themselves around the table, handing each other glasses of wine and cutting large swaths out of the Wethering Heights cake.
It was joked that they should kill him. Rebecca went into lurid detail about a case not too long ago where this woman dumped bodies into chemical vats to dispose of them. Ariana seemed slightly too enthusiastic about the idea until Olivia briskly changed the subject.
Nora tapped away on her laptop, sipping one of the beers Rebecca brought because “it was all I had in my fridge!”, the printer in the corner spitting out document after document. Ariana and Gertrude drank near it so they could collect each new paper, hold it up, laugh, and tack on the board.
“He told G3 magazine in 2019 that he only sleeps four hours a day. MicroNap Powersleeping he calls it," Gertrude said.
“I got that beat. In 2022 he told BusinessTomorrow that women have more value and contribute more to the economy when they’re having children.”
“Oh my god that has to go on the board.” Gertrude tacked it up, taking pleasure in stretching a red string back to Barret's face. With the eyes blacked out and the devil horns turning him into a bizarre death-demon, he was almost attractive.
“So we’re not killing him, okay, what if we just take his money?” Ariana asked.
Nora hit print again on her keyboard. “My dad has guns I’m sure we could borrow—”
“Why do we need guns?” Gertrude said.
“To point at him. You know, give me your money, man.”
“I was thinking maybe sneak in like cat burglars,” Ariana replied.
“I used to dress up as Catwoman for my first husband,” Rebecca said. Her words slurred slightly as she tottered over to the table full of wine to pour another glass.
“Still got the whip?” Olivia asked her politely, catching Gertrude’s eye, both of them struggling to hold back laughter.
“No, funny enough, I think he took that in the divorce… he really liked it, I used to stick it in his—”
Gertrude choked on her drink, a jolt of sticky red wine lodging in her throat. Her boss wacked her on the back, then handed her a napkin.
“Well, he's basically Gertrude's boyfriend,” Ariana said. “Flowers, cake, and it's not even your birthday.”
“Would he buy you a bookstore for your birthday?” Nora asked Gertrude.
Before she could answer, Olivia, getting steadily drunker, said: “Most I ever got for my birthday from a boyfriend was a gift card. To a different bookstore.” She sighed. “I was wasted on that man. I give really good head."
“Not good enough, apparently,” Gertrude replied.
That brought a wild peel of laughter from their normally reserved boss. With a jolt, Gertrude realized just how drunk Olivia was. How long had they been here, making fun of Barret, eating cake, emptying bottles of wine? The night was slipping away, and suddenly she found herself in charge. Like a mother hemming in a small family of swaying toddlers, she went about the room, taking drinks from people. “It’s midnight, we work tomorrow, go home, do you have a ride? No, you can’t drive. Yes, use an app and get one, no not one more drink—”
They each had to be soothed and coaxed into their coats, and one by one she ushered them into cars; driven by boyfriends, Uber drivers, Rebecca for some reason called an actual yellow taxi-cab. Finally, it was just her and Olivia, the bookstore settling into serene, cemetery-quiet now that the talkative ones had filed out. For a brief moment, Gertrude imagined owning the store with Olivia, having these moments of quiet respite with each other every night.
Olivia’s mood soured, twisting away from the buoyant false jubilance of earlier. Now that there was no one to put to on a show for, she slumped in a chair and laid her head on the table, looking at the board. A low groan echoed from her.
Gertrude was unsure what to do. She’d never been around someone so openly upset; her mother, even in her worst moments, was stubbornly prideful and would retreat to her bedroom to face her pain alone, the TV blaring criminal investigation shows and the box fan in her window whirring weak comfort.
It was unnerving to see Olivia, someone she regarded as firmly Adult, Adult with a capital A, tumbling down a well of emotions.
Is this what life did to you? Beat you down each year until you were slumped and groaning in your thirties? Gertrude was twenty-two and already felt exhausted by it all. Things had to work outonce in a while, right? Fighting the good fight had to result in victory every so often.
She must’ve seemed unsympathetic, sitting next to her boss/friend/mentor. Because she did not pat Olivia on the back. Did not embrace her or murmur reassurance. She sat, her leg jiggling with impatient anxiety, chewing a nail thoughtfully. Her eyes could not leave the not entirely unattractive face of Woodrow Barret.
“It might work,” Gertrude said.
“What?”
“The divorce thing. We need to tweak it, of course. I’m not marrying him but—”
Olivia sat up, blinking against the intoxication to listen. “You mean… lead him on?”
Gertrude shrugged. “I heard a girl in class bragging about her boyfriend buying her a husky after a month together. And that guy definitely wasn’t a billionaire. I think he sold drugs, actually.”
“I love a man who provides,” Olivia said dryly. “What’s your point?”
“What if—and I’ll need help because I am not good at this—I text him. I… date him. We—" Gertrude gestured around the break room, “We get him to fall in love with me. Whatever it takes. And in doing so, I convince him to pay off the bookstore debt for us. Or at least leave us alone until we can get business going."
Olivia nodded with each sentence, keeping in time with her pauses. “If you pitch it to him as this is the place you come to have silly, girly fun, like it’s your dollhouse or something, that it isn’t a threat to him, it’s his precious girlfriend’s little job…"
Gertrude fluttered her eyelashes. “I’m just a sweetie pie who loves books, dontcha know? Head empty, no thoughts. Just romance books and flowers, and I just need my big dick billionaire boyfriend to pay everything off so I can drink lattes with the girlies.”
“Oh, you’re good at this,” Olivia said. Her sadness evaporated; she was upright now, tying her hair back. The joke murder/heist bulletin board was suddenly valuable. “Are you serious?”
Gertrude tipped back on the hind legs of her chair as the two of them examined the board like detectives on a case. “I didn’t have many friends until the bookstore,” she said slowly. “I’m not a reach-out-and-connect type of person. This has been really good for me. Now some guy wants to throw around money to shut us down, so what? He can have more money? Fuck that.”
“I understand. I just don’t want you doing anything you’re uncomfortable with.”
“You’ve seen the books I read, Olivia. I have no trigger warnings.”
“For that joke, you’re fired.”
“Watch out, I’ll get my rich boyfriend to run you out of town.”
“Oh he’s your boyfriend now?”
“Sent me flowers, didn’t he?”
***
The DNF sold two dozen books the day after the Going Out of Business party. There were several customers, plus another offer by a different, competing investor to buy the business outright.
The staff took no notice of such things.
All day long they cooked up different ways to text Woodrow Barret.
Ariana favored the nuclear approach. “Send him a picture.”
“I’m not sending him nudes you psycho—"
“Not nudes, just a picture. A little skin. Maybe don’t wear a bra, maybe do wear shorts that show off your thighs. Find a mirror, tongue out, hit him with heyyyyyy with lots of Ys.” She shrugged, smirking. “Always works for me.”
“Yeah, I’ve met your ex-boyfriends,” Gertrude said. “They were like fish, attracted to shiny objects.”
Arianna flipped her hair. “So I do a little catch and release, what of it?”
“We’re trying to get him devoted enough to buy me a store.”
“Wrap your thighs around his head, make him devoted to that pussy.”
Rebecca, unseen, somewhere in the fantasy section, cackled.
“You’re done, no more advice from you.”
Ariana rolled her eyes and walked away.
Rebecca had a different tactic. “I did most of my dating before cell phones,” she remarked fondly, leaning against the counter next to Gertrude’s register. “But we did use a lot of notes. I would send a hand-written note that smells of your perfume back with one of his little deliveries.”
“Okay,” Gertrude said. She liked it better than Ariana’s idea, anyway. “What should the note say?”
“Something filthy, of course.”
“Wha-?”
“'Stop sending gifts and finish in my mouth already,'" Rebecca said thoughtfully. "Say that. It should work on him."
“Rebecca!”
“It worked on my second husband.”
“Stop it! No more!”
Olivia was somehow worse. “You. Me. Dinner. Tonight. Pick me up at 8.” She thought for a second. “Add a heart emoji. So he knows it's flirty.”
"You text like a divorced dad, Olivia."
"Thanks, I learned from Rebecca's husbands."
Rebecca, somewhere in the dark romance section, yelled: "Hey! The first one was a writer! He was alright!"
The only one of them who wasn't single, divorced or “temporarily between boyfriends” as Ariana put it, was Nora. Her boyfriend Jay arrived early to pick her up, but they hung around together fretting over Gertrude’s dilemma.
“Well, what works on guys?” Nora asked him.
“If they don’t get attention from women, pretty much everything,” he said. He was a stringy, nerdy man who had square framed glasses that he constantly pushed back up his nose. Together, with Nora's round glasses, they looked like an advertisement for LensCrafter. “But if they’re a rich playboy then…” he took the glasses off, cleaned them, and replaced them back on his face. “He might be looking for something different. He’s been sending you stuff?”
“Cakes, flowers, notes,” Gertrude said.
“Oh, so he likes you. Maybe he’s into the whole “You’re not like other girls” thing.”
“I was pretty rude to him.”
“That can be hot. Nora bullied me in middle school. Changed me.”
“I did NOT!" Nora said hotly. "I laughed at your dumb Power Rangers shirt ONCE.”
“See?” Jay said. “Absolute bully. She does not respect the Power Rangers. I’m leaving her.”
Gertrude looked down at her phone. His number had been typed in; the contact saved. $Barret$ was already taking up a large chunk of her life and they’d only exchanged a few words. Would she soon be answering $Barrett$ texts? Building an association with that name in her phone? God, what if she got attached? What if he turned out, somehow, to be decent?
No, do not turn into an “I can fix him” girl.
“So, after all of this, the advice is to just be myself?” Gertrude asked her friends.
“Yeah,” Nora said. “Didn’t you watch Disney channel as a kid? That’s always the lesson.”
“No, I watched House of a Thousand Corpses.”
“Pretty sure that was on Disney channel,” Jay said.
When they left, Gertrude went back to her phone. She wasn’t going to overthink it; it would be smooth, natural, and entirely Gertrude.
Heyyyy, it’s Gertrude, the girl from the bookstore? I just wanted to say thank you for the flowers. And the cake. And lunch. It was very sweet .
Pause.
What now?
This was why she'd only slept with two people. Why she didn’t date. This whole dance; trying to seem available without being too desperate, trying to be mysterious and exciting without being a cold bitch. You know what? Maybe she was a cold bitch, maybe people should just deal with that.
She deleted everything.
Start over.
Simple.
Brief.
Gertrude.
Thanks for the flowers. I’m not too into all the gushy stuff. Would you like to go on a date?
She read it three times, decided she sounded like a lawyer, almost deleted it, reread it, changed her mind and liked her firm, adult tone. She sounded in charge.
Interested, but reserved.
Like Olivia.
She hit send and immediately turned her phone upside down next to the pens and tape she kept on the little counter under the register.
She was three aisles away, yet still heard it vibrate.
Somehow, she knew it was him. Just by the veracity of the noise, the suddenness of the reply.
They had begun.