Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
Henry
—Joey’s Staff Pick
I used to think the worst part of my job was figuring out where to make cuts.
Whether it was personnel or parts that people really enjoyed about their job, it was never fun to make these changes.
But I had to grow a thick skin, ready to slash budgets and restructure businesses in order to produce a more effective life for the company.
I knew I had to be a little assertive with decisions and it could make me unlikeable.
Downstairs, though, the booksellers didn’t consider me just unlikeable. I had quickly turned into the Antichrist from the schedule changes alone. If I had to bear the burden of being a jerk to make sure that The Last Page didn’t close its doors, then so be it.
Changes were inevitable, but I was hoping there wouldn’t be that many, just a few tweaks here and there.
Part of me knew that couldn’t be true. If Leo had spent the last few months sick, keeping the books by himself, then there were bound to be a few errors.
Still, I doubted it was anything we couldn’t come back from.
I stood at the edge of the room, surveying Leo’s office that was, just like his apartment, a complete mess. Tension built in my chest at the prospect of having to decipher and organize another chaotic room.
I inched toward his desk as if it could bite me. It felt almost sacrilegious to move stuff around, like if I kept it all exactly the same, he could return to it. Plop down in his chair and pull his glasses up from where they hung on a chain over his chest and read his book.
I shook my head, trying to step out of the spiral of grief and guilt.
It was like quicksand. If even part of me succumbed to it, my whole body would fall, too.
I’d grasp at anything around me, hoping to pull myself out, before just accepting my fate.
All the time we could’ve spent together if I had dug my head out of that sand and picked up the phone.
I shrugged off my Carhartt jacket that was once my dad’s, gifted to me on my eighteenth birthday by my mom, and set it on the chair opposite Leo’s desk. There was no way in hell I was sitting in his seat.
Hovering over the desk, I tried to make neat stacks of the papers.
Buried beneath it all was an ancient laptop.
I flipped it open, unsurprised when it was dead.
I circled the desk, pulling open the drawers, hoping to find a laptop charger, only to be met with files, files, files, and more files. All of them dating up to his death.
“There’s no way,” I muttered. “Grandpa, what were you doing?”
I vaguely remember from my high school years insisting to him that he needed to go digital. I would sit in the chair opposite his desk as he sifted through different papers, typing in a calculator every so often.
“This is how businesses have been run for hundreds of years, Henry,” he had said with a laugh. “I would’ve closed a long time ago if I wasn’t capable of doing this.”
The laptop was promising, though. Maybe he had transferred it all over and kept a double record of everything. If not, my job was going to be a lot more difficult than I had anticipated.
After a while, I found the laptop charger hidden underneath a pile of papers on the desk. When it finally woke up, none of Leo’s old passwords worked, so it was essentially useless until I could find the passwords.
I sat on the opposite side of his desk, beginning to organize the files when there was a knock on the door. Before I could stand up to open it, the door flew open, hitting the back wall.
“I can’t do it anymore,” Joey cried.
I frowned, standing up. “Do what?”
“The pressure of being at registers is too much to bear. You have to move me.”
I picked up the schedule I had left on Leo’s desk, scanning it. “You’re at registers for another hour, then shelving in Fiction.”
“Even worse!” Joey screeched. “I’m overwhelmed at registers, I’m overwhelmed in Fiction—”
“Is there a place you’re not overwhelmed?”
Joey quieted, calming down. “Espionage.”
My frown deepened. “I didn’t know that was one of the bigger sections. Does it need shelving?”
Joey nodded. “Usually two people. Stewart and I have a good system going there.”
I hesitated. Even if I wanted things to change for the better, I wanted the booksellers to like me.
“Don’t tell anyone,” I commanded. “Just for today, you two—”
Without another word, Joey spun on his heel and shut the door behind him.
I sighed, taking deep breaths to manage my impatience and anxiety, and kept sifting through the papers.
It wasn’t too shocking when I found a notebook with all of Leo’s passwords on them.
My heart stuttered when I saw the one for his computer: HM726. My initials and birthday.
When the laptop unlocked, I began digging into the files, trying to decipher it all.
I was right that he kept a double record of everything, thankfully.
Judging by the files on his computer, the store was doing okay.
There’d been a downtick in sales, but nothing we couldn’t recover from.
Once I cross-checked everything, I’d be free to start making a business plan.
Before I could get into it, the door slammed open, with no knock this time.
“Are you fucking kidding me? Joey gets moved to Espionage with Stewart so they can make out and I have to stay in Finance and Self-Help?” Mabel demanded.
“Joey told me he got overwhelmed, so I was trying to—”
“Joey gets overwhelmed when the wind fucking blows,” Mabel said. “You want to know who’s overwhelmed? Me. All the dude bros out there haven’t figured out how to properly mask their BO. Either too much body spray or not enough deodorant. If you want an old woman’s health on your hands—”
“Okay, okay,” I said holding my hands up. “Where do you want to shelve?”
And for the next hour, booksellers kept coming in and demanding I change the schedule. I don’t know if it’s because I wanted them to like me or because some of them (Mabel) scared me enough to agree, but soon enough the schedule was jumbled.
My hair was messy from running my hands through it, my head on a swivel, trying to anticipate when another one would walk through the doors.
I couldn’t take it anymore and decided to lock it and ignore the frequent banging on the door and pleas for help, as if they were starving peasants in Les Misérables.
By the time lunch hit, the doorknob jiggled again. Once, twice, then rapidly.
Before I could ask who it was on the other side, the lock clicked into place and swung open to reveal Ella.
She stepped through the door, propping it open with her hip. Her brown hair swished as she looked back and forth between the lock and me, frowning. “Did you lock that?”
“The booksellers have been knocking down my door. I did it for my own sanity.”
Ella barely suppressed a smile and said, “Oh? The booksellers were coming up here?”
“I know you were the first line of defense. You sent them up here after they went to you.”
“You’re from Tennessee. Don’t they have a saying about assuming?”
She shut the door behind her, taking in my progress. There were stacks and piles everywhere, the books discarded to a corner of the room. Her eyes lingered on Leo’s empty desk chair. “Are you having a meeting with Leo’s ghost or something?”
“What?” I asked, shocked. “No!”
She fell into Leo’s office chair, spinning around in it. “Why aren’t you sitting in this chair? I’ve sat in the one you’re in now plenty of times and I happen to know it’s super uncomfortable.”
“I didn’t want to be disrespectful.” I shot her a look as she completed her fourth spin, but she just laughed.
“If you knew Leo like I did, you’d know he’d love that joke. He always said he was going to haunt this place. Lucky us.”
Childishly, jealousy rang through me, even if I was a bit mystified by her. My shoulders hadn’t relaxed since stepping foot in New York. But here she was spinning like crazy, without a care in the world, only to stop herself by propping her foot on his desk.
Ella was complex. She wasn’t necessarily scary, even when she chewed me out next to the clearance cart, but I knew the power she held in this store.
However she wielded it was the scary part.
Today she was wearing a short black dress, tights, and knee-high boots.
Not necessarily what I would pick to wear on an eight-hour shift, standing the whole time, or in a lingering March winter.
So far, Ella seemed like the kind of person to let everything roll off her back. Except, you know, the obvious.
There was no doubt Ella was beautiful. But it was her long, silky hair that kept drawing my attention. The way she’d push it behind her ear or pull it behind her shoulders. It was hard to stay focused when she did so.
“You know, Lyle came in here and begged, on his knees, to let him work on the second floor.”
“I heard you let him.”
My brows furrowed. “They have this weird magnetic power where I feel bad saying no.”
Ella sat up, pulling Leo’s chair closer to his desk, folding her hands atop it. “Let’s make a deal. I’ll help you run the store if you give me final say on the changes.”
“We talked about this.”
“You need my help,” she argued. “Besides, the store is operating fine. I’ve looked at the books, we’re doing really well. You’ve barely glanced at them so I don’t know why you think—”
“Because there’s always room to be more efficient.
I’m not trying to be a jerk here, Ella, but I remember the way Leo ran things when I was still around.
I just want to make sure the store is set up for long-term success.
” When she rolled her eyes, I continued, “I am sorry about how everything happened.”
“If you were really sorry, you’d give me the store or let me be part owner. You just pity me. And if we’re being honest, if I were in your shoes, I wouldn’t give me the store either.”
“I—”
“I get it,” she said again, an edge to her voice. “We’re grieving the same person, but in different ways. I know it’s not so simple. I think we’re both hurting.”
I looked away, the words hitting closer to home than she knew. If I couldn’t ever get my time with Leo back, then making sure the store was okay would be the way I’d repair our relationship. “I really will do my best with the store.”
“Then you should take my advice. I know you have seniority or superiority or whatever white man complex fits you today, but I know this place better than you ever will.”
“And I know business,” I said, trying to keep the bitterness out of my voice. “The reason I changed the schedule is because it makes economic sense for everyone to be able to work in different sections. What if someone calls out sick?”
“Then we deal!” she said, her eyes narrowing.
“David likes to shelve. Which is rare among this crowd. He gets the most work done when I give him a section of the store to do, especially History, which everyone hates, and leave him alone. Ren is really great at giving recommendations. Lyle is probably our best used book buyer. It’s better when we have specialists. ”
“Right,” I said slowly. “What happens when one of them quits?”
“First off, no one here would ever quit without giving at least two weeks’ notice. Trust is important in this store. Look, we’re losing focus. The point is, everyone’s mad at you. That doesn’t bode well for you.”
It was my turn to roll my eyes. “Since the beginning of time, employees have been mad at their bosses. That’s just the way it is.”
“Nu-uh.” She tucked her hair behind her ears again and I tried my best not to get distracted from the way she brushed her hair from her forehead. “Not here. At The Last Page, everyone loved Leo. It’s more than you can say.”
Irritation flared in my chest. I hated that she spoke as if she was his granddaughter and had some sort of authority over him.
And the worst part was that she did. No matter how hard I tried to reconnect to my grandfather in this store, no matter the hours I put in, I’d never have what she had: years and years of memories.
“What happened between Leo and me is none of your business,” I said, my jaw clenched. “Clearly he wanted me to run the store if he left it to me in his will. He wasn’t the kind of person to just forget to change it.”
Her hands clenched into fists as she narrowed her eyes. “What could have possibly happened to keep you away from someone like Leo all these years?”
“I’m not going to do anything drastic,” I said, ignoring her. “But there are things that are just best for business. And being adept at each section of the store is one of them.”
“It’s tough for everyone,” Ella said, annoyed, pulling her feet down. “The store doesn’t feel the same, and even though it might not look like they’re outwardly grieving … they are. You should just let me help you, Henry,” she snapped.
“This is my job, Ella,” I said. “I’m doing my best, trying to make sure the store doesn’t fall apart without Leo. I know what I’m doing.”
“No offense, but obviously not. Just let me help—”
“You know what? I’ve actually got it handled.” I stood and nodded toward the door. “I appreciate your concern, but as the owner of the store, I think I can figure it all out.”
Ella huffed at the low blow and said, “Henry, you’re playing chess wrong. I’m trying to help you out.”
“They’ll listen to me,” I insisted, growing frustrated.
She folded her arms across her chest. “If it comes down to you and me, it’ll be me. Every single time.”
“I’m the owner,” I repeated, feeling slimy even as I said it. Like it was some checkmate that I earned instead of a blind spot she couldn’t have anticipated.
Ella shook her head as she walked out the door. “Guess you’re going to learn the lesson the hard way. I’ll be at main info when you come crawling for my help.”
I shut the door behind her, turning the lock a little too aggressively.
If The Last Page were one of my clients, I’d put Ella in charge.
Whether she or the booksellers knew it, they looked to her for approval at every turn, like children looking to their mother for permission.
The weird part is that they seemed to want to make her happy.
That wasn’t unusual with Leo, but somehow that power transferred over.
If I had on her on my side, then the booksellers would accept the future of the store a lot easier. But pride was a terrible, all-consuming thing.
I could run a business with people against me. I’d done it before. I had to keep a clear head and lead with my mind and what I knew would work. I wouldn’t let The Last Page turn into a disaster.