Closing Shift

Jess left me to close on Friday, which she does now, which still feels like being handed the keys to something I'm not old enough to hold. I'm twenty-two. I have a lanyard. I take it very seriously.

The thing about closing alone is that the store gets big. During the day R&C is a normal size, full of Jess and Reagan and customers and the little bell over the door going off, but at eight o'clock when the last person leaves and I turn the sign, all four hundred years of the building seem to exhale at once and stretch out to their full length. The floorboards start talking. Old buildings do that, they tick and settle as they cool, but knowing why doesn't help much when you're alone with a thousand books and every one of them written by someone dead.

Reagan stays with me. That's the deal. Jess would no more leave me to close without the dog than she'd leave me without the register. She follows me around the shutdown like a supervisor, sighing at each task to indicate his assessment of my pace.

I did the register first. Counted it twice, because the first count came out three dollars over and that never happens, and the second count came out right, which meant I'd miscounted the first time and there was no mystery, just me being twenty-two and bad at counting past a certain hour. Reagan watched the whole thing with an expression of frank disappointment.

Then the lights, back to front, the way Jess taught me. The store goes dark in stages, and each stage the front window gets brighter by comparison, until Water Street is this warm gold rectangle and I'm the only thing standing between it and all the shadowed stacks behind me.

That's when I heard the noise.

A rustle. Paper. From the back, in poetry, where nobody was, because I had turned the sign and turned the lock and it was just me and the dog.

I would like to say I was calm. I was not calm. I said "hello?" to an empty bookstore, which is the single stupidest thing a person can do, everyone knows that, I've seen the movies. Reagan lifted his head. And then Reagan, brave, loyal, sixty-pound Reagan, the guardian of R&C, looked at me, looked toward the noise, and lay back down. Full weight. Chin on the floor. Her verdict was in and her verdict was that it wasn't worth getting up for.

So I went back there myself, phone-flashlight out, heart going, and found the culprit.

A book had fallen. That was all. A fat anthology on the top shelf had, over the course of the day or the week or the slow patient life of a leaning shelf, given up and slid down onto the one below it, and the slide had pushed a paperback off the edge, and it had landed open on the floor with its pages fanning shut. Rustle. Paper. Mystery solved. The great intruder of R&C Booksellers was gravity.

I put the book back. I straightened the anthology. I felt my heart come down out of my throat and take up its normal residence, and I felt extremely, magnificently foolish, which is a feeling I'm getting used to as a permanent condition of being alive.

Reagan met me at the front, tail going, ready to leave now that I'd handled the dangerous part myself.

"You're supposed to protect me," I told her.

She leaned his whole self against my legs, which is her answer to most accusations, and it works, because you can't stay mad at a dog who's decided you're furniture.

I set the alarm. I locked up. Out on the step the cold came off the water and the whole street was quiet and lit and mine for about thirty seconds before I walked home. Jess says you get so you love the closing shift. I'm not there yet.

But I counted the drawer right the second time. And I put the book back where it belonged. And the store was still standing in the morning, which I'm choosing to take full credit for.