Chapter Fifty-Six
Lexi doesn’t usually text her sister this late, but she’s not sure what else to do, where else to turn. The flat is dark and empty, and Lexi’s sensible American friends are probably all tucked up in bed ready for their 5a.m. wake-ups for a run or a visit to the gym before their world-changing days at the office.
Any chance you’re up?
I am now.
Lexi refuses to feel guilty about this. If people don’t want to be woken up by text messages, they should have their phones on silent.
You okay?
...
Give me five secs, okay? I’ll call you.
It’s 6a.m. over there, the sun barely rising, if the sun can ever be said to fully rise in England. Stephanie’s house is probably still, for at least another half an hour or so, before the routine of getting ready for school and work starts up again. In solidarity with what her sister is probably doing at this very moment, Lexi makes herself a cup of tea. She’s just putting the milk back in the fridge when the phone rings.
‘So, what’s up?’
In the brief pause before Lexi speaks, she hears the tell-tale sound of raindrops on an umbrella. Stephanie is standing outside in the rain to talk to her, probably in the unlikely combination of wellies and pyjamas. This is love: for Lexi, and also for the family whom Stephanie doesn’t want to wake up too soon (although possibly that is mostly self-preservation). Brits may not sayI love youto each other as much as Americans do, but they can read the signs. Taking a call in wellies and pyjamas before weekday madness begins is certainly one of those signs, and it makes Lexi feel both grateful for her sister and sad that she’s so far away.
‘I’ve messed everything up,’ she tells her. ‘Sam, the bookshop, everything.’
‘Wait,’ Stephanie says. ‘Slow down.’
Lexi tells her everything, or at least almost everything. Then, when she finally stops talking, Stephanie is quiet. If it weren’t for the increasingly insistent drumming of the raindrops, Lexi would wonder if they’d been disconnected.
‘How soon are you thinking of coming home?’ Stephanie asks.
‘Soon.’
Lexi feels guilty about how long it’s been since her last visit. There were those years when travelling was difficult, and then, when they were back to more or less normal, it never seemed quite the right time to leave the shop.
‘I miss you. All of you.’ On the fridge, the latest picture of Chloe and Peter in their burgundy and grey school uniforms smiles down at her.
‘We miss you too. It would be so nice to have you home.’
Usually, Lexi corrects people when they call London home. DC is home now: it’s where she’s built her life, built a community, survived a pandemic. It’s where the coffee shop staff know her name and her order, where she can’t go for a run without bumping into someone she knows. This tiny capital city, with its green spaces, its earnest twenty-somethings determined to make their mark, its quirky politicians who buy the most unexpected books, its Puerto Rican and Mexican and fusion restaurants.
This time, though, it hits different. Lexi thinks of her first term at uni, everything new and strange, how she’d called Stephanie, who’d come to pick her up. For one blissful weekend, Lexi had felt like her old self again. She thinks about how amazing it would be to feel that again. How she probably wouldn’t want to come back to DC. She thinks about Chloe’s dance recitals, her toes pointed inside her pale pink ballet slippers, her tutu making her look like the Disney princesses she loves. She thinks about letting Peter win at Connect Four. She thinks of cups of tea with her sister, taking the Tube into Central London for a spot of shopping. It all feels, suddenly, so comfortingly familiar. She’d be part of a family. Maybe she wouldn’t even notice her singleness. She’d forget about Sam in an instant. And anyway, who needs sex when you’ve got easy access to peshwari naan?
The thought of being back in London is like a warm weighted blanket, like changing into dry clothes after getting caught in an unexpected downpour. When she falls asleep, she dreams of tube stations and afternoon scones, the ducks in St James’s Park, and the international aisle at Sainsbury’s, and she wakes up strangely rested, except for her still-puffy eyes reminding her of what’s gone so wrong in DC.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Lexi has no choice at this point but to call an emergency staff meeting. She’s messed her booksellers around long enough, yanked them this way and that, and they deserve to know what’s happening. She’s ordered pizza and wine, and been organised enough to chill the white, to avoid the Bookshop Special of warm pinot grigio in a paper cup.
She watches Hazel and Debbie and Natalie and Megan trickle downstairs to the sofa area after closing time, having counted the money and wiped the surfaces and– oh the glamour!– cleaned the toilets. One by one, staff who weren’t on the shift join them: Hazel, Elijah, Marcus. The buzz down there is a low-pitched one, a humming of stress in the atmosphere. Nobody expects an emergency meeting to be good news, after all. But Lexi also wouldn’t blame them for thinking this was an exception, after Tipsy Browsing Friday and how well it went. They all thought they’d hit on a perfect formula. A way back from the graph of doom. Lexi had hoped the next meeting would be different from this– full of laughter, optimistic projections, ideas for new Tipsy Browsing merch. Instead, she watches her staff eat rapidly cooling, limp slices of pizza, and she takes a deep breath.
‘Thank you all for coming at such short notice,’ she says. ‘I know I’ve always asked a lot of you, and that’s never been truer than in the last few months. Tipsy Browsing was a roaring success, and I want to thank you for all your time and energy and enthusiasm and determination. You truly are the best—’ her voice catches in her throat and she pauses to compose herself among the pin-drop silence ‘—the best team I could have ever asked for.’
There’s no way out of this one now. Lexi is like a gymnast, who’s let go of one of the uneven bars, and it’s time to grab the other one before she face-plants.
‘Unfortunately, our landlord has given me notice that he’s raising our rent by thirty per cent. And there’s just—’ Her voice catches again, but this time it’s less noticeable among the gasps and the whispered swear words. ‘There’s just no way I can make this work anymore. I’m sorry.’
There’s a respectful pause, a moment of silence for the death of life as they’ve known it, and then everyone raises their hands and starts to speak all at once. It feels so desperately lonely in Lexi’s chair. She finds herself wishing for a hand on the small of her back, or gently squeezing her own hand. She finds herself, weirdly, wishing for Sam, of all people, to be here. Maybe to take the blame. But also, maybe, because he gets her. He cares. Except not anymore, because she’s ruined it. But she can’t think about that right now, or she’ll never hold it together. Chances are slim as it is.
Lexi waits for the hubbub to die down, for everyone’s polite instincts of waiting for each other to speak to kick back in, and then she answers their most pressing concerns.
