Page 91 of The Wedding Forecast

‘Both of you! It affects me too.’

‘How does it affect you exactly?’ Bobbi asks.

‘The two of you, spending time together.’ Hayley folds her arms. ‘I just…I don’t know. I would have liked to be consulted.’

Hayley has always been sensitive about this. Once, when we were teenagers, she accused Bobbi of liking me more than her, because Bobbi took me to see a movie adaptation of a book I’d loved. You’re supposed to take your daughter to the movies, Hayley had yelled, and it hadn’t mattered that she’d already told Bobbi she would rather be dead than see that movie, and that she’d never read the book. If I’d known you were taking Anna, I would have gone, she’d said. I would have hated it but I would have gone. It was the principal of the matter.

‘Have you ever consulted me before you did anything in your life?’ Bobbi asks her now.

‘Oh, please,’ Hayley says. ‘You know everything about my life.’

‘Because I snoop and pry!’

‘Hayls, it’s not changing anything. It’s just a job,’ I say. ‘I already spend heaps of time at the bookshop. I’ll just be on the other side of the counter now.’

‘Fine. Well. Good luck. Mum isn’t easy to work with.’

‘Excuse me, everyone I have ever worked with has loved me,’ Bobbi says.

Jean walks back into the room from the kitchen at that moment.

‘Dinner is ready. Shall we continue this at the table?’

‘Yes,’ I say, sighing, trying to think of a less-fraught conversation topic I can introduce at the table. Religion, maybe. Bobbi’s celebrity encounter on the cruise ship. Maybe Jean can tell us the most awful thing she saw in the emergency room this week. Merry Christmas.

29

‘OKAY, LET’S START with the basics,’ Bobbi says.

It’s my first day, and I feel like a little kid. I hate first days. I just want to skip to the part where I know what I’m doing. It’s probably why I stayed in my last job so long. But at least it is providing a distraction from thinking about Mac, who is still occupying my thoughts to an alarming degree.

Bobbi shows me the point-of-sale system and how to use the EFTPOS machine and I write everything down in my ‘Learning to Be a Bookseller’ notebook (a Moleskine that I bought months ago with a plan to write notes for my novel but I never wrote a thing in it so it’s being repurposed).

Even though I have been in the shop a million times, Bobbi walks me around because she wants me to look at it all with fresh eyes, from an employee perspective. She also wants to give me her insider view on why things are the way they are.

‘I put fiction on this side of the room because it’s in my eyeline from the counter and a lot of the non-fiction covers depress me,’ she says. ‘Also, all my observations of people tell me they naturally turn left when they walk in looking for fiction.’

I write down fiction = left.

‘This first row on my front table is my guaranteed-sales area. You put a stack of any books in that exact spot there, people will buy them. Doesn’t matter what it is. It’s the magic spot.’

‘Did you put my book there?’

‘Of course. I also put it in my magic spot in the window. There’s something about a particular spot in the right-hand window—people are always drawn to it.’

‘So the key to selling books is visual merchandising?’

‘No, but that’s a lot of it. You also have to read absolutely everything, have the knack to know what will sell before you order it, be charming, have a good location, and a lot of luck. Oh, and there’s also colour theory. I read lots of books about that. The dark blue of the shopfront, it’s called Atlantic Mystique—it’s the kind of blue people associate with imagination and intelligence. People want to feel smart when they walk into a bookshop. That colour is like a signal to them: “Come in here, we’ll make you a better person”. I spent months finding the exact same shade of blue for the chair,’ she says.

I am fascinated and I immediately want to buy at least three books on colour theory.

Bobbi takes me out the back, which consists of a narrow hallway that also doubles as a kitchenette (a generous term for a sink, a tiny bar fridge and a shelf with a kettle, a few mugs and a biscuit jar), a small storage room for incoming and outgoing stock, and a toilet.

She pauses at the biscuit jar.

‘Now, this is important. I have simple tastes. I like plain whole-wheat digestives. Sasha used to like mint slices. You can tell me whatever you like, and I’ll order some,’ she says. ‘It’s important you have the biscuits you need, otherwise you’ll get to 3 pm and want to die.’

‘Um, I’m good with the digestives, I think,’ I say. My preferred biscuit is actually a Tim Tam, but that feels like a diva-ish choice. Tim Tams are probably twice the price of the digestives.