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“Is it?” Mrs. Miller says grimly. Eeyore.
“Isn’t it?” I inquire gently.
“I’m guessing you haven’t heard the news.”
My shoulders hike up a little. “Not this morning.”
I’ve been here since before sixa.m.doing inventory.
Her eyes fall on the stack. “Oh,” she says. She lifts one of the hardcovers I’ve piled on the counter. “I heard about this one. Sue, one of my bunco buddies, said it was good. She listened to it on audio. Her eyes are going, you know.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. I am about to press even though part of me doesn’t want to know what news story she means, but Mrs. Miller is still talking.
“I don’t know what I would do if my eyes started to go. If I can’t read, I might as well be dead.”
“That’s not going to happen,” I try to soothe.
She blows out a just slightly boozy breath. It’s only after ten.
“You’re young. So you don’t know. One by one everything starts to go.”
I have no idea how old Mrs. Miller is. I know she was the high school English teacher when my dad was a kid, retired just before I started at Little Valley High. She’s a widow, lives alone in a big house just on the edge of town. Her kids, according to rumor, don’t visit much. She’s lonely, that I know for sure. She comes in here two to three times a week. I like her, though my dad said she was mean to him, nearly flunked him in sophomore year and almost got him kicked off the football team. Those of us who come alive in the pages of books, and struggle with the “real” world—we recognize each other.
“Nice of you to get these in, Maddie. I’ll take them all,” she says. Her salt-and-pepper hair is choppy and too short, her face a landscape of deep lines. I think she’s beautiful; all faces tell a story.
“Not this one though,” she goes on, lifting one from the stack and putting it aside. “She puts too much sex in her books.”
“Hmm,” I say. “Good to know.”
“And the language. It should be a law that authors are not allowed to swear on the page. Laziness if you ask me.”
“I see your point.”
I try to keep my responses to customer criticism of books neutral. There’s no accounting for taste. The book in question has been on the bestseller list for ten weeks. So apparently sex and swearing aren’t a problem for everyone.
The sleeve of her jacket is frayed. I notice this detail as she pays for her stack of books. I make a note to look for paperbacks next time.
“You were saying about the news,” I say.
“The girl. The missing girl.”
I shake my head.
“A topless dancer at that local dive. Left work, didn’t make it home.”
I brace myself for some comment about her profession, the way people do, make a girl seem less for what she chooses to do with her body. A that’s-what-you-get kind of an attitude.
“Poor thing,” she says instead, looking at something behind me. “Life isn’t easy for girls.”
That’s the truth.
“What bar?” I ask, as if I need to. There aren’t that many bars, and only one with topless dancers.
“Billy’s,” she says, with a wrinkle of her nose. The locals put up a fight when Billy wanted to open his place, clumsily namedHeadlights. But he managed to get his permits. “His father was a C student, you know. CliffsNotes all the way. I don’t think he read a single book I assigned to him.”
I went to school with Billy. He wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed either. But nice enough. And I always thought he was gay, so I was surprised to hear about his bar that has been open for I don’t know how long. Five years, maybe? Most people wind up there for a drink now and then, even if they have no interest in the dancers. Even Badger and Chet go there from time to time, just to connect with Billy.
“She was expected home for the holidays and didn’t show,” Mrs. Miller goes on. “Her parents came looking and reported her missing.”
