‘Shit, Mitch, I take tea. Just black, plain, tea. A miracle this shop makes a profit at all, with you at the helm. You’ve got a memory for details like a sieve.’
I take the cup, wrapping both hands around its warmth and shaking my head. Tut tut, Mr Tuttle. But it’s a ritual, not frustration. We both know the familiar script and all the gestures that go along with it. ‘Not like it hasn’t been the same order every day since we met,’ I say.
‘Thought I’d be spontaneous, force you to try something new.’ He grins, his teeth uneven but spectacularly, unnaturally white. The peroxide blonde of the dental world.
My eyebrows aren’t as pronounced as his, but they’ll still mount a good rise when the moment calls for it, and I prop them up in mock disapproval. Then a sip of my drink – tea, despite Mitch’s pronouncement, strong and hot and exactly as I like it. Of course. And in a cup from Peet’s, which we’ve collectively decided has Starbucks outgunned on all counts. We’ve all long since grown tired of the coffee we brew in-house. That’s for the patrons. We ourselves will take something a little more refined, thank you.
‘Susan still keeping you to the new diet?’ I ask him. The script had run its course, and I’d noticed Mitch had opted out of his usual coffee and sported a cup with a teabag – orange-coloured, probably indicating something herbal and revolting – dangling out of its lid.
‘The fascist,’ he mutters, looking defeated. ‘If it hasn’t been brewed from a weed or a berry, I’m not allowed anywhere near it.’
‘Commiserations.’ I’m laughing as I answer. ‘I’m still getting smoothies.’ There’s no need to elaborate. Mitch knows the story and shakes his head empathetically. If there were more hair there, it would flop with the exaggerated motion.
He’s carrying two additional paper cups in a holder, filled with whatever contents are bound for their recipients on the far end of the shop, sighing for good measure but still smiling as he walks away. Big steps, lumbering but confident – a great, heaving land mass on the move. Mitch, needless to say, doesn’t cut the slimmest of figures, and I can see why Susan wants him on a diet. Still, poor thing. I probably shouldn’t refer to him as a land mass.
I’m momentarily captivated by the motion of this boisterous, generous man, hunting down the prey to serve as the targets of his daily good deeds. I catch the look of satisfaction that covers his creased face when he spots the smiles they offer in response, and for a moment feel the melancholy that comes from wondering why there aren’t more selfless souls like Mitch Tuttle’s in the world. And definitely more bosses. But I also catch the sly sleight of hand that flicks a donut from the counter into his grasp as he saunters back, and my devious smile is instantly back. I feel exonerated from the guilt of the heaving-land-mass reflection.
‘I know I said I wouldn’t nag you.’ I let my words stretch out as he approaches. My eyes point to the deep-fried treat poorly concealed in his grip.
‘A promise I’m glad you consider as inviolate as the oath that put that ring on your finger,’ he answers, motioning towards my hand, before I can go further. He steps into his small office at the side of the shop, divided from the floor by a glass wall, and plops his overweight frame into his seat. I can hear the donut drop onto the desk next to his herbal tea.
A second later, I’m quite certain, it’s gone.
Libra Rosa is hardly the largest bookshop in our part of the world. Even in a society where they’re fast disappearing, the Bay Area still has its share of some of the greats. Green Apple in San Francisco has branches scattered around the city, some covering multiple storeys and bringing in authors and speakers while cultivating book-sharing and the lovely art of the second-hand. Johnson’s in Berkeley caters to the hip. Iconoclasm in Marin fosters the new age, as do a half-dozen others like it. There’s a little bit of something for everyone. The only thing the shops share in common is the Californian-liberal ideal that they should be nothing at all like the high-octane bookstores of New York and ‘the big cities’. They’re quiet little holes-in-the-wall with small-town vibes and a pace deliberately laid-back to suit the pot-happy lethargy of the NorCal literary culture.
Libra Rosa is, among the mix, pretty standard. A tribute to its location in Santa Rosa – an oversized town just fifty-five miles north of San Francisco and the last opportunity for residence that San Fran careerists can reasonably consider for a daily commute – the shop has been shaped by Mitch into his vision of a perfect, if miniature, out-of-town literary tribute to the old Haight-Ashbury days. Rows of new books, stacks of classics, and a small section for the second-hand, with beanbags in corners, vinyl LPs on the wall and an overall atmosphere of being committed to life in 1965. Most of what we sell can be bought on Amazon, but Mitch has ingratiated himself with enough of the local community that the shop has a decent following who come in dribs and drabs throughout the day, never more than a handful at a time, though the addition of the coffee bar and seating area two years ago upped the daily visits a little.
In one corner of the shop, on the far left as one enters and barely visible from the glass frontage onto the street, is the periodicals section. My terrain. I have a small desk surrounded by rotating racks for the newspapers and fixed shelving for the magazines.
Periodicals are even less viable these days than books, given that almost every smartphone in existence carries their content in full colour and with instant access, but keeping up the periodicals corner is something of a hobby horse for Mitch. ‘It’s called print media, and print requires paper and ink.’ God love the man for more than just his kindness. I’m not a technophobe, and I browse the Net with the best of them. But the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times are just never the same on the screen. You need to be able to hold them, get the ink on your fingers. It’s a life experience not to be dismissed.
So I arrive each morning. I unbundle the packs and boxes, which feels almost like working in a proper, big shop in the city – except that I know the mailman who delivers them is called Bruce, a wooly-haired gentleman who’s been on the downtown route for twenty-six years and who delivers our items ‘promptly at the exact time I get here’, and follows the delivery with a twenty-minute linger over a double black coffee, which doesn’t quite seem full octane to me. Nevertheless, I set the papers into their assigned racks, glancing through the magazines as I place them on the old shelves. It’s a job with a slow pace, deliberately as much as a simple function of location, but with an upside: it allows me to read as I go and catch glimpses of the world’s reporting on life outside.
It usually takes me an hour or two, and then I settle into the routines of maintenance, selling, curating. And simply being present, as a shop without attendants is nothing more than a warehouse. Though a shop without customers is, too, and some days we barely pass that test. So I sit at my small desk, smile as guests enter the shop, answer questions when they have them – which on rare occasion are about books or papers, but more often about their children’s recent sporting success or a vague complaint about the state of politics, or another pothole on Main Street – and spend the many quiet moments between browsing the Internet that still has stories to tell even once I’ve read all the day’s papers through.
I have my own computer for that task, and I have to admit that as much as I cherish paper and ink, I do love this thing. The latest model, thinner than my calculator and an elegantly understated shade of what Apple optimistically calls gold. I can’t say that my previous model, whatever it was, had been all that bad; but I do love a shiny new thing, and the shinier the thing that’s new, the darker the memory of what it’s replaced. God bless Apple for keeping the shiny things coming. If I weren’t happily married and Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, hadn’t announced himself as being the other way inclined, I could see myself having an extraordinarily torrid affair with that man.
Pinned to the wall beside my desk is a photo of David and me, taken a year and a half ago near Lake Berryessa, and another of David and Sadie both lying on their backs, bellies up, out in the backyard. Two frozen moments of happiness I keep right at eye level. Tacked around them are notes and posters and all the usual fare