The Path of the Bookseller

The voice chirped suddenly from behind me: “Look at his! It’s beautiful!”

I turned around. A few feet away, a man was carrying a little girl. One of her arms was around his shoulders. The other, as well as her steady stare, was pointed right at me. “Daddy, look!” she said. “Those colors!”

Her father smiled. “Yes, yes, beautiful.” He nodded toward me, then toward her. “She sees people’s auras. And she’s quite vocal about them.”

“Well, um, thanks,” I said. I certainly hadn’t heard anyone say that about me before, even in San Francisco. “Can I help you find anything!”

“Books!” the girl called out. “I love books!”

The man was looking for books on channeling,. He was disappointed that we didn’t have anything by Ramtha, but I did turn him on to Jane Roberts’ Seth Speaks.

He put the girl down as he thumbed through the book. Once on the ground, she walked up very close to me and slowly circled my legs, staring. I suppose she was still studying my aura. Maybe it was particularly strong at her eye level, just below my knees. Occasionally, she stopped in front of me, looking up beatifically until we would make eye contact, then continued to circle.

It was the warmest of the Sundays here so far. Though most people were still wearing coats, few wore hats. The store was swarming with families, many with four or five children bustling around their parents or darting off in multiple directions. As usual for the bookstores I’ve been in, there were far more girls shopping than boys.

One mother, shopping with two daughters, was buying a present for the older daughter’s friend. As she was paying, the girl tugged on her mother’s sleeve. “We have to go! We won’t have time to wrap it!”

“We can wrap it over there if you’d like,” I said, gesturing to the wrapping station near the door.

“Good!” the girl said. “I want to pick the paper!” She ran down to the station and tried to see the rolls, but, being about as tall as the counter, couldn’t quite get a good view of them. She then placed one hand on the edge of the counter and crouched down. In a single motion, she vaulted into the air and landed on top of the counter, where she stood and cycled through the rolls of wrapping paper. Heading off to another customer, I didn’t see what she chose.

I spent most of the day working the registers. I was scheduled to work there for three of my six hours, but was stuck there for much more of the day, covering calls for backup. We were short-handed all day, what with the clusters of families browsing, and with supervisors being busy ringing up orders left over after yesterday’s failure of our credit card processing network.

With the families continually merging and dispersing at the registers, it was often hard to tell how backed up we were. Any group of people might have involved just one person making a purchase or several. Parents tried to simultaneously pay for purchases and juggle their kids. I gave out more bags than corporate rules insisted that we should, since parents were carrying their kids. Some had to stop and round the kids up in mid-purchase, chasing after toddlers or calling for the older ones.

One mother paused as she was putting together what she was buying, and, in a powerful voice, called out the names of five children, who obediently clomped back to her. She looked back at me. “Sorry for shouting,” she said.

“That wasn’t shouting,” I said. “That was projecting.”

“Thanks,” she said, smiling with a little less embarrassment.

Another mother was putting away her change when the boy in her arms yelled, “Candy! I want candy! Do you have candy?”

He looked right at me. I looked at his mother. “Should the answer to that be ‘yes’ or ‘no’?” I asked her.

She looked at the boy, then back at me. “I supposed ‘yes’ is OK.”

“Then we have them right here,” I said, pointing to the counter display just to her right, which she hadn’t seen.

She picked up a Lindor ball. “These are small,” she said to the boy. “Are these OK?”

“Yes!” he said.

She picked up two more and put them on top of the book that she was buying. I rang them up. “Can you do without a bag?” I asked.

“I think so,” she said.

“OK,” I said. I tucked the receipt into the book and lifted it toward her, the balls managing not to roll off. “These don’t travel too well,” I said. “But they tend not to travel too far.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “They won’t.” She unwrapped one ball and popped it into the boy’s mouth, then ate one herself. I suspect that one or the other of them consumed the third one, too, before they got out the door, since she left with the book tucked under her arm.

After I clocked out for the day, I caught a glance at myself in the mirror. I looked exhausted, my eyes tired, my hair in disarray, and my face more drawn than I would like it to be. But I found myself smiling, thinking back on the day. My face may have looked like hell, but, I had been assured, my aura still looked pretty good.