To My Former Co-Worker Jack at Half-Price Books

A bar fight left you unconscious. Not a bar fight, really, because you left, but they came after you. You admitted to having a big mouth, maybe saying somethings that were out of line. They left you on the sidewalk.

There’s a scar on your face. You limp. When you reach for the bills out of the register, your fingers move with deliberation, as if you have to tell them what to do: index finger pull the bill, thumb reach up and clamp. No movement is fluid. Even your speech is slowed down, just a titch.

You’ve been there a few months before I started. I was hired to work 11-2 to cover all the lunch breaks. Three hours was about all I could fathom. I was two months into grief and knew that, without a job, without someone waiting for me to show up at a certain place and time, dressed and ready to greet people, I might not survive.

Bookstore jobs are my fallback. Everyone spends sometime in retail, and if you’re lucky, you get to work in a place that sells what you love: food, clothes, tires. For me, it’s books. And people who work in bookstores “get it.” They hold books as if the pages are alive. They love it when a customer comes in and asks for their favorite author. They believe they are serving a greater good. I could recover there. The books, the people. This was my therapy.

I forgot about the babies. Parents bring them in, sleeping in car seats, wrapped up in slings. So many babies. If I can, I leave when they walk in, grab the history or romance books in the backroom to be shelved, because I will not meet the babies in those sections. I pretend not to hear them if they call me for help. I don’t know how to look at a baby or hear a baby.

No one at the store knows this about me and I can’t figure out how to tell them. The words just never make sense and even when they say, “So, do you have any kids?” I cannot figure out the answer. “Yes, but…” “Well, I did, but…”

One day, you and I were sorting out a large pile of books someone wanted o sell us. I don’t know how it came up, but I told you about Rainer, about why I always run when the babies come in, about how I wished people would know this without me having to say it, so they would understand.

“That’s funny,” you said, “because all people see when they see me, is this,” pointing at your cane. You talked about how people don’t know you at all because they can’t get past what they see, their assumptions about you. You wished it was less obvious, invisible really, revealed only when you wanted it to be.

I don’t know about you, but I wanted to try it, to trade places just for a day to see which was better or how it was different. We didn’t say a word the rest of the afternoon. We thumbed through the books and priced them. Customers would come in and we greeted them, “May I help you?”