While they were dickering over who got to buy what, and thus who had nominal ownership of which, my customer stalked behind the shelves until he had circled the children and was in the clear, with the children on his right flank and the door, an easy retreat, to his left. He stood there, indecisive, until desperation drove him out into the open and up to my counter.
He set the book down and offered me a small smile along with his cash (exact change) as I rang up the total. It was an odd amount, something I'd seen recently, and I looked at the book again.
"I'm sorry," I said. "Didn't you already buy this book?"
He looked surprised. "No, I bought another book."
"No, I'm sure it was this one," I insisted. "Was it defective?"
"No, it wasn't this book."
"Because if it was, you could return it. Weren't you satisfied with it? It didn't fall apart or something, did it? Was it inaccurate?"
"I – don't know," he confessed. "Actually, you gave me a different book instead."
"I did what?" I asked.
"There was a mix-up when..." he held his hand up to show Carmen's height. "The woman and girl came in. You gave me another book instead while you were dealing with her. I should have checked my bag. I don't want to return it," he added hurriedly. "I liked it."
"Did I overcharge you for it?"
"Oh, no, not really."
"What did I give you?"
"Greek myths. Ovid."
"One of these?" I asked, holding up a copy of Selected Myths of Ovid's Metamorphoses. The high school was using it for a literature course that fall.
"I didn't want to complain, it's just that my roof leaks. I don't blame you or anything," he added clumsily.
"I'm so sorry – here, take the book at my cost," I said, offering it to him.
"No, I'd really rather pay..."
"But it's my fault. Let me make it right with you," I said.
"I don't – " he cut off abruptly as several of the children swarmed around him, insinuating themselves against the counter so that I'd see them first when he left. He suddenly found himself engulfed in a sea of adolescents while trying to argue a point of pride with me. I felt a certain amount of pity for him.
"Please, I don't mind. I enjoyed it, so it doesn't matter," he insisted. He set the money on the counter and withdrew his hand, nearly elbowing one of the children in the nose as he did so. The boy from before had sidled up on his other side, comic books held tightly against his chest, and now he craned his head up and around the stranger's ribcage.
"Hello," said the boy with a curious look.
"Hello."
"You've moved into the cottage, haven't you? You buy a lot of books," the boy continued.
"Please, go first," the stranger said. The boy beamed at him and offered me his comic books, which meant all the other children began jockeying for place behind him. My customer withdrew again, back to the cookbooks, leaving his money and his book behind. There wasn't much for me to do but ring up the children as quickly as possible and break apart a scuffle that started when a boy grabbed the wrong bag and its rightful owner socked him in the arm.
When the last of them were gone he was still there, pretending to have been reading the backs of books the entire time. He waited another few minutes before he set a paperback down, carefully using his sleeve to rub his fingerprints off the slick cover, and returned to the counter.
"You should have gone first," I said. "They're impatient little beasts sometimes."
"I don't mind," he stammered. "May I have my book now?"
"Of course," I said, giving up on restarting our argument about payment. I offered him the book wrapped in a clear plastic bag, normally reserved for rainy weather or people with a lot to carry. "See? So you can make sure you have the right one this time."
He looked down at the title through the plastic. "Yes, I see," he said gravely, clearly uncertain whether or not I was joking.
"So you've moved into the cottage at The Pines?" I asked, as the ancient cash register spat out a receipt. I tore it off and offered it to him. He shoved it in a pocket absently.
"Word travels fast."
"Get used to it. I'm Christopher," I added, offering him my hand.
"Lucas," he replied, hesitating briefly before shaking.
"Staying the winter?" I asked, while he shifted uneasily and glanced around.
"Probably through spring at least."
"You working in town?"
"Not really," he said abruptly. "Thank you – have a nice day."
He was out the door and down the steps before I could get another reply out.
***
It is a natural human urge to settle in certain formations, which can be repeated in a village of five thousand even more easily than a city of five million. The village is merely the city stripped to its basic component parts, after alclass="underline" places to gather, places to buy and sell, places to live, places to play. The church, the shops, the houses, the park.
Low Ferry's major road was a two-lane blacktop lined with shops, the only reliably-plowed street in the winter. During the summer the cheap asphalt sometimes melted and stuck to peoples' shoes. My shop, and my little apartment above it, stood about midway down the road in the heart of our bustling retail district which consisted of my bookshop, the hardware store, the cafe -- which was also a general store and sold homemade jam in summer -- a department store with a grocer's built into one side of it, and two antique shops that closed when the tourist season ended each year. At the northern end of the road, before it shot off in search of a freeway to join, there stood a small squat wooden church which was attended by nearly everyone who lived in the village.
Spreading out from the shops in a vaguely oval pattern were shady streets with pleasant grass-yarded houses, none more than a decent half-hour's walk from the center of town. The two lower schools stood on one side of town and the high school on the other, closer to the manicured sports field. To a child it must have seemed pretty tedious, spending eighteen years with the same forty or fifty faces. Or maybe it was reassuring. I went to school in Chicago, where the faces changed from year to year.