Page 23 of The Sound Of Us

If River Valley was not put on the map a hundred years ago, no one would even know we exist. We’d be these weird cave people out in the middle of nowhere, getting high on painkillers and cheating with the deacon. Not much happens here and so we go big on what we do have. For example, a welcome party for our new resident.

My skin pebbles with goose bumps when I think about him. The way he looked at me. But more than that, it’s the way he wouldn’t stop looking at me.

I don’t know how much he saw of what happened at the library with Frank, but what else could I have done but smile and pretend it never happened when he showed up? The lace panties were safe inside my pocket by the time he got there.

It’s not that Frank had been upset that I like to wear women’s underwear sometimes. The problem had been that I hadn’t asked for his permission first when I bought the pair. And if Frank was not the centre of attention for everything, he bashed it down. You couldn’t even ask me how I feel about it, Axel? No fuckin way you’re gonna wear them. You’re so damn inconsiderate. It’s why I’d hidden it in the first place. I hadn’t wanted Frank to contaminate something about myself I’d just recently discovered.

I think the thing that bothers me the most is that he’d found my secret hiding place. It’s hard to tell when I’d pay for that. I’ll need to find a new hiding place. Especially for my beaded bracelet and my mom’s letters.

Anyway, we went to the evening church service together after that welcome party and praised and worshipped God like good Christians. I had a hard time because of how many sins I’ve committed since Pepper chased that black SUV.

I put all thoughts about this weekend away and jog the few steps left to the bookstore.

I’m starting my new job just in time for our annual book fair, an event attended by every single resident for a small entrance fee of one dollar. Besides books being sold, you could buy every kind of beer, wine and spirit with money you don’t have, after which husbands went home and beat their spouses for ‘being too chatty’ with the town folk or for ‘acting like snobs with the town folk’. When alcohol was involved, the non-drinkers unfortunately arrived at the same outcome.

Till Books Do Us Part opened fifteen years ago and is River Valley’s pride and joy. The story about how it got its name is that Deborah Flannigan quietly divorced her husband when he complained that she read too much. She gained half of their small fortune in the divorce settlement, sent him packing, and opened a bookstore aptly named Till Books Do Us Part. There is a rumor that Mrs. Flannigan had kissed the librarian’s husband at that year’s Christmas lunch and that was the real reason for the divorce but it was never clarified and everybody loved Deborah and her seventeen-year-old daughter, Casey, too much to dwell on it. In any case, it was bad enough that she was a divorcee, so everyone left it at that.

“You’re early. I like that.” Benson, my best friend, and, as of eight o’ clock, my boss, claps his hands when the tinkle of the doorbell announces my arrival for my first day of work.

“Hey, Ben.”

Benson throws his arm around my shoulder and pulls me inside the store. “Why didn’t we think of this sooner?” he asks.

“Because you needed someone who wasn’t going to die suddenly.” It was meant to be a joke, but Benson has never been fond of my dying jokes. I give him a playful shove, but he’s not buying it.

“That’s not funny, Axel.”

“Okay, okay. Sorry. Thanks for giving me this job, by the way. I was going to die of boredom otherwise.”

“Axel!”

It takes me a minute to figure out I’d done another dying joke. “Sorry.”

Benson takes my coat and places it behind the counter. “Okay, so first rule of the job. No death jokes, ever, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Do I need to put that in your contract so I can fire your ass if you do it again?”

I hold up my hands. “Okay, okay. God, so serious on my first day, Ben.”

“Come on. I’ll show you around. I’ll manage the front ninety percent of the time, but you’ll still need to know how to work the register, look up titles, put in requests for new titles, that type of thing.”

I follow him to the back of the store, passing the self-help and religious section. Funny how the books that tell you that you need no one but yourself and the ones that tell you that you’re nothing without God sit side by side like that.

“How’s that husband of yours?” Ben asks once we’re inside a backroom. But he says it like, herrrrsssbin, just in case I missed his sarcasm because Ben couldn’t care less about how Frank is doing. “Luke said he got employee of the month again?”

Luke is Ben’s brother, and he’s a supervisor at the lumber company Frank works at.

“Yeah. Last month. He’s okay.”

Ben faces me with his hands on his hips. “That man can fool everyone else, but not me. What’s the latest disgusting thing he’s done?”

“He’s having a wall phone installed today.”

“A what?”

“A wall phone. He said he’ll call me every day, so he knows I’m home.”

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