Personal Touch Read Free

would have to work at Chair Fair. My mother owns that store. It’s seasonal, opening May 1st, selling lawn chairs, beach chairs, barbecue cookers, beach umbrellas, picnic tables and so forth. I loathe helping there. Passionately. First I hate my mother’s partner, Jeter, who is this huge bosomy woman with a voice louder than Baby Julie’s. Second, I hate the customers. Anybody who shops at Chair Fair has forgotten something he meant to bring along and he resents spending the money and he’s in a hurry and he thinks we overcharge. He’s right about that; we are definitely in business to make a profit, my mother says, trying to balance our budget. And he’s rude.
    I have this terrible tendency to be rude right back.
    I waved good-bye to my sea gulls and they shrieked and wheeled as I walked back home, ordering me to come again and feed them tomorrow.
    When I was down to the last three employers I knew of in our entire village (and two of those my mother said no daughter of hers would ever work for)—I found a job.
    Mr. Hartley’s Second Time Around. (You may have noticed that here in Sea’s Edge we specialize in quaint names. Since neon or garish signs are zoned out, we have these cute little wooden signs that swing and creak in the breeze. The summer people love it.)
    Second Time Around sells used paperbacks. “Summer people,” Mr. Hartley told me, “read an awful lot. In winter I open only on Saturdays, but in summer I’m open six days a week.”
    Second Time Around is in a little cubbyhole of a store between the Savings Bank and Annette’s Bread Basket (a bakery), which is nice for depositing my paycheck but not so good for keeping my waist trim.
    It contains roughly ten thousand paperbacks sorted equally roughly by category, like science fiction or World War II. You bring in your old paperbacks and get a credit to apply to buying other people’s old paperbacks, for which Mr. Hartley charges you half price. At first I didn’t see how Mr. Hartley could make any money that way, but he said twenty-five-and fifty-cent sales really add up, and besides sometimes you sell the same book ten times a season.
    As long as he hired me to sell that book, I really don’t care. I spent the end of April and the beginning of May developing this long fantasy where all these terrific boys would bring in their paperbacks and end up hanging around the cash register because that delightful girl, Sunny, so well-named—really just the sight of Sunny brightened your day—Sunny was so appealing these boys didn’t even want to get back to the beach; they just wanted to feast their eyes on that girl.
    Mr. Hartley told me I’d meet every single summer person who came to Sea’s Edge, assuming they were literate this year. I tried to figure the proportion of sixteen to eighteen-year-old boys in a summer population of about six thousand. I decided there could not possibly be fewer than fifty. I further decided that all of them would be voracious readers with a deep insatiable need for used paperbacks.
    “And the best thing about this job,” said my father, “is that it’s within walking distance. I really didn’t want to have to drive you to work every day.”
    “Walking distance!” I yelled. “It’s at least two miles from home!”
    “So use your bike,” said my mother. “You don’t have any trouble riding two miles when you’re headed for the beach, I notice.”
    I hadn’t used the bike much since starting high school because I take a bus now, so I had to haul the bike out of the toolshed and scrape it down with steel wool to get the accumulated rust off it. I did this job out in the driveway, where passersby could definitely see me, and I wore my best jeans and pulled my hair back with my new white scarf, but the only person who noticed me there was Mrs. Macauley, who is eighty, who told me I was going to ruin my pretty clothes doing that filthy chore.
    I kept telling myself that I’d be spotted by the very earliest