hind leg flung over his shoulder and a lick to the base of his tail.
Madison, of course, knew nothing of this. No doubt she’d already conjured the cat-in-the-basket image in her mind.
“Oooh, a kitty!” the girl squealed. “When I was little, I had a white Persian named Mr. Cuddles. Mommy got allergies, so we had to give him away to my uncle and aunt, but I’ve always loved cats.”
“Well, that’s important, but what’s more important is that Hamlet loves you back,” Darla replied. Though, given Hamlet’s persnickety nature, “love” was something of a stretch. “Tolerate” would be more appropriate.
Bad enough that she had to hire a new part-time employee. She never would have suspected that the true challenge lay in finding someone who could get along with Hamlet, the official black cat mascot of Pettistone’s Fine Books. Darla had been shocked earlier that year to learn that she had inherited Hamlet along with the building and business from her late Great-Aunt Dee. It wasn’t as if she’d been close to the old woman. They’d actually interacted only a handful of times over the years; still, Great-Aunt Dee was the original Darla Pettistone, for whom Darla had been named.
They had shared similarly round faces and snub noses, though the old woman’s red hair had come courtesy of Miss Clairol, while Darla’s wavy auburn mane was strictly her own. The octogenarian had also originally hailed from Texas, just like Darla. However, about sixty years earlier, the then twenty-five-year-old had fled north, renaming herself Dee to put distance between her new life and her country roots. Despite the twangy Texas accent that she could never quite lose, Dee had apparently settled in surprisingly well in Brooklyn. Perhaps it was due to her three native–New Yorker husbands—all of whom had been wealthy and had thoughtfully predeceased her—that she’d sequentially married over the years.
Hamlet had appeared on the scene long after, coming to the store as an abandoned kitten. He’d been named for the tragic Shakespearean character . . . or, rather, for the copy of the play that he’d pulled down off the bookshelf and made into his personal little kitten bed.
Hamlet had split his time between apartment and bookstore for almost ten years now. And since Dee had been Hamlet’s caretaker (Darla never thought of the cat as being owned), this meant that Darla technically was as close to a blood relation to Hamlet as a human could be. It also meant that they—feline and woman—were pretty much stuck with each other. And given that Darla had never been much of a cat person, her learning curve in this relationship had been steep. Still, she had grudgingly concluded she could only hire an employee that Hamlet liked . . . or, at least, one that he wouldn’t feel compelled to systematically terrorize out of a job. Unfortunately, he’d already ix-nayed the first few candidates she had interviewed.
“Let’s get this over with,” Darla told the girl. “Go ahead and bring your things”—she’d learned not to let a potential hiree leave behind anything they’d have to come back for later—“and we’ll go down to the main store to find him. While we’re looking, I’ll show you around the place a bit.”
She had been conducting the interview with Madison on the shop’s two-room second floor. The front area, which overlooked the street, was designed as a lounge. In this space, Darla hosted the occasional writers’ groups and book clubs, though the rest of the time the area served as a reading room and employee break area. In one corner, a small galley kitchen lurked behind an Asian-inspired screen, allowing for a bit of cooking and washup.
The shop’s storeroom was housed in the rear room, where packing materials vied with cartons of books awaiting shelving. Housing her storeroom on the second floor was not the most convenient of arrangements, but Darla found that bribery (in the form of coffee and pastries) usually worked well enough on the delivery drivers to get them to haul one or two hand trucks’ worth of books upstairs. And if her baked goods didn’t suffice, well, there was an old-fashioned dumbwaiter that went between floors. Though slow, it was sturdy enough to accommodate a case of hardcovers—or, as she’d discovered as a child, objects quite a bit larger!
As they made their way down the steps, Madison clutched her pink iPad case to her ample chest and gave an exaggerated sigh. “I think your shop is wonderful! It’s nothing like a chain store