my way through the swinging door and onto the sales floor.
I need to pause here to give a sense of what it is to work in Two Old Queens. I mean, if you peer in through the glass of the front window, I guess it looks normal enough. There’s a lovely wooden sign depicting Queen Victoria gazing disapprovingly at Queen Elizabeth—who stares serenely back—in the transom above the door. The store’s located on a corner within sight of Tompkins Square, which is pretty much the center of the East Village in New York City. This means we’re far enough off the tourist trail to be generally pretty quiet, and not close enough to Soho or Greenwich Village to be hip. Our window display, courtesy of my uncle’s partner, Tommy, changes seasonally, and sometimes even monthly, when he’s feeling creative. You might also spy the wee tea bar, tucked into one corner; leaf tea only, darling. And there’s the standard cash desk, mostly filled by an old register with buttons so stiff, it hurts my fingers to press them.
The register does, however, make a satisfying cha-ching when I complete a sale.
Supervision is provided by Tommy’s cat, an elegant, aloof, green-eyed tabby called Rhianna. Literally all the boxes ticked for a self-respecting indie bookstore, right? But where Two Old Queens sets itself apart is in our merchandise. You know how in the library, they refer to the bookshelves as stacks? Hey, don’t mind me, I’m only heading over to the stacks to look up a book on paleontology.
Well, when we talk about the stacks in our shop, it’s literal.
Every surface is stacked high with teetering piles. Until they stop teetering, and tumble—usually Rhianna’s doing. When this happens, everything comes to a halt, and all hands converge until a new pile appears once more. Faster when a customer is underneath, of course.
It’s a chaos with which I’ve battled as long as I can remember. I have spent my time—So. Much. Time.—trying to organize Uncle Merv and his systems. Whenever a tiny bit of progress is made—I find a new computer program for arranging book intakes, or an inventory system relying on something more comprehensive than the alphabet—inevitably, the wheels fall off again.
Still.
The shop is always warm. Every reader is welcome. It smells of old books and sweet tea and the heady scent of ten thousand stories, trapped between the covers.
And a little bit of cat.
Currently, the front of the shop boasts a dozen “book pillars”; floor-to-ceiling spirals of new acquisitions. I’ve been laboring over them for weeks, and have managed to work my magic and stack three of them from largest to smallest. Still, with having to sort Merv’s most recent acquisitions, it’s been slow going.
By the time I take a final pivot around the waist-high stack of family bibles—there’s been a run on funerals in the neighborhood recently—I stop in surprise to find two men standing beside the cash register with my Uncle Merv.
As noted, our little shop is definitely off the beaten path. We have what I like to think is a pretty typical amount of foot traffic—mostly regulars, and once in a while the odd tourist gets lost and stumbles in. Business has been a bit brisker since the Starbucks down the street relocated elsewhere, but we’re never remotely crowded. It’s rare to have two customers in the shop at one time, unless it’s Christmas or one of the local book clubs decides to do a Jane Austen reread.
However, as I stagger up to the desk, the two-man element of this scenario is less surprising than the expression on Merv’s face. Merv came of age as a gay man in 1970s New York. He’s survived bashing, the AIDS crisis, and Tommy’s histrionics when I set the table and forget to put the forks on the left. Merv’s live-and-let-live ethos rules his life, and explains a lot about the condition of the bookshop. There’s not much that can knock him off his stride.
So, when he looks worried—there’s usually a good reason.
I pause, chin resting lightly on my stack of books, and take a closer look at the two men standing by the desk. The first is a short, overweight man with bleached hair and a spray tan. His camel overcoat is crumpled, and he’s left a trail of dirty snow all the way from the front door. I can’t help glancing around for Tommy, who will have an absolute bird when he sees this, but thankfully he’s nowhere in sight. The