Work

For years, I worked at a bookstore in the Maine Coast Mall. The mall had stores on one side and windows on the other, with a walkway about twenty feet wide in between. Although I was not a morning person, I liked opening the store. I had my own key, which I used to unlock the big glass doors of first the mall and then our store. I let myself in and closed the door behind me.

I liked being in the bookstore while the doors were closed and nobody else was there, walking between the shelves of books to the break room. I put my lunch in the refrigerator, punched my time card and put on my name tag. I didn't mind wearing a name tag, except when customers read it and called me by my name as if they knew me.

Later in the morning, I went out into the mall to check in newspapers. The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Herald and Globe, and the Portland Press Herald. People reserved these papers. I cut off the plastic bands and counted them. Then I counted the reserved ones out, checked them off in the book, and wrote names at the top in pencil. Some of the reservers got mad if we wrote their names in ink.

I remember the light on the brown-tiled floor of the sloping mall, everything in order, all the stores opening for business. I gathered my scissors, papers and reserve book and went back in.