Haunting Jasmine by Anjali Banerjee Page A

pry the window open?”
    A cracking sound pierces the air. The window pops open a few inches, letting in a blast of fresh air.
    “There you go,” Tony says, rubbing the palms of his hands together. “Air, all you want.”
    “How did that happen? There must be a touchy spring.”
    “Yeah, that must be it.” He walks away, shaking his head. “Air, she says. ‘A clean shop is a lucrative shop.’”
    The rooms are beginning to look half decent, slightly less cluttered, but no matter how hard I work, the bigger the task seems to become.
    Throughout the morning, a smattering of customers drifts in and out. A few people pop in to pick up books they’ve ordered.
    “My aunt needs to diversify,” I say, wiping down the ornate ceramic mantelpiece in the children’s book room. Tony is shelving a stack of picture books. “She should carry soap, candles, handbags, cheaper new paperbacks, like the ones they have in the grocery store. To bring in more customers.”
    “This isn’t a grocery store. Take a look around.”
    “She needs to come into the twenty-first century, make a modern niche for herself—”
    “She already has a niche.” Tony runs to answer the ringing phone. “Drop shipment on the fifteenth book,” he says into the receiver. “The whole order was supposed to arrive today!” He yells into the phone for a few minutes, then hangs up in a huff.
    “You don’t want me to improve on anything,” I tell him.
    “Use your intuitive sense.” Tony points a finger at his chest. “Your heart.”
    “I leave that to Auntie. I have another idea: she could expand—buy the business next door and turn it into a bookstore café.”
    “We already have a tea room. Didn’t you see it?”
    “But that room can’t compete with the Fairport Café—”
    “She’s not trying to compete. Okay, watch and learn. Look, there’s a live one.”
    A young bald man has stepped inside the store, shaking his umbrella. Tony strides up to the man and smiles. “How can I help you today?”
    “I’m looking for a coffee table book about garden cottages,” the man says in a reedy voice. He’s in a black trench coat, sleek with water.
    I step forward. “We carry many of those.” Even I know what a coffee table book is.
    The man looks at me blankly, as if I’m invisible and the air has spoken to him. “Built with green materials?”
    “The books?” I say. The heat rises in my neck.
    The man makes an irritated sound. “Cottages. Built with sustainable materials, energy efficient.”
    “There’s no such thing as an actual coffee table book,” Tony says, motioning the man to follow him. “The publishers don’t define their books that way. But I’ll show you what we’ve got.”
    I listen to Tony’s smooth voice recede down the hall, as he leads the man to the Home and Garden section. Fine, if Tony is so good at his job, he can do without me for a moment. I’ll search for a cell phone signal again. I hold up my BlackBerry in desperate hope, carry it down every aisle in every room, and somehow end up in the Sexuality section, where a woman is furtively sifting through books about female arousal.
    I hurry to the next room, my face flushed. I’m glad she didn’t ask me for help. That was a close call. In the next aisle over, a little girl begs her father for a fairy book. “This one, please, please. It’s only seven dollars.”
    “Oh, honey, no,” her father says, distracted. “That’s a waste of money.”
    The little girl says, “How many packets of cigarettes would that buy, Daddy?”
    Silence, except for faint laughter coming from the next room. The father takes the book up to the register. Big surprise—three customers line up ahead of him, tattered old books in their arms. What on earth did they find that interests them?
    Every chance I get, I run out to check voice mail, where I’ve found a blip of a signal five blocks down and two blocks over. Robert has not called back. He can’t sell the condo without