Page 44 of A Novel Love Story

Lily and I both looked at Anders expectantly, and he gave a one-shouldered shrug. “I think we’ve got most of that in the back.” He went to go get the supplies. “Not the ribbon, though. Butterscotch has made it his life’s mission to shred them all. You’ll have to find that elsewhere.”

Lily looked around. “Whereisyour cat?”

“Probably hiding somewhere,” he replied, though there was a note of uncertainty in his voice as he looked around the bookstore. “Probably crawled into an alcove and fell asleep. He’ll come out eventually.Youneed to go find a ribbon.”

“Hmm.” Lily gave it a thought before an idea dawned on her. “Ooh, I know where some ribbon is! I’ll be right back,” she added, and before I could ask her where she was going, she fled out the front door and down the sidewalk.

I could feel Anders’s judgmental gaze on me.

“I know what I’m doing,” I said, answering his unspoken question. Then I said, “Truce? For Lily?”

He rolled the thought around. “Depends.”

I didn’t want him to hate me. I didn’t want anyone to, really. It was a flaw of mine. I took a deep breath. Now or never, I guessed. “Look, about yesterday—”

“I’ve got some boxes in the back,” he interrupted, and left.

I snapped my mouth closed. Oh, dear. He mustreallyhate me.

A few moments later, he came back with a cardboard box, a box cutter, and a few other supplies that Lily had listed off.

I riffled through them. “This should work, thanks. I mean, I wish I hadmysupplies: a bone folder, PVA glue, my stitching needle, but this’ll do in a pinch. What?” I asked, when I found him staring.

He snapped out of whatever thoughts he had in his head, and quickly retreated toward the children’s section,muttering something about finding his damn cat.

“Weird,” I muttered, and got to work.

First things first: I had to tear off the remaining cover and reinforce the spine, which I did with Elmer’s glue. By the time I was done, Lily had come back with a pretty ribbon that—clearly—she used in her hair.

“Will this work?” she asked, breathless.

I took it, and ran the inch-thick ribbon between my fingers, measuring it against the book. It was the color of milk and honey. “It’s gorgeous. Are you sure you aren’t going to miss it?”

“Nah. I don’t like ribbons in my hair anymore.”

“Then I’d love to use it.”

She pulled up a stool and sat on the other side of the counter as she watched me work, swinging her feet back and forth underneath her chair. I glued her ribbon to the cardboard spine at the top, giving her a built-in bookmark. Lily watched, amazed.

“So how did you learn all this?” she asked as I measured her book and then set the glued pages to dry under five heavy tomes I pulled from the closest shelf (History). The weight of the books would compress the pages so they would end up gluing tight together. From the measurements, I drew boxes on the cardboard. “A special school?”

“No. My mom was a librarian, so I learned from her,” I replied, double-checking the measurements, and then started to cut with the box cutter. “We didn’t have a lot when I was your age, and I readso muchthat my books would also start falling apart. She was used to bandaging up books for the library she worked at—our district didn’t have great funding—so she taught me how to fix them. Bind the spines. Glue the pages. Tape the covers. She knows how to fix it all.”

“Areyoua librarian, too?” Lily asked.

“No. I teach English at the local college.”

“That sounds boring.”

I laughed, finishing cutting out the cardboard that would become the cover. “It is, sometimes, but I get to talk about my favorite stories. So it makes it worth it.”

She watched as I took a piece of card stock and laid it flat under the cardboard spine, and glued the two covers to either side. “What’s your favorite?” Then she scrunched her nose. “Are they kissing books, like the ones Uncle Andie likes?”

Startled, I asked, “What?”

“You know,romances.”

“I mean … I … yeah. I like them a lot.”

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