The Devil Buys a Book

I reluctantly walked back into the bookstore that Friday afternoon, wishing I were anywhere else. It had been a hellish week, full of idiotic customers, inane corporate directives and backstabbing co-workers. I glanced at the man perusing the books on the bestseller table and for the first time in my life, my jaw literally dropped. I ran to the back of the store on feet crippled by bone spurs, to grab the only other person I was sure would recognize him. She assumed I was fucking with her as I dragged her to the table. We stood about twenty foot away and whispered back and forth loudly enough for our voices to be heard in submarines half a world away from our small Texas town.
“It’s him!” I hissed.
“It looks like him but why would he be here?” she hissed back.
“I read somewhere he owned property in this county. I didn’t want to believe it,” I replied, still sotto voce.
A regular customer and another employee walked up to us.
Our regular asked, “Why are y’all hissing?”
We pointed and explained. Both newcomers agreed it looked like him. The employees seemed to feel the best option under these strange circumstances would be to continue debating, but our regular believed in the direct approach. The man had moved away from the table and was walking past us. Our regular went up to him and asked the question everyone but me was dying to know. I knew it was him.
The man gave an unconvincing chuckle and said, “No, but I get that all the time.”
In triumph, our regular joined our huddle and announced, “It’s not him.”
“What else would he say?” asked my employee.
“He lies,” I muttered darkly.
The hissing argument continued with everyone else wavering. I knew I was right. I could tell by the way my skin crawled when he was standing two feet from me. A woman appeared and asked where the history section was, thereby taking me out of the huddle and giving me no chance to convince the skeptical. I turned the corner and there he was.
The woman was his wife and they followed me all the way back up the aisle. A voice in my head, which I can only hope was mine, was shrieking,
“He’s looking at my butt!”
I stopped at the huddle, which now consisted of three people trying not to look guilty. The man and his wife continued to the cash register where he paid for his book with a credit card and left the store. But not before my employee had sent the regular out to the parking lot to get his license plate number so she could run it through some computer program she had on her computer. There was no need for that as we all raced to the startled and confused woman at the register and demanded she pull out her credit card slips. My sense of vindication was dampened by my need for an immediate shower and some good drugs.
Karl Rove had been looking at my butt.

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