Free Breakfast with Neruda by Laura Moe Page B

table in front of her, and waiting. Finally, I yell, ‘Her name is Claire.’ Pelee Peugeot glances my way, and I can see meanness in her eyes, as if the devil has sent her here to sign his books. She turns back to my brother, and with a frigid smile full of teeth, she says, ‘Is that with a C or a K?’ Josh told me later she creeped him out big time.”
    “Maybe she was just weird that day.” I open the door to the bookstore.
    “No,” Shelly says. “I Googled her, and I found out her real name is Anne Smith. She’s had five husbands, all younger. She has a kid by Number Three, but she left him with his father so she could go off to Greece and start writing. That’s where she met Number Four.”
    “So how did she get the name?”
    Shelly shrugs. “I saw this YouTube interview where she had some bullshit story about once having been rescued by some guy driving a Peugeot.”
    “It’s kind of a cool name,” I say.
    Shelly shrugs. “I guess. But she’s still a bitch.”
    We step inside the store. “Smells like paper,” I say.
    “Duh.”
    A bearded guy wearing a Book Loft T-shirt asks if he can help us. “He needs a map,” Shelly tells him, and the guy hands me a photocopy of the store layout.
    “I don’t know where to start,” I say. “It’s like a book museum.”
    We step up to the first level, where current bestsellers are displayed. I spot a Pelee Peugeot book on the
New York Times
bestseller shelf.
    “That bitch,” Shelly whispers. She reaches for the book. She leans in toward me and whispers, “Normally I bend a few pages of her books every time I go to Barnes & Noble. That way it will get remaindered, and Pewee Pissant can’t make any money off it.” She sets the book back on the shelf unharmed. “But this is an independent bookstore, so I’ll be nice.”
    “Remind me not to piss you off,” I say.
    “Don’t worry,” she says. “Your pages are already bent.”
    We thread our way up and down various staircases and rooms. Each room is unique, and I notice the music changes every few paces. In one room we hear Patsy Cline. A few steps away, Coltrane wails on sax, and yet another room plays John Lee Hooker. It reminds me of Bob. He was into music, and he’s the reason I know something about jazz and blues.
    The shelves are filled to capacity in each room. “It’s almost too much,” I say. “Overwhelming.”
    “Pick out whatever you want,” she says.
    “I want it all.”
    “Well, my dad’s rich, but he’s not that rich.”
    “I could live here,” I say. Is this where it starts? This tendency to want to hold on to everything? To keep all the books of the world within reach? “This store reminds me of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.” Shelly gives me a quizzical look. “In a book I read a couple years ago called
The Shadow of the Wind
, there was this secret hideaway where they stashed old books,” I say, “The Cemetery of Forgotten Books.”
    “What’s the book about?”
    “It’s about this boy’s possession of a rare book he picked out from the cemetery. It houses the last copies of all the books that have gone out of print.”
    “It’s a book about a book?”
    “Yeah, it’s kind of hard to explain . . . part mystery, part love story. The kid picks out a book that leads into all sorts of intrigue.”
    “Let’s see if we can find it,” she says. She looks on the map. “Fiction is in rooms eight, nine, and ten.”
    Even with a map, the rooms are hard to figure out. If we were in a hurry, I’d ask for help, but I like the adventure of finding things. Like Daniel Sempere and his father, we move through the labyrinth of books and search through the fiction section.
    “Who’s it by?” she asks.
    “Carlos Ruiz Zafón.”
    We find it under Zafón, along with his other books. “I liked
The Angel’s Game
too,” I say, “but not as much as
The Shadow of the Wind
.
The Angel’s Game
is more of a ghost story.
The Shadow of the Wind
has more layers.”
    “You