Willie interrupted again and asked Veronica to sign for the purchases on the card machine.
Other customers were coming into the area and Leah was moving down the main aisle, but Presley Ann took the time to answer as she carefully bagged all of Veronica’s purchases. “It was surreal. I looked down at this little…angel lying on my chest, and…” She took in a deep breath, and Veronica’s smile mirrored the wide one that grew on her face. “I knew he was meant to be mine.” Veronica teared up a little and gave her a gentle hug.
“Aww,” Willie said in a fake sing-song voice. “That’s so sweet. Thank you for shopping at Stigall’s, ma’am.” She handed Veronica her receipt and then turned to Presley Ann. “You need to ask Leah or Evelyn for a refresher course on the register. I can’t be ringing up sales for you all morning.” With that she walked away, whispering to herself, as if no one could hear her, in a fake sweet voice, “Blabbedy-blabbedy-blab.”
Leah approached them, watching Willie hurry off to corner a customer for another sale in the misses jeans department, and then looked back at the two of them. “What was that all about?”
“Did you hire that woman, Leah?” Veronica asked.
Leah chuckled dryly. “Nope. That was Dad’s doing. What did she do now?”
“Well, besides pirating e-books, she embarrassed Presley Ann. She’s hateful.”
Leah frowned and then glanced back at Willie as she carried the jeans the customer was looking for to the other register. “What happened?”
Presley Ann shrugged. “Actually, she was right in a way. She had to ring up a sale for me because I drew a blank on how to operate the register.”
“Well,” Leah said with a sigh. “I should’ve thought of that when I set the register up this morning. I meant to ask you if you remembered all the codes and stuff.”
“Evidently mommy brain strikes again,” Presley Ann said, smiling when Leah grinned at her.
“I think you still got the better end of the deal with my nephew. Now what’s this about e-book piracy?”
Veronica growled and explained. “She thinks that if she wins an e-book in a giveaway or a contest that it’s okay to upload it to a file sharing site on the Internet so others could download it for free. She justified it by saying the authors give them for free as prizes in drawings, and sometimes money is tight, and it’s not like it’s a ‘real’ thing, anyway.”
Leah’s jaw dropped. “She had no idea you’re an author?”
“No.”
Leah groaned and then gave a longsuffering sigh. “I’m sorry.”
“Me, too,” Veronica said as she looked down at the receipt. “I wonder how she’d like it if I walked into her home and took food from her refrigerator and slipped a little cash out of her purse. I mean, it’s not like she’ll really need it to survive on.”
A little slow to adopt technology to download books to her smartphone, Presley Ann hadn’t realized the gravity of the problem until it was explained. “What are you going to do?”
“Gage Randall asked me, Grace, and Rachel one night at the Dancing Pony if we had a strategy for dealing with pirate sites. He agreed it’s like attempting to plug a dike with your finger but he said he’d be willing to help if we wanted him to.”
Leah grinned and whispered, “I’ll bet he and Duke could get themselves added to that group and do a little recon for y’all. At least expose the people who are doing this and justifying it online.”
Veronica smiled and nodded…and then frowned as she looked at the receipt. “Just out of curiosity, Presley Ann, what’s your clerk number?”
Presley Ann chuckled as she looked at Leah, and Leah recited the number from memory. “Why?”
Veronica made an indignant sound and said, “Presley Ann just spent the last forty five minutes helping me find Christmas gifts for my brothers and Hank and Travis.” She handed Leah that receipt and pointed at the clerk number on it. “That’s not right.”
Leah growled and said, “I guess she’d justify stealing the sale from Presley Ann, too, since she rang it up. Presley Ann, why don’t you go see Evelyn and get her to run through the basic machine operations with you. I’m sorry I didn’t do it earlier. Veronica, do you have a minute? We need to void the sale and redo it, at your insistence, of course,” she added with a wink.
“You bet.”
“Presley Ann?” Leah said, as Presley Ann turned to walk to the back, still feeling embarrassed over the lapse.
“Yeah?”