1
Brooklyn
It’s early afternoon at Golden Creek Library, about half an hour before the local schools let out for the day, and I impatiently blow a wisp of blonde hair away from my eyes.
My besties, Nora and Cassidy, have formed the book version of a bucket brigade to help me load up the library van, but even with two extra sets of hands, I’m running late.
“Who knew it would take this long to pack up a few books?” I huff as I put another box in the back of the van.
“A few?” Cassidy laughs. “Brooks, what is this, the entire contents of the teen section?”
“Hardly,” I say. “There are still plenty of books in the stacks.”
“Still, are you sure the outreach center needs this many books?” Nora asks. “Heck, do they even have room for this many books?”
“The director told me they’d take anything I wanted to bring,” I say. “And besides, what’s the point in setting up a satellite branch if the selection is no good?”
This project has been a couple of months in the making, although the outreach center director, Prescott, apparently has his hands full over there so we’ve had to coordinate the whole thing via email. Now that I’m loading the tenth and final box of books into the back of the van, a little tinge of worry shoots through me and I wonder if this is what he had in mind after all.
It is a lot of books.
But I’ve loved this idea ever since Prescott came to me with it. Honestly, I wish I’d thought of it myself, because nothing makes me happier than a little matchmaking between a teenager and the right book at the right time. It can save lives, and I know that firsthand.
I shut the van door, then take a deep breath. “Thanks for the help, you two.”
“Any time, Brooks,” Nora says.
“You know we’ve got your back,” Cassidy chimes in.
I really should get over to the outreach center. The idea was to have all the books set up by the time the teens arrived for their after-school programs, sort of a surprise, but the library was crazy busy all morning, and I majorly underestimated how much work it would be to box and carry all these books.
I lean against the van to catch my breath a minute, and Cassidy and Nora keep me company. They’re both librarians here too, and I’m sure they’ve got plenty of work to do, but they look like they could use a minute to catch their breath, too.
“Hey,” I say, “Tell me about the honeymoon, Cookie.”
I use the cute nickname that Cassidy’s new husband calls her by—which her father-in-law, a tenacious library patron, had come up with.
“Yeah,” Nora agrees. “You’re my sister and even I have barely heard any details.”
Cassidy and her husband Chuck had fallen fast and hard for each other, and got married two months after they met. It all happened so fast that my head was spinning, and I was just the best friend cheering her on from the sidelines.
But I’ve never seen her happier, and that’s all I need to know that Chuck’s the one for her.
“Hawaii was absolutely magical,” Cassidy says. “Beautiful, sunny, vibrant…”
“A whole bunch of vague adjectives that tell me the two of you hardly left your suite,” I say with a wink.
“So not true,” Cassidy shoots back, then she blurts out, “We went for a lovely hike and did it behind a waterfall our first day there.”
She clamps a hand over her mouth before she can say any more, and I squeal. “Good for you, girl. Someday, I’m gonna find my own Tall, Dark and Handsome and you better believe we’re not going to see a damn thing beyond our hotel room walls on our honeymoon.”
Cassidy laughs, but Nora just sighs. “And I’ll be here at the library, reading picture books to other people’s kids and slowly becoming an old spinster.”
“No, you won’t,” Cassidy says. “You just have to wait for the right guy to come along.”
“He’s sure taking his sweet time,” Nora says. She’s two years older than Cassidy, and a year older than my twenty-four years, and sometimes I think that fact eats at her; that her kid sister basically just lucked into meeting the love of her life while Nora is still waiting.
“It’ll happen when it’s meant to,” I say, and I believe that with my whole heart.
My own life hasn’t been easy—far from it—and I’ve never been lucky in love, but things always seem to work out in the end. When I was growing up poor, my family never had much but they always managed to have just enough. And when both of my parents died when I was just fifteen years old, Nora and Cassidy’s parents took me in and treated me as their own.