Read on for an excerpt from Mary Ann Rivers’s
The Story Guy
Tuesday, 4 a.m.
I scroll back down through the photos and description again, looking for a reason to avoid contacting the seller, but there isn’t one. Blond, beautifully made, and I can tell, even though the pictures were taken under bad lighting with a shaky hand. I nearly convince myself that this mid-century dresser is exactly what I want, but I don’t click the link to the seller’s email. It’s true that in the very worst case, I drive somewhere unfamiliar and stand awkwardly in someone’s entryway or garage or shed while I struggle to find a polite way to refuse. It’s imagining that potential moment, thick with polite embarrassment, that prompts me to close the listing. The solemn main menu of the MetroLink homepage blinks back.
My cell phone lights up the corner of my bed where it’s slipped under the sheets. There’s only one person who would call me at this hour.
“I think you keep me as a friend so you have someone to talk to when you’re with the goats.”
Shelley laughs. “You’re not wrong. The ladies rarely have much to say, and Will won’t talk to me until he’s had more coffee.”
I stretch out on the bed and watch a moth settle itself into the shadows gathered on the ceiling. I can hear the muffled and mysterious noises of Shelley’s task, a bleat from one of her little milking goats. “I might have been asleep this time, you know.”
“Carrie.” Shelley laughs, sounding a little far away since I’m probably on speaker. “I know you.”
“You do.” She does.
“Yesterday was hard,” she says, her voice gentle. It was hard. I am sleepless at an unreasonable hour fit only for happy women and happy men tending their spoiled goats.
“I’m not sure what was so hard about it, exactly.”
“Did you call your parents?” she asks.
“I did.”
“What did they say?”
“Not much. They were disappointed, naturally, but understand. As always. In half a minute they started re-planning the trip as a second honeymoon for themselves.”
“Haven’t they already had, like, four second honeymoons?”
“Six, actually.”
Shelley laughs. “I love that. Your parents are like the patron saints of happy marriages.”
“You’re not doing so bad yourself.”
“Hey Will, didja hear that? We’re happy!” Shelley laughs again, and I hear Will grunt, but then there is also a suspicious little bit of breathy quiet coming over the line.
“Guys! That better be the goats kissing. Jesus.”
“Sorry. Hey, Carrie?”
“Yeah?”
“Are you going to be okay?”
“Of course. People have breakdowns at work over nothing all the time.”
“Stop that. It’s not nothing.”
“Then what is it?”
Shelley is my colleague at the Metropolitan Library, where I’m happy, where I love the kingdom of teen collections over which I reign, except today, when in the middle of everything, I wasn’t. Shelley was reconciling my circulation report. Like always. Like every Tuesday. We were talking about me taking vacation time.
“I mean, sure. That sounds nice.” Shelley enlarged my circulation report and corrected a cell in the spreadsheet with an efficiency that reminded me of wren tucking grass into a nest.