FOUR
PULLING UP TOthe library the next day was an immediate kick to my nostalgic solar plexus. I’d gone there almost every Saturday when I was a kid, just to check out the Fear Street books again or see how much of a large-print Harlequin I could read before my mom caught me and yanked me out of the section. She should’ve been relieved that I was getting my sex education that way instead of porn.
It was a tall building, with all the kids’ books, media, and fiction on the first floor, and all the nonfiction and computers on the second. By this point, I could zero in on true crime by Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress classification in five seconds flat. It wasn’t long before I hadHelter Skelterand was browsing the rest of the section, seeing if there was anything else that might be interesting. There was one book with the greasy plastic cover of a Waffle House place mat, the red font large and garish, that promised to be a tell-all from the daughter of a serial killer who’d beenlocal to Central Florida in the 1980s. I didn’t remember putting it on my bibliography for my section on familial relationships between author and subject, but it could be helpful.
In the end, I checked out three books, including those two and one on getting a house ready to sell that I’d probably flip through while eating dinner. I brought them to the front counter and started scrolling through my phone, looking for the email with the temporary number I was supposed to provide to get my library card.
“Oh my god,” I heard.“Phoebe Walsh?”
I glanced up. The librarian was a pretty South Korean woman, her black hair cut into a chic chin-length bob, her red-framed glasses just this side of nerdy to make her look hip instead. Maybe it was how much more sophisticated she looked than when we’d been fifteen, or maybe it was the unexpectedness of how happy she seemed to be to see me, but it took me a second to place her.
“Alison,” I said. “Wow. You work here?”
The fact that she was behind the counter was a dead giveaway, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“I got my master’s in library science last year,” she said. “Remember how we said we wanted to be librarians because we’d be so good at book recommendations?” She spread her hands wide, like all this could’ve been mine except for the elephant graveyard. “Well, now that’s what I do. I love it.”
Alison had always been one of the most organized people I knew, so I could totally see her as a librarian. But I couldn’t tell if she remembered why we’d stopped being friends. She had to. It had been a pretty big deal at the time, at least to me. But the way she was acting now, it seemed like everything was fine, we were just two acquaintances catching up.
“Yeah,” I said. “Cool.”
To be fair, I was pretty sure I’d said I wanted to work at our local Barnes & Noble instead, because for some reason I had it in my head then that all librarians were unpaid volunteers. If I was going to recommend books to people, I wanted at least minimum wage. But then the bookstore conglomerate made me take a one-hundred-question personality quiz as part of the application process, and they never called me for an interview. The books I could’ve moved in the true crime section alone.
“What about you?” she said. “I didn’t know you’d moved back. Or are you just visiting your dad?”
It was probably weird of menotto mention that he’d died. This was a girl I’d known for the formative years when I’d crushed on Joseph Gordon-Levitt so hard my stomach hurt. She’d known my dad, too, had eaten his signature Southern goulash and heard him yell at me for leaving the bread bag open.
But that was exactly why I didn’t feel like getting into it. I couldn’t put her off with a simple “Thanks.”
“I’m just here for the summer,” I said. “I applied for a library card online, actually. Do you need the code?”
A flicker of hurt crossed her face. “I can look it up by your last name,” she said. “W-a-l-s-h?”
Okay, I guessed I deserved that. “Yup, that’s it.”
She was silent as she typed a few more things into the computer, then waited for my card. I was going to make some comment about how cool it was that they could print those on the spot, but it would either look like I was fishing for conversation because I felt bad about being short with her (which was true) or like I was easily impressed (also maybe true in this case).
Once the card was ready, she scanned it and then my three books, making no comment as to the subject matter. The consummate professional. “Here you go,” she said. “You saved forty-nine dollars, eighty-nine cents by using the public library today.”
I took the books and card and tried to give her a little, cautiously friendly smile. But she was already looking down at another stack she was sorting into piles. I thought we were done, that she was letting me know she could dismiss me as hard as I had her, but then I heard her voice again as I started to go.
“I was just worried about you, Phoebe,” she said. Her hands rested on top of the books now, paused. She wore a wedding ring. At one point this girl had been my best friend and she’d gottenmarriedat some point in the probably recent past and I hadn’t even known. “I didn’t mean to... well. You scared me.”
The sudden lump in my throat made it hard to swallow. I wanted to say something, but my mind was a blank, the words physically stuck somewhere that I couldn’t reach.
“You seem to be doing okay now,” she said, looking up and giving me a small smile. I heard it for the question it was, and I could answer that at least, could get out a simpleYes.
But I couldn’t. I gave her a jerky nod of my head, and left the library.
?SEVERAL TIMES ONthe drive home, I almost turned around and went back. I thought up a million different things I could’ve said. I could’ve told her about my dad. It felt weird that I hadn’t. I could’ve told her that I wasn’t mad at her, not anymore, that I understood why she’d done what she did. I could’veapologized for letting us drift apart. I could’ve asked her about her wedding.
But instead my mind went around and around in circles, until the idea of going back seemed so pointless. I pulled into my driveway and shut off my car, leaning my forehead on the steering wheel while I thought about how I’d only been in town for a few days and already everything seemed so fucked up.
There was a guttural sound of a motor outside, loud and getting louder, and I lifted my head just in time to see Sam come around the corner on a ride-on lawn mower, wearing these giant goofy headphones. He made a path up to the edge of the backyard, then came back, passing by me just as I got out of the car. I stood there, my hands on my hips, while he did another complete strip of grass, up and back. Finally he must’ve seen the look on my face, because he brought the mower to a stop, the engine still idling, and slid the headphones off one ear.
“That’s my yard!” I yelled over the rumble.
He tilted his head, squinting into the sun. “I know,” he said.