I hate being dismissed like I’m nothing. I hate being reminded of the feeling of being as inconsequential as a ghost who only appears when her eldest sister decides to cry.
Adam’s still waiting for a response. I shrug. “What’s in it for me? Well, obviously I’ve spent the last year meticulously searching for his birth certificate so I can steal his identity.”
Adam runs his hand over the stubble of his chin. “This isn’t a joking matter.”
I scoff. “You made it into a joke by accusing me of hurtful things with no evidence whatsoever.” I dig in my purse for my keys. This conversation needs to be over, like, yesterday. “Why don’t you ask me if I’ve exposed him to squirrel germs or chipmunk ticks while you’re at it? That’s what you were soconcernedabout last time we spoke.”
His eyebrows furrow, etching a deep line between them. “Pardon me?” He shakes his head. “Squirrels? What the hell does any of what you just said mean?”
I narrow my eyes as I process all of this information. “You don’t remember me at all, do you?”
He blinks. “I—uh. Remember you? Like, we—” He kind of gestures his hands around and my stomach sinks when I realize he’s asking if he and I had ever had sex. His smile fades away when he sees the disgusted look on my face. He blinks, then snaps his fingers. “Right. Nate Bowen’s wedding. You had the animals.” He chuckles to himself and then glances at me up and down quickly. “You look…” He clears his throat. “Different.”
I don’t even understand what we’re talking about anymore. He’s just wasting my time on a whole new level now. I sigh and say, “You want to know what’s in it for me, Adam?” I lift my hand and gesture toward William’s home. “I know what it’s like to be lonely and forgotten, and your grandfather knows whatthat’s like, too. When I bring him dinner—” I can’t help it. My eyes well over and tears, probably stained with eyeliner and mascara, make their way down my face. A jaw-dropped Adam trails their movement. “What I ‘get out of it’ is I am a little less lonely and forgotten, too. Okay? I’m not trying to steal William’s savings or get him to be my sugar daddy or whatever the hell else you’re thinking, because, ew, but it’s not entirely altruistic, either. Are you happy now?”
Adam says nothing. He opens his mouth, then closes it, then opens it again. I honestly think I have rendered him speechless. I do not have time for speechless, so I nod and say, “I have a shift at work now. I already reminded William. You’re not invited, by the way.” Trying to hold my poise, despite the makeup certainly smearing my face, I get in the vehicle and only stopjustshort of squealing my tires on the way out.
The sky is settling into a glorious sunset as I make my way to the library, with the clouds shaped like roses and tulips and dinosaurs, each one dipped in yellow ocher and tangerine and rose gold. Early summer in Cranberry is my favorite. Always has been. But the beauty of the sky meeting the distant lines of evergreens and tulip trees can only do so much to improve my mood.
I can’t believe I cried in front of Adam Noemi. Of all the things I wouldn’t want to do in front of that man, weeping may well be at the top of the list.
I was supposed to be like a goddamn pinecone! Not stand there and basically unzip my skin and let him see every single feeling coursing through me. A second wave of embarrassment hits me as I pull into the library parking lot, and when I stop the car, I bury my face in my hands and let out a long, painful groan.
Oh well. At least he’ll for sure leave me alone now.
5
Behind the fancy, red-bricked, newtown library, there is a building that is now rendered theformerCranberry Public Library. It’s nestled between woods made up of oaks and pines and waxy-leaf tulip trees, with the occasional wild cranberry bush tucked in, full of ripening fruit this time of year like an adornment of rubies and amethysts. The building itself is ancient, the gray stained sidewalk leading up to the glass doors cracked, the doors themselves so heavy and swollen, they get stuck about a dozen times a day and I have to put a foot on the doorframe to get the momentum to swing one open.
After all that, I enter the main floor, where my boss, Anise, greets me. She wears a violet pantsuit that looks stunning on her curvy figure and dark brown complexion. She’s matched her lipstick to the suit and she gives me a wide smile, her eyes crinkling up like she’s genuinely happy to see me. I know she’s forty-eight years old because we celebrated her birthday with cupcakes only a month ago, though she doesn’t look a day over thirty-six. Aniseis one of the few people in town who is consistently nice to me, but even then, I sometimes get scared that her kindness isn’t real.
“How you doing this evening, Sky?”
I’m thankful I cleaned up my makeup in the car, so I can more easily lie. “Great! Had some lasagna for dinner.”
Anise raises an eyebrow. “Nadia made lasagna and you didn’t bring me any? What the hell?”
“Don’t worry, don’t worry, there’s two whole pans. I left one with William, so I’ll bring you some of the other one tomorrow, okay?”
“You better.”
I make my way to the elevators, which are for sure as old as this whole building. They take an age to open, and when I step inside, they creak in a way that reminds me of what it must sound like inside a great blue whale experiencing extraordinary indigestion.
After incremental drops down to the basement, the doors open so reluctantly, I get the feeling they’re experiencing pain in their old age. After patting them a little bit as they groan getting the final inches widened, I tell them, “Great job,” and step into the basement.
Crooked cherrywood bookshelves are arranged in a bit of a labyrinth, the books within faded, with paper so brittle, I have to put on white gloves when handling them. To my left and right, the walls are filled from top to bottom with even more books, and each of these has its own swinging library ladder, just like what Belle had inBeauty and the Beast. Those are what William acts like are going to kill me ever since I had to open my big mouth about them. To be fair, they creak about as much as the elevators, and Anise did warn me to use them slowly, which I may or maynot have neglected to do…but still. I’ve fallen from much,muchhigher up and turned out…sort of okay.
There are little slits of windows along each wall, letting in wide, short rays of the glowing terra-cotta sunset. Every time I step in here, I feel like I’ve entered into a just-unearthed dwelling that’s one thousand years old, and it’s filled with equally old relics and words and the smell of leather, paper, and cherrywood.
It’s dark. It’s dusty. And I fuckingloveit in here.
The carpet is faded blue-gray and leaves a lot to be desired, but I walk briskly across it to my desk. I found this desk when I first started here, in a storage room on the second floor, covered in piles of unused fax paper. I decided to ask for forgiveness rather than permission with regard to my claim to it. I donated the paper to the children’s library, as scrap for children to draw on, and then I pushed the desk onto the elevator, not certain if it would break the surely already unraveling cables that hold it up.
So far no one has noticed or cared about the missing storage desk, so as far as I can surmise, it’s officially mine now. My desk looks a bit messy to anyone else but me, were anyone around to actually see it besides me, that is. But I know where everything is. My notes are categorized on Post-its in a shape on my desktop as labyrinthian as the shelves on this floor. A book is opened to its center, where I’d left my work from last night, the pages as thin as rice paper, the words so faded, some spots are unfortunately illegible.
Technically, my job title is library technician, the same job I’d had briefly at St. Theresa’s. I kind of pretend it’s a bit fancier in my head—and it certainly is fancier than what I was doing at St. Theresa’s, which was basically working as a glorified receptionist. So now I call myself a library historian, or a preserver of history. Specifically, I was hired for the Cranberry Codex Restoration Project. Basically, when the big move happened from thisbuilding to the new and shiny library out there, they left behind the oldest books, many of which were donations from local wealthy families. This means that a good percentage of the books have local historical significance.
I spend my days slowly going through the hundreds, maybe thousands of books left behind. And I have a checklist that assists me in discerning if the book has the kind of significance the city is hoping for. If it does, I catalog the book in the library system and organize it on one of the few shelves I emptied my first week here. Anise will then take a look and let me know if the book needs to be documented—scanned—or not, and I do that work as well. Scanning old books is my least favorite part of my job, because that means I need to leave my sacred space—the dusty, dark, old basement—and go to the well-lit, floor-to-ceiling-windows-surrounded new library building up front. Withpeople.
