I have thought about nothing else since.
It's been three nights since I learned the sound Finn Bardot makes when he comes, and my body has not stopped suggesting that I need to hear him make that sound again. Standing in that parking lot with him, I wanted to kiss him so badly I had to hold my own elbow to keep from reaching for him. Then I drove home aching, yearning, and sat in my car outside my own apartmentfor seven whole minutes arguing myself out of turning around and driving to the vineyard to find him.
Reason won the argument. Reason is a selfish bitch. The rest of me has been moping like a sore loser ever since.
So after the last bell, I do what I often do when I'm feeling confused and lost in a way I can't explain to anyone. I go find my mother.
The library at four on a Wednesday is church-quiet, sun coming through the tall windows onto the reading tables, the whole building smelling like aged paper and crisp lemon floor polish. My favorite scents of my entire childhood.
It takes me only a second to realize that Finn is here.
He's at the corner table by local history, my mother sitting across from him. And between them is a stack I can read from the door because I've spent my life knowing this room. Large-print editions. Matching audiobook cases. A pamphlet I'm too far away to see what it's about.
What's he doing here with my mom in the middle of the week?
I step behind the biography shelf before either of them sees me. I'm not proud of sneaking and snooping as a full-grown adult. I do it anyway.
Finn is sitting very still. Not the stillness that happens when I walk into a room. This is the careful, serious kind, one hand flat on the table like he's holding it down, his broad shoulders set. His voice when it reaches me is low and even.
"It's to help one of the workers at the vineyard," he says.
My mother, who has run that circulation desk since before I was born and been lied to about overdue books, water damage, and who really tore the maps out of the atlas in 1987, does not blink.
"Reading struggles are far more common than people think," she says, and slides the pamphlet back across, face-up, like it's aboat-repair manual. "The adult reading program two towns over is excellent. Evening sessions. Very private." Her hand rests on the audiobooks. "And these go home with you today. Same book, two formats. The fellow you're trying to help can listen while he follows along on the page. It's not a workaround, whatever anybody says. Audiobooks are reading. Tell him the librarian said so."
Finn looks at the stack for a moment. "He'll be glad to hear it," he says. And the jokes are gone. There's no wink in it, no stage anywhere in the building. Finn Bardot without jokes is Finn Bardot being braver than anyone ever gets to see.
Except me. And, now, my mom. Even if he's giving her a more cautious version of brave.
The man across from my mother spent yesterday afternoon hanging a sky for my drama kids. Now he's here, in the building where I watched him charm an auction crowd without breaking a sweat, quietly doing the one thing on earth that scares him the most. And he didn't tell me.
He was never going to tell me. That's the part that gets all the way in. This isn't for my benefit. It’s for himself. I was never supposed to see it.
It lands somewhere I have no defenses built, because it never occurred to me to build them there.
My mother walks him to the door the way she walks favored patrons out, which is to say she comes around the desk, something she does for maybe four people on this earth.
At the door he pauses. "Thank you, Mrs. Gable."
"Clara," she says.
He smiles at that, then he's gone through the front doors with the pamphlet, the book, and the matching audiobook case, and I am standing in the biography section with my chest aching from a tenderness I have no idea where to put.
My mother returns to the desk, picks up a stack of returns, and says, without turning around, "You can come out of biographies now, sweetheart."
Shit. Twenty-six years at that desk. The woman has seen it all. I never had a chance.
"How long did you know I was there?" I ask, coming out.
"You walked in at 4:09." She hands me half the returns. "Shelve these with me."
We shelve. It's muscle memory, the two of us moving down the aisle, and I last almost a full minute before I crack.
"What was that about?"
"A patron consultation."
"Mom."
