Lending a Paw(33)
Yes, life as I knew it was over. But Stephen couldn’t fire me; only the library board could and they wouldn’t meet for another three weeks. Timing is everything. I could polish up my résumé and send it out . . . where? There wasn’t anywhere else I wanted to be.
The man read my expression of woe. “Ah, don’t worry about Stevie.” He slapped me on the shoulder. “He’s so stuck in that ivory tower he built for himself that he’ll never hear a word about Eddie.”
“You know Stephen?” A small hope beat in my heart.
“He’s the same now as when he was a kid. Smart, but not really seeing anything.”
I blinked and tried to imagine a young Stephen. Somehow he looked just like he did now, only shorter, buttoned-down shirts and all.
“Downstate,” the man said, “he and his folks lived on the next block. And here I end up retiring practically down the street from him. Funny old world, eh?”
Life up north was full of odd coincidences like this. On a ferry ride to Mackinac Island last summer I’d sat in front of my high school biology teacher. And two winters ago I’d been skiing at the nearby Nub’s Nob, and ridden up the ski lift next to a guy I’d had a class with in graduate school. Things like that happened when the region’s major industry was tourism on a grand scale. Up here, the odds of running into your grade school crush were about the same as running into the latest American Idol idol.
Stephen’s old neighbor asked, “So, you going to bring Eddie around next time, right?”
I smiled. “Not a chance.”
• • •
During the drive to the next stop, I kept the conversation tight on the complexity of tasks involved in being a librarian. Thessie was a high school senior and considering library science as a major. Ergo, her volunteering on the bookmobile. “There’s a lot more to being a librarian than most people realize,” I said.
“Yes, I know. Um, that man? What did—”
“Dealing with odd questions is one of those things they don’t tell you about in college.” I tossed off a careless laugh. “Another thing they don’t tell you about is working with library boards. Chilson’s board is wonderful, but I could tell you stories.” And I did, on and on without a break until we came to the next stop. “Well, here we are,” I sang out. “And we have people waiting for us already. Isn’t that great?”
Thessie may have been only seventeen, but she was no slouch in the brains department.
“So if anyone asks about the cat, what do I say?”
“There is no cat,” I said firmly.
“Yeah, but maybe there could be.” She gave me a sidelong look. “I mean, if there was a cat, it might be fun having it around.”
I rotated the driver’s seat and brought the laptop to life. “Will you pop the roof vents? Thanks.” Thessie, at least eight inches taller than me, could reach the ceiling easily. “No cat. There’s no way Stephen would allow a fuzzy, furry feline on the bookmobile.”
“Not a cat guy, is he?” Thessie asked.
“He’s not an animal person.” Neither cat nor dog nor feathered friend was held in esteem by the library director. “Says all pets do is eat and make messes that other people have to clean up.”
It was easy to see the gears whirling around in Thessie’s pretty dark-haired head. I shook mine. “There’s no use bringing it up. Even if we get around his dislike of pets, he’ll say that people are allergic and we can’t possibly run the risk of exposing anyone.”
“Okay, but the bookstore downtown has a cat and they don’t have any problems. And wasn’t there a library in Iowa or somewhere that had a cat living there?” She glanced around. “A bookmobile’s smaller, I guess, but if we vacuumed every time to get the hair and dander out—”
I was shaking my head. “Not going to happen.” I unlocked the back door and pushed it open. “Good morning! Come up and into the bookmobile.”
Up the stairs first was a young man of about twelve. Red springing curls, bright blue eyes, and braces on his teeth. “Do you have anything about fishing? There’s this bass in the lake I want to catch and my grandpop said you might have something.”
Thessie took him under her wing and escorted him to the high shelves at the rear end of the bus.
Next up the stairs was an elderly couple, hand in hand, looking for books on gardening. After I got them settled, I noticed a young woman coming aboard. Twentyish, long sun-washed blond hair, tan, wearing flip-flops, shorts, and a tank top covered by a flowered-print short-sleeved shirt, she looked the image of a California surfer girl.