Some Like It Hawk(50)
“Okay, so will you be pleased or dismayed that the rest of the Steering Committee are waiting for you in the library with pizza?”
Pizza. That argued that someone thought we were in for a long meeting. Unless they’d just appropriated the pizza Michael had talked about ordering. I closed my eyes, controlling the urge to mutter several of the words I’d tried to expunge from my vocabulary before the twins picked them up.
“Dismayed’s closer to the mark,” I said. “If I’m not up in an hour or so, call and fake some kind of small problem with the boys that only I can handle.”
“Will do,” he said.
Encouraged at having an escape route, I headed for the library. But on my way, I stole upstairs to check on the boys. They looked so cute and angelic that I pulled out my phone and snapped a few pictures to send to the grandparents. Before the boys arrived, I’d hardly ever used the camera feature on my phone, and now I used it almost daily. And not just for my own enjoyment. I’d figured out that if I sent my mother-in-law enough baby pictures, her visits were shorter, somewhat less frequent, and a lot more peaceful.
I tucked in both boys more neatly and then, feeling slightly less guilty, I returned to the ground floor and trudged down the long hallway to our library.
Chapter 19
Of course, the library wasn’t really our library at the moment. Call it our once and future library. When the Evil Lender had issued their eviction notices, Ms. Ellie, the librarian, and a small army of townspeople had packed up all the books, computers, furniture, periodicals, microfiche—in short, the entire movable contents of the building. The original plan was to store them in our barn until the evacuation was over. Then Randall Shiffley had made Michael and me a surprising offer: if we agreed to host not just the boxes but a living, breathing library until such time as the town regained control of its buildings, he would donate the labor to build our dream library—we only had to pay for the materials.
We had jumped at the opportunity. Some previous owner of our house with serious social aspirations and a much larger bank balance than ours had added on a two-story wing containing an enormous ballroom with a music room on one end and a sunroom on the other. We’d set up Michael’s office in the music room, let Rose Noire use the sunroom to overwinter her organic herbs, and had been planning to convert the ballroom to our library when we had the money.
When Randall made his offer, our library contained half a dozen ancient Ikea shelving units, a few bits of thrift shop furniture, and forty or fifty boxes of books for which we didn’t have enough shelf space. A little daunting, walking into the room and wondering when—or even if—we’d ever manage to build the library of our dreams.
Now it was built. Sturdy mission-style oak shelves ran the entire perimeter of the room, interspersed with paneled oak doors and wide-silled oak window frames. A little interior balcony ran around three walls of the room, giving access to the upper story of books and creating delightful reading nooks on the ground floor level. The fourth wall was balconyless but contained a brass ladder attached to a rail that let anyone without too great a fear of heights reach the books.
It was perfect—except that it was filled with the county’s books instead of ours, and separated from us by a locked door for which Ms. Ellie, the town librarian, held the key.
Occasionally, during a bout of insomnia, I’d steal down to Michael’s office, peer through the French doors into the library, and pretend it was all ours again. If I sat at just the right angle, so I couldn’t see the circulation desk, I could usually manage it, provided Ms. Ellie had turned off all but the night lights, so the Dewey decimal numbers on the spines of the books weren’t too obvious.
Tonight, though, the library was very much a public space. I knocked at the locked doorway that divided our part of the house from the library. And then, after Ms. Ellie let me in, I waited impatiently while she checked out books for the last few patrons and gently but firmly shooed a group of high school students out the public entrance, which led through Rose Noire’s sunroom greenhouse.
“Eleven o’clock,” Ms. Ellie kept repeating. “Closing time.”
“But why can’t we just stay a little while longer?” one of them whined. “We still need a little more time to finish our school project. Couldn’t Mrs. Waterston just lock up after we finish?”
“It’s July second,” Ms. Ellie said. “You’ve got till school starts to finish that project, and if you’d spent the last several hours working on it instead of texting people, maybe you’d have finished by now,” Ms. Ellie said. “And Mrs. Waterston has too much to do to babysit you.”