“You’re serious?” I looked at my watch. “After all that work we did to get to midnight? Don’t you ever clock out?”
He shrugged. “I told you, it’s not that kind of a job.”
“So you have to pull an all-nighter because she didn’t do her homework?”
“I have to pull an all-nighter,” he corrected me, “because we weren’t fully prepared for the interview.”
I walked over to him and picked up another one of the books, a blue one with a warped cover. The title, once embossed but now worn and faded, read Our Fair Town: A Local’s Remembrance. It had been penned by someone named Irma Jean Rankles. I said, “Either way, I have to say right now working at Colby Realty feels like hitting the jackpot.”
“You really think delivering towels is better than this?”
“I think,” I replied, “that I spent half of fourth grade studying the history of Colby. It’s not exactly compelling stuff.”
He cleared a space for himself at the table, sliding a monitor aside. “Well, obviously Clyde feels differently.”
Instead of responding, I flipped through the first few pages of Our Fair Town, something that—judging by their smell and yellow pallor—no one had done since Irma Jean’s days. “So you’re . . . I should go. Right?”
He looked up at me. “You don’t have to. We could read together. This stuff might be fascinating, now that you’re not, you know, nine.”
“Doubt it.” I put the book on the top of the stack. “It’s late. I need to get home anyway.”
“Oh. Right.” He tucked the pen he was holding behind his ear, then reached forward, looped his arms around my waist, and pulled me closer. “Look, I promise. Tomorrow night, we’ll get together. No town history, no work stuff. No demarcation. Deal?”
It was hard to say no when he said it like that. “Deal.”
He smiled, then cracked the atlas and flipped the legal pad to a clean sheet. The good student, personified. I hung around as he turned through the early pages of town maps, his brow furrowed with concentration. Pretty quickly, though, I felt a yawn coming on and slipped away to the door.
Outside, there was a warm breeze blowing, and I had that stiff spot in my neck I knew would only be cured by sleep, and lots of it. I opened my car door and was about to slide in when I heard Ivy say from somewhere above me, “You’re leaving.”
I looked up to see her up on the deck off the master bedroom, the glowing tip of a cigarette visible in her hand. Unnecessarily, I told her, “Theo’s got a lot of work to do.”
She exhaled, not saying anything for a minute. “So you’re . . . together now. Yes?”
It was hard to gauge her tone, saying this. Maybe it was the wind, or the angle, but I couldn’t tell if she was being condescending, annoyed, or a mix of both. “We’re just hanging out,” I told her.
“Ah.” Another drag. “Not sure that’s the best idea.”
No mistake this time: I felt myself bristle, hackles rising. “Meaning what? You’re the boss of his personal life now, too?”
“Just making an observation,” she said mildly, shrugging.
“Well, I’m not on your clock. So you can save your breath.”
I slid into my car and pulled the door shut with a bang. I made a point not to look up at the house at all as I cranked the engine and backed out, glancing back only once I was pulling away. By then, though, she was gone, the only thing visible on the deck the half-filled wine glass, a cigarette butt bobbing within it. Which pissed me off more, if that was even possible.
I rolled down my windows as I drove into town, trying to cool off. When I passed the Washroom and spotted the back door open, light spilling through, I doubled back.
Anywhere else in town on a summer Friday night at this hour would have been crowded, if not outright packed. But the Washroom wasn’t exactly Tallyho. In the Laundromat, a girl tapped away on a laptop, waiting for her clothes, while a guy across the room thumbed through a paperback. Over on the café side, Clyde was behind the counter, talking to a guy who was reading the newspaper and eating a piece of pie. When he saw me, he smiled.
“Emaline,” he said. “What’d you do with those New York friends of yours?”
“The better question,” I replied, walking over, “is what did you do?”
“Me?” he said, all innocent.
I just looked at him. “Our Fair Town: A Local’s Remembrance? Really?”
“What? It’s a very informative volume.”
“So you’ve read it,” I said, clarifying.
“It’s part of my own personal collection.”
“Since when? Lunchtime?” I asked. He blinked at me. “I saw the stamp, Clyde. You got it today, along with the rest of them.”
There was nothing he could say; we both knew he was busted. He’d been safe assuming Ivy and Theo wouldn’t know about the Colby library’s budget crisis, and how they were selling older books to try to generate revenue to buy newer ones. But as an avid reader who regularly haunted both the library’s stacks and their clearance room, I knew well the red circle with a date inside that meant final sale.
“Okay, fine,” he said now. “It is sort of mean. But she had so little respect for this place and everyone in it. I had to do something.”
“So you attacked with Irma Jean Rankles.”