“Hey, Leese,” I said to the woman, who was almost a foot taller than my efficient five feet. Her height was the same as my best friend’s, who owned a restaurant in Chilson, but instead of Kristen’s slender blond Scandinavian inheritance, Leese Lacombe’s ancestors had endowed her with a broad build, olive skin tone, and brown hair almost as curly as my unruly black mop.
Leese, a few years older than me, possessed a razor-sharp brain, a quick wit, and a prestigious law degree. She’d spent her time in the corporate trenches in a big downstate firm, and had moved back north a few months ago to start up her own law office, one that specialized in elder law. To keep costs down, she was using her home as an office, and had taken to borrowing books from the bookmobile instead of making the half-hour drive into Chilson.
“What’s new with you?” Julia stood and went to get the stack of books Leese had requested online. I was still tweaking the bookmobile schedule, but at that point we were visiting each stop every three weeks. Though that wasn’t a very long time to most people, it was an eternity for bibliophiles, and we were getting used to bringing along huge piles of requested books and lugging back the corresponding huge piles of returns. I doubted that any bookmobile librarian had ever needed to buy a gym membership to get an upper-body workout.
“New?” Leese perched the books on the corner of the rear checkout desk. “I’m glad it’s almost October, for one thing. My summer neighbors have slammed their trunks for the last time.”
Julia and I nodded, understanding the feeling. We lived in a part of Michigan that was the summer playground for a large number of folks from the Detroit, Grand Rapids, and Chicagoland areas. Some people visited for a weekend or a week, while others had seasonal residences they occupied from May through September.
The population of Chilson and the entire Tonedagana County more than tripled in the warmer months, and summer came with a complicated set of issues. Most of us were glad to renew the friendships that had been put on hold the previous fall—not to mention the fact that many businesses depended on the summer dollars—but October was undeniably a sigh of relief. No more parking problems, no more waiting in line for a restaurant table, and no more waiting anywhere, really.
“It is nice to have our town back,” Julia said. “We’ll be tired of looking at one another by April, though.”
Leese laughed, and it was a surprisingly gentle sound from such a large person. “Undoubtedly. But without this quiet time, would we appreciate the busy time?”
The question was an interesting one. I gave up trying to shift Eddie from the driver’s seat and walked down the aisle to join the conversation. “So it’s part of that old question: How can we value the highs of life if we don’t know what the lows are like?”
“Exactly!” Leese beamed at me with a high-wattage smile, and I knew exactly what was going to happen next. She would sit on the carpeted step, Julia would pull around the desk chair, I would perch myself on the edge of the desk, and the three of us would dive into a long, leisurely discussion when we all had better things to do. But it was nearly October, the summer folks were mostly gone, and it was warm enough to prop the door open. What could it hurt to let the bookmobile chores wait a few minutes longer?
Julia pulled the chair around, and Leese dropped onto the step. “It’s the swings in life that make things interesting,” she said.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, hitching myself up to sit on the edge of the desk. “Isn’t that some Chinese curse? ‘May you live in interesting times’?”
“Would you rather live in a boring era?” Leese challenged.
Julia laughed. “Minnie Hamilton couldn’t live a boring life if she wanted to. She’s just attracted to trouble.”
“Am not,” I said automatically. “I’m just—”
“Do you know what this tiny woman did earlier this spring?” Julia demanded of Leese. “In the middle of a massive power outage, she managed to hold a very successful book fair.”
Leese looked at me with interest. “You did that? Wasn’t Trock Farrand the headliner?”
“Minnie’s show, from top to bottom,” Julia said. “When the original big-name author pulled out, Trock heard about it and flew out from New York.”
“He’s a friend. That’s all,” I said, knocking my shoes together. “He wanted to plug his new cookbook.” Trock, host of a nationally televised cooking show, owned a summer place just outside of Chilson and in spite of the differences in our ages, backgrounds, and interests, we’d struck up a solid friendship.
Another solid thing was the relationship between Trock’s son, Scruffy, and my friend Kristen. I had the inside scoop that a proposal was in the near future, and I was having a hard time keeping quiet.
“Whatever.” Julia waved off my comment. “And just a couple of months ago, Minnie figured out that—”
“Hey!”
Julia frowned. “I’m on a rant, Minnie. Please don’t interrupt me when I’m in full flow.”
But it wasn’t Julia who I was scolding. I shifted on the desk and called to my cat, “Where are you going?”
We’d felt free to open the bookmobile door because for the last year, Eddie had completely ignored it. When we were en route, my furry friend traveled in a cat carrier strapped to the floor on the passenger’s side, but once I set the parking brake, Julia unlatched the wire door, allowing him to roam free about the interior. Though he’d run outside a couple of times the first year of the bookmobile’s service, since then he’d shown little interest in leaving the bus before we did.
Eddie, being a cat, paid no attention to my question, but continued to sniff at the open doorway.
“Is he going to make a run for it?” Leese asked, amused.
“Not a chance,” I said. “He wouldn’t want to get too far from his cat treats.”
Eddie’s ears flattened and Julia laughed. “I think you hurt his feelings. You should apologize before he does something drastic.”
“I shouldn’t have to apologize for telling the truth.”
But she did have a point. A miffed Eddie was not a good situation. He had claws and knew how to use them, especially on paper products. Paper towels, toilet paper, facial tissues, newspapers, and even books weren’t necessarily safe when Eddie was in the mood for destruction.
“I am sorry,” I told my cat, “that you take offense to a fact-based statement.”
“Huh,” said Leese. “Not much of an apology, if you ask me. And from the looks of him, he doesn’t think much of it either.”
Eddie was standing at the top of the stairs, intent on ignoring everything in the bookmobile, twitching his ears and nose.
“Hey, pal,” I said, sliding off the desk. “Inside only. You promised, remember?”
“That was before you insulted him,” Julia said. “All previous deals have now been canceled.”
“Come here, Eddie.” But just as I leaned down to grab my fuzzy friend, he hopped out of my reach, jumping down to the bottom step.
“That’ll teach you to make fun of a cat,” Leese said, laughing.
“Especially an Eddie cat,” Julia added.
We were parked in a large church parking lot, at least a hundred feet from the closest road, which hadn’t had a car pass in the last ten minutes, so I wasn’t overly worried about Eddie getting dangerously close to traffic, but there was a long line of shrubs at the far side of the lot and I could just see Eddie crawling into that prickly mess and not wanting to come out until long after we should have been at the next stop.
“How about a treat?” I crouched at the top of the stairs. “Come back right now and I’ll give you a whole pile of treats.” Not a big pile, but still. “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.”