“Yeah, well.” She grinned. “It was a good winter.”
“How much of that is due to Mr. Scruff?” I knew he’d visited Key West at least half a dozen times since Christmas and would be in town all summer running his father’s show.
She winked at me and spooned up the last of her custard. “And how much of those rosy cheeks is due to the attentions of your doctor?”
I scraped hard at the corners of the dish and licked a teensy bite of custard off my spoon. “Probably not a whole lot.”
My boyfriend, Tucker Kleinow, known in Charlevoix Hospital’s emergency room as Dr. Kleinow, and I had been dating since last summer. After that rough patch when we’d realized he was horribly allergic to Eddie, things had smoothed out and had been going reasonably well until he’d accepted a short-term job downstate.
“Still living with his parents, is he?” Kristen shoved our dishes to the side.
I nodded. Tucker’s new job was a two-year fellowship position at the University of Michigan, and his parents lived less than an hour away from the university hospital. To save money, he’d chosen to move in with them instead of getting his own place. It made financial sense, but it also made my visits a little awkward.
“Ah, it’ll all work out,” Kristen said. “And it’ll be easier this summer, when you’re on the houseboat instead of at your aunt’s boardinghouse. I mean, your aunt Frances is awesome, but it’s not the same as having your own place.”
Many people had said the same thing to me over the years, with additional comments about the need to build equity and a solid credit record. I ignored them all. “Tucker’s taking his vacation up here,” I said. “Third week of June.”
Kristen glanced at a wall calendar. “So you’re going downstate soon?”
“Not that I know of.” Her eyebrows went rose dramatically, so I dredged up a quick explanation. “With the book fair and moving to the houseboat and . . . and everything, I’m just really busy. The bookmobile needs a good spring cleaning and . . . and . . .”
“And you don’t get along with Tucker’s parents,” Kristen said, making it a statement of fact.
I sighed. “I want to like them. I try to like them. But every time I go down there, I never know what to say.”
Dinners were the worst. Tucker and his parents would talk about people I didn’t know and places I’d never been and I’d sit there with a polite smile on my face with absolutely nothing to contribute. I kept myself entertained by picking cat hair off my clothes, setting them free one by one, and guessing where they’d land. Once, an Eddie hair had stuck to Tucker’s dad’s right sock and I’d laughed out loud, which had proven awkward since everyone else had been talking about the early demise of a neighbor.
“Talk about books,” Kristen advised. “That will keep you going for hours, if not days.”
But I was shaking my head. “The only bookshelves in the entire house are in the study, and those hold more knickknacks than books.”
Kristen dropped her jaw, opening her eyes wide. “They don’t read? Sacrilege! Have you warned them what might happen to their brains? Give them a librarian’s citation. That’ll shape them up.”
I smiled. Kristen was the best friend a person could have, a tremendously hard worker, a brilliant chef, an outstanding employer, and had a tremendous sense of humor, but she was not a reader. “They have a lot of cookbooks in the kitchen.”
“Ha!” She thumped the table with her fist. “Just as I suspected. You are a book snob. You don’t think cookbooks are real books, do you? No, don’t deny it. I’ve known you too long. I bet you’ve never even read a cookbook from cover to cover, so how can you pass judgment?”
She ranted on, and the tight feeling in my stomach eventually faded. Which was, no doubt, what she’d intended because she had known me for a long time.
And because she’d known me so long and so well, she eventually stopped talking and gave me a long look. “So, what’s wrong? No denials, I can see you’re sad about something. Save us both some time and tell me now.”
I tried to smile, but it wasn’t a big one and it didn’t last. After a moment, I said, “Remember the guy on the bookmobile who gave me the maple syrup?”
“Sure.” She nodded.
“He’d dead.” I sighed. “An accident, they say. A tree fell on him and . . . and . . .”
“Oh, honey.” My best friend stepped close and wrapped her arms around me. “You go ahead and cry. I’ll hold you, and you cry.”
So I did.
Chapter 3
The next bookmobile day was clear and bright and even though there wasn’t a hint of green growth anywhere, the sunshine was enough to make me believe that someday summer would indeed come.
“Just think, Eddie,” I said. “Soon we’ll be on the front deck of the houseboat on the chaises, me reading the newspaper while you try to sleep on top of it.” I did, on occasion, read parts of the paper out loud to my cat, but I’d drifted away from the habit while living with Aunt Frances. Some things are best kept private.
At this point on the bookmobile route, it was just Eddie and me. There were a number of housebound stops to make, and the library board had agreed that the inviolate rule to always have two people on the bookmobile didn’t apply to the housebounds, as long as I kept a fully charged cell phone on my person.
“One of these days,” I said to Eddie, “someone should revise the library’s bookmobile policies.” The set I’d drawn up a year ago, before the maiden voyage, had been a good start, but things had evolved, as things tended to do, and the policy should be updated to reflect that.
Of course, doing so would take time, and that was a commodity in short supply.
“How about you update the policy for me?” I asked Eddie as I made a right turn onto a gravel road. “You know how we do things. All you’d have to do is read over the existing document and make a few changes. I can help with the spelling.”
Eddie’s “Mrr” was half swallowed by one of his slurpy yawns.
“Nice,” I said. “Hope you wiped your chin.” I braked and made another right turn, this time into an empty barnyard large enough to accommodate tractors hauling pieces of large and expensive equipment.
“Don’t get all excited,” I said to the sleepy Eddie. “It’s the neighbor who’s getting the books. His driveway, because of its length and narrow width, is not what you might call bookmobile friendly and this farmer was kind enough to let us park here.”
We came to a complete stop and I reached for Adam Deering’s bag of books. Though I’d never met Adam, I’d met his wife, Irene, soon after the pair moved up North. The first time she’d walked into the library, I’d been at the reference desk and had smiled at her expression of happy awe.
I understood her look, because the Chilson District Library was flat-out gorgeous. After the town’s middle school had moved into a brand-new building, the old one was converted into a stunning facility of wood-paneled walls, Craftsman-style light fixtures, mosaic-tiled bathrooms, spacious community rooms, and so many books that I sometimes felt light-headed when I looked at them all.
Irene’s rapt face had been the start of an acquaintanceship that held the strong possibility of turning into friendship, given the right circumstances, so when she’d called and asked if the bookmobile could drop off some books to her husband, who was recovering from heart surgery, I’d been happy to help out.
I’d wondered, of course, about a woman who couldn’t be much older than forty having a husband who’d had heart surgery, and was curious about meeting Adam. “They say that curiosity killed the cat,” I said, unlatching Eddie’s cat carrier, “so don’t get carried away with your freedom, okay?”
He snuggled more deeply into the pink blanket that one of Aunt Frances’s boarders had made him last summer, and purred.