He pulled himself into a tight ball, rolled over, and said absolutely nothing.
I laughed and kissed the top of his head. “Have a good day, my friend. I’ll see you tonight, okay?”
“Mrr.”
• • •
After a quick breakfast of cold cereal and orange juice—which hit my self-imposed limit of morning dishes to wash at three, because spoons counted as dishes to me—I shouldered my backpack and let myself out into the morning.
The town of Chilson rose from the shoreline of Janay Lake on a shallow slope at first, then up steeper and steeper. The houses perched on the top of the hill had amazing views and property tax bills to match.
Uncle Chip’s, the marina where I moored my boat at a cut rate in exchange for updating their budget projections, was on the east side of town, the side where normal people with normal jobs could still find affordable homes to buy.
The west side was massive houses and mansionlike lakefront cottages, a mix of new money and old money left over from the years that steamers running up from Chicago stopped at the natural harbor created by the entrance of Janay Lake into Lake Michigan.
On bookmobile days, I always drove the mile from the marina to the library, since lugging Eddie and our lunches that far would have been too hard on both me and my friendly feline. The bookmobile’s maiden voyage had included a stowaway Eddie, who’d quickly become an integral part of the operations. If I didn’t bring him along on every trip, there would be innumerable unhappy patrons, something that was best to avoid. On library days, however, unless the weather was horrific, I walked. This hadn’t been a running morning for the Ash and Minnie team, so the walk to work and back would likely be my only exercise.
The bizarre warmness of the last few days was still holding and I barely needed the nylon shell jacket I’d tossed on over my library clothes of slacks, dressy T-shirt, and loose blazer. This time of year the sun came up just before eight o’clock, and if I timed things right, I’d see the sun rise above the horizon as I entered the library.
As I walked briskly off the dock and headed up the sidewalk and toward downtown, I glanced at the house closest to the marina. When I’d moved to Chilson, it had been a ramshackle mess, a hundred-year-old family cottage long since chopped up into apartments. For decades it had been given about as much tender loving care as you’d expect from an absentee owner who seemed to care primarily about getting the rents on time.
Rafe Niswander, a friend of mine, had bought the place about four years ago. The whys of that purchase still had the coffee-drinking geezers at the local diner scratching their heads every morning, but there was no denying that Rafe was doing a fantastic job of renovation.
From top to bottom and stem to stern he’d redesigned, rewired, and replumbed. He’d fabricated crown molding to match the original, haunted building salvage stores, and researched period colors. And then he’d stare at whatever he’d done, declare it unworthy, and rip half of it out.
He’d managed to wangle an occupancy permit out of the county’s building official, but no sane person would want to live in a house that had milk crates for kitchen cabinets and a persistent drywall dust issue. None of this, however, seemed to bother Rafe. If a casual observer asked how he could live in a permanent construction zone, he would shrug, start whistling the Seven Dwarfs’ “Heigh-Ho” song, and get back to work.
When the project was done, it would be a showpiece, but the diner geezers were laying long odds on any completion date within the next five years.
Yesterday I’d heard the buzz of a floor sander when I’d come home and had stopped by to tell Rafe what had happened on the bookmobile and to remind him to wear his dust mask, a reminder I was sure he’d ignored. This morning he must have left early for his job as principal of the middle school, because the house was dark. I shied away from imagining the dust he’d created the night before and headed up the hill.
Ahead of me lay a downtown that edged into quaintness but thankfully stayed on the side of reality. The home-grown blend of old and new, brick and wood, stylish and traditional, was part of the charm of Chilson and I thought, as I almost always did while walking to work, that I was the luckiest person alive.
I unlocked the library’s side door just as the sun shot over the horizon, and let myself in.
“Minnie? Is that you?”
Of course, no life was perfect.
Strong-mindedly, I resisted the urge to turn and flee and, instead, pasted a smile on my face. “Good morning, Jennifer,” I said, advancing into the lobby. “How are you on this gorgeous morning?”
The new library director, standing tall behind the main counter, didn’t return my smile. “Well enough, I suppose.”
My former boss, Stephen Rangel, had given me a lot of latitude to do my job, for which I was still grateful. He’d also been humorless and mired in the necessity to follow rules, however arbitrary they might be. Plus, he hadn’t been a fan of the bookmobile and had provided only a grudging support throughout the early stages. (“Minerva, are you certain you’re up to this?” “Minerva, the library board only approved this project because you’d found a generous donor. How, exactly, do you plan to fund the operations?” And so on.)
We’d all expected Stephen to stay in Chilson until his retirement and he’d even confided he’d been grooming me to be his replacement. That shock had barely faded when he’d stunned everyone by announcing that he’d accepted a library director position in another state.
My coworkers had pleaded with me to apply. I’d seriously considered it, but in the end decided to pass on the opportunity. If I moved up to director, there was no way I’d have time to drive the bookmobile and I wasn’t ready to give that up.
On the other hand, if I was now the library director, I wouldn’t be facing the sleek and citified Jennifer Walker, who was sending waves of disapproval at me for no reason that I was aware of. Back before she’d started, I’d patted myself on the back for having been responsible for the library becoming the temporary home of a very rare and valuable book, thinking that the new director would be impressed at my connections and abilities. If she had, the feeling hadn’t lasted.
“What can I do for you?” I slipped my backpack off my shoulder. Into the returns bin went the books I’d finished reading, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, Let’s Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson, and I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, a comfort book published in 1948 that I’d reread for the umpteenth time.
“I asked you to reduce the bookmobile’s budget,” Jennifer said. “I expected a draft this week, yet here it is Friday and I haven’t seen anything from you.”
After Stephen’s departure, the staff had breathed a collective sigh of relief. No more didactic pronouncements, no more unfunded mandates, no more unrealistic expectations. Though I’d respected Stephen, I’d never managed to like him, and I’d looked forward to a deeper relationship with the new director.
This hadn’t happened yet.
The last of my books thunked into the return slot. Jennifer had, in fact, asked me to reduce the bookmobile’s budget. She’d also asked for it to be done by the middle of October, and this morning my phone said it was September. Just barely, but still.
Why she wanted the bookmobile’s budget reduced was a question she hadn’t yet answered. Thanks to a generous donation last winter, we had over two years of operations money in addition to a healthy budget for vehicle maintenance. There was also a small, but growing, fund for the future purchase of a replacement bookmobile.
To my way of thinking, clearly the sensible way, there was absolutely no reason to touch the bookmobile’s budget. But Jennifer had been hired by a beaming library board and it was my job to do as she asked.