Chapter Four

NAN’S WORKDAY STARTED with Mona bursting into tears first thing in the morning and running into Nan’s office to sob, chest heaving while blowing her nose and gasping as if she’d been attacked. Nan fought the impulse to lock Mona in the office and run away.

“What is it?” Nan asked. She had an outsized fear of cancer and hoped it wasn’t that. She knew it wasn’t true that cancer was contagious, but it kept getting closer and closer to her. The skull-making demon disease killed people before they died, leaving them walking around hairless, burned skeletons until it was a relief for everyone when they finally died. Both of her parents had died young of cancer, within a year of each other, when Nan was still a teenager. Even thinking the word made that spot in her right armpit twinge. Is that where it will start in me?

“I’m so ashamed. This never happened in my family before. I can’t bring myself to say the words out loud,” Mona said.

Then don’t. I don’t really care.

“You don’t have to talk. Take a day off. You don’t have to work when you’re so upset,” Nan said.

“I can’t go home. He’s there. My son.”

“Your son who just got married?” Nan had overheard way too much about that wedding. She actually knew the color of the bridesmaids’ dresses (periwinkle), the name of the maid of honor (Tabitha Teti), and how many people ordered the vegetarian option that the caterer insisted was necessary for the sit-down dinner (sixteen, which shocked Mona as she had no idea she even knew one vegetarian, let alone sixteen).

“Yes, he came back home,” Mona sobbed.

“To visit?”

“No, he’s getting a d… He’s getting a d…”

Dog? He’s getting a dog? What’s so terrible about that?

“They dated all through high school. And college. Then she went to pharmacy school. Then they got married. Now he says they’re getting a d…” Mona said.

“Divorce? They’re getting a divorce?” Nan asked. What a ridiculous guessing game this conversation was.

“I can’t say the word. It’s our first one in the family. We don’t get di-i-i-vo-o-r-ced,” Mona choked out.

Nan wondered if she’d been caught in a time warp, and she was now back in the 1950s. Was this town ringed by the Pine Barrens an enchanted village of the past?

“I’m sorry to hear that, Mona.”

I’m sorry you need to spill your guts right when I’m trying to meet a 10:00 a.m. deadline to finalize my book order for the month.

“He said marriage wasn’t what he thought it would be. That’s all he’ll say. What could that possibly mean?”

That marriage wasn’t what he thought it would be, seems clear enough to me.

Mona laid her head down on Nan’s desk. Her bouffant lacquered hair did not budge. What would it be like to have hair so hard that it held its shape in an emotional crisis?

Once again, Nan was shocked at what they hadn’t taught her in library school. She didn’t mean to be cold. She realized people’s personal lives affected their work lives, but she really really really really did not want to hear any more about Mona’s son’s marriage on the rocks.

She was a tiny bit curious though. Had the hapless couple been sleeping with each other since high school? Maybe the glow had worn off through their long engagement. Or had they held off on full intercourse till marriage and that was what caused the big disappointment when they finally did it? Straight people were so funny sometimes. Such high expectations for what could take time, practice, and alcohol to get right.

“I can’t show my face in town. No one must know. The priest—what will the priest say? I feel like such a failure. My husband and I have been married for thirty-four years. What kind of example have we shown my son?” Mona picked her head up to wail.

“What else does your son say?”

“He says they both agree. It’s a mutual breakup. She’s not upset; he’s not upset. Did you ever hear of such a thing?”

“Well, yes. It’s not so unusual.”

Trust me. I’m the queen of breakups. I’ve heard it all.

“I guess it’s nobody’s business why they broke up, right? That’s their business, even if they are family,” Nan added.

“I have to walk around this town and hear the whispers. I have to face the gossip. The big wedding we threw them, three priests married them, everyone in town came to the reception. So many people danced at their wedding. All those presents still in their boxes. They didn’t even write their thank-you notes yet. I feel so terrible.”

“Is it your fault, Mona?” Nan put her hand on Mona’s arm. She felt silly doing that but couldn’t think of any other gesture to make except shaking the woman, and that wouldn’t do. “Is it really your fault?”

Mona stared at her for a long time. “You’re not from here. You have no idea what my life is like,” she said finally. She stood up. “I’m going home. Don’t tell anyone. I mean anyone.”

The day went from bad to worse quickly. The New York Times had failed to arrive on their doorstep, causing the old men who gathered by the door at the 9:00 a.m. opening time to lose their minds. They stood by the front desk, refusing to take their usual seats in the reading room as if standing there breathing on Nan and Dunkan would make the newspaper appear.

Dulcie Mainwaring from Barbara Pym’s No Fond Return of Love popped into Nan’s mind. How Dulcie always found public libraries a bit upsetting because of all the odd characters one found there. There was an apt Barbara Pym observation for almost any situation in life, Nan found. That was precisely why she was Nan’s all-time favorite British novelist. Nan believed she deserved bonus reader points because so many people didn’t know her work. BP was her special little secret, the one author she could whip out whenever people asked who her favorite writer was.

“Where is it, when is it coming, did someone steal it?” the men asked Nan.

I don’t know, and I can’t make it materialize out of thin air, she wanted to say.

Instead, she asked Dunkan to take petty cash and go buy a copy from the drugstore. They weren’t supposed to do that. They were supposed to get the delivery service to bring another one and report a missing issue. But when they did that, the paper didn’t get there until the midafternoon or sometimes even the next day. Nan was afraid the old men would have a group seizure or heart attack right in the library if they had to wait that long. She’d never been around old people much until she got this job, never realized how welded they were to their daily routines.

Nan watched as Dunkan lumbered down the street. He was the most peculiar walker she’d ever seen, his body rocking side to side like a giant stuffed animal lurching along. She couldn’t imagine how long it would take him to get anywhere that way. He had to catch his breath after every few steps. The wait for his return seemed endless. When he finally got back with the newspaper, he placed it on the front counter and stepped back.

The old men gathered around it, grabbing at the sections they wanted. It was a feeding frenzy, and they were the devouring sharks. Nan knew then she should have told Dunkan to buy several copies. She had to put her body in the middle of the fray, separate the sections on the front counter, insist “One at a time please,” and stare down the men until they seemed a little bit ashamed of themselves, meekly taking a section and sitting down.

“I hate the health section. I don’t want this crap,” one of them muttered.

“I got education. Who the hell wants that?” another one said, slapping the paper with his palm.

It took Nan an hour to settle the men down, standing over them, glowering to let them know she wasn’t going to put up with any more grabbiness or nasty remarks. Dunkan wouldn’t do it. He was afraid of them, and it showed.

They did have weapons, Nan realized. Those canes were no joke. She wouldn’t put it past them to have knives in those canes that could pop out when they needed extra power. And they wouldn’t get in trouble for wielding those weapons. All they had to say was it was a mistake, the cane slipped, they didn’t mean it. Those old guys could get away with murder.

Then it was time for preschool story time. Nan was learning that three-to-five-year-olds were either charming delights or little jerks. There was no in-between. That day, they were little jerks. They were apparently bored by the story of small animals gathering underneath a mushroom that kept growing as the rain came down. Nan actually loved the story, but no matter how much her voice rose or how animated her gestures were, the children didn’t care. They wouldn’t take their eyes off the ringleader—that Angelica who cockily took off her socks and shoes, and then everyone took off their socks and shoes, then Angelica threw herself down flat on her back and rolled around like a drunken yogi, and they all rolled around like drunken yogis.

Nan was exhausted by the time story time was over. She had a blinding headache between her eyebrows, probably an aneurysm getting ready to explode in there. She limply waved goodbye to the children and their caregivers and sagged in the rocking chair.

The bad day ended worse than she could ever have imagined when she went downstairs to the Children’s Room and smelled a horrible odor near the new picture book shelves, where the most beautiful books with gorgeous shiny illustrations were. These were the ones newly arrived and still fresh before grubby preschoolers with their dirty little fingers smeared the pages and tore them in their haste to swallow the book whole and before snot and vomit landed inside. Someone or several someones, judging by the volume of the liquid, had peed all over the new picture books, splashing urine all over the books, the shelves, and the carpet.

Nan gasped. Who would do such a thing? Was it the obscenity-screaming thugs again? Why? What had she ever done to deserve this? And most importantly of all, why did the library not budget for a full-time custodian? Because she couldn’t ask the assistants to clean this up. That was not an option. The one principle she ran her work life on—formed from working shitty part-time jobs with awful bosses before and during graduate school—was never ask anyone to do anything you wouldn’t do yourself.

So she breathed through her mouth as she found a broom, garbage bag, and rubber gloves, as she swept the books clumsily into the trash, as she wrote down their titles so she could replace them, as she sopped up the urine with paper towels, as she threw up into the wastebasket.

When Dunkan clomped down the stairs to see what was taking her so long, she teared up as she waved him away, then she let a few tears out as he found more rubber gloves and helped her. She finally went upstairs, leaving the bag downstairs as evidence. This was public property damage; she would have to document the vandalism with another police report.

She held her tears firmly inside when the officers came, different ones this time. They knocked on the locked library door as gingerly as if they were making a visit to tell a family that their loved one had died in a car accident or by suicide down by the town lake.

No, there were no cameras in the Children’s Room. She answered their questions mournfully, knowing that there was nothing they could do. No one had seen anyone go downstairs except the usual after-school crowds and then parents with their kids after dinner loading up on bedtime stories and books to help with homework. She and Dunkan and their student worker Amo Gonzalez—who, although he never took his earbuds out and seemed to pay no attention to anything but the music in his ears, had a perfect shelving record, had never missed a Dewey decimal point carried out to its furthest point—had not seen a thing as they came and went from the Children’s Room. No one had reported anything. The vandals must have seized a moment at the end, when the room was briefly empty, when the staff was busy elsewhere, and then they’d emptied their bladders on the most pristine new books.

“All we can say is it must have been a boy or boys,” the first officer whispered as if told one must always be quiet in a library even when investigating a crime after hours. “Because no way could a girl have climbed up there and let go. The angle’s all wrong.”

Nan pictured a girl standing on top of the bookshelf and pulling down her pants, squatting and peeing like a camper in the woods. She started to laugh then, heard the hysteria in her voice, that awful word still used against women, but she was hysterical; she couldn’t help it, couldn’t stop laughing.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. It’s been a long crazy day,” she finally choked out.

The officers left shaking their heads, and the day was finally over.