Chapter Five #3
Mrs. Schulte, who had followed them in with a notebook of her own, nodded firmly. “One shelf can be admired by donors. Donors who admire a shelf may be moved to fund another.”
“Especially if there are cookies nearby,” Mrs. Beck added from the doorway.
Mrs. Hanford looked around the hall. “There must be rules.”
“There will be,” Cornelia said.
“Written rules.”
“Delly will insist on it,” Lottie said.
Mrs. Schulte brightened. “Your sister is very useful.”
There was that word again.
Useful.
Lottie looked down at Peterson’s list.
Perhaps she had been careless with the word because she had heard it all her life as praise.
Delly had made herself useful when their parents died.
Lottie had made herself useful to Mrs. Whitmore.
Women without money, position, or protection learned early usefulness kept bread on tables and roofs overhead.
Mr. Peterson, however, had flinched from it as though usefulness had been a chain, not a compliment.
No person ought to be only useful.
She had said that to him.
Now the words sat beside the shelving list and asked whether she believed them for herself.
By noon, the meeting hall had been swept, the starter shelf planned, and three arguments had been tabled for later.
Lottie had made a list of categories: Scripture, poetry, instruction, household, history, nature, and stories.
Cornelia approved of most of them, though she suggested children’s books deserved their own place within easy reach.
Lottie wrote children in the margin.
Then, after a pause, she added: Build for leaning.
Cornelia saw it and smiled.
The afternoon stretched warm and golden.
The Bees left to torment the carpenter about timing.
Cornelia returned to the schoolhouse. Margot came by once with lemonade and news one of the brides had been asked to walk with a man who owned three pigs and mentioned them twice before asking whether she liked pork.
Lottie laughed until her side hurt.
Then, when the room emptied and the laughter faded, the loneliness returned.
Delly was not there to correct the categories. Not there to warn against overextending borrowing privileges. Not there to suggest romance shelves would cause more harm than whiskey if left unsupervised.
Lottie sat alone at the table, surrounded by crates not yet unpacked, and finally let herself feel it.
She had wanted a life outside their Chicago room. She had prayed for it. Dreamed of it. Crossed a continent for it. Now it was here, wide and bright and full of possibility.
Delly was not across the room. She was across town, married, beginning a life Lottie had not expected her to choose.
It was good.
It still hurt.
Lottie opened the botany book, meaning only to put Peterson’s list back inside, but the pages fell open to a pressed fern Mrs. Whitmore had given her the week before she left Chicago. The old widow had tucked it into the book with trembling fingers.
“For your western library,” she had said. “Every proper library requires at least one thing that once grew wild.”
Lottie touched the fragile green shape.
She wondered what Mr. Peterson would think of it.
Then she wondered whether he would come that evening.
Evenings are not always mine.
She believed that. A logging camp did not care for courtship, supper hours, or a young woman’s hope. Men were hurt. Work ran late. Weather turned. Mr. Peterson owed his time to many things which had claimed him long before she arrived.
Still, when the thud of a boot sounded outside the meeting hall near dusk, Lottie looked up so quickly her neck ached.
It was only Mr. Prentiss from the mercantile, carrying a parcel of lamp wicks Mrs. Schulte had ordered and several opinions about lending books to men who might forget to return them.
Lottie thanked him, listened politely, and watched the road through the window until he left.
Mr. Peterson did not come.
The disappointment was smaller than heartbreak and larger than sense.
She closed the botany book. Then she folded Peterson’s list once more and slipped it between the pages beside Mrs. Whitmore’s fern.
A pressed thing from the life she had left.
A careful list from the life she had entered.
Both tucked into the same book.
That felt like a kind of promise, though she did not yet know from whom.
By the time Lottie returned to the hotel, lamps glowed in the parlor windows, and the town had settled into evening. She paused on the boardwalk and looked toward the dark line of the camp road.
No tall figure waited there.
No one called her name.
She had no letter to read tonight except for the old ones. No sister in the other side of the bed. No certainty from the man she had come to marry.
What she did have was one bundle of brackets, a shelving list, and an almost-yes.
It was not much.
Lottie had always believed a beginning did not need to be large to be real.
She climbed the stairs to her room, set the botany book on the little table, and smoothed her hand over the cover.
Tomorrow, the library would begin.
Perhaps Mr. Peterson would come.
Perhaps he would not.
Either way, Charlotte Bellamy had not crossed half a continent to stop reading at the first difficult page.