6. Kylie
Kylie
Perry Sterling has been in my library every day for a week, and I’ve gotten nothing done and somehow gotten everything done.
He can’t shelve. He can’t haul. He sits in the good chair by the window with his braced leg up on a footstool and works the phone like a bull he means to ride the full eight seconds.
In six days he’s talked the feed store into a donation, the radio station into a free spot, and Novaleen into catering the whole event at cost, and every last one of them hung up feeling like they’d done him the favor.
It’s infuriating. It’s also working. My petition jar isn’t a jar anymore. It’s a shoebox, and the box is getting heavy.
We’ve fallen into a rhythm, is the dangerous part.
I open at nine and he’s on the front step by five past, two coffees from Novaleen’s in one hand, mine fixed how I like it, though I never once told him how. I don’t ask how he knows. I’m afraid there’s an answer, and I’m more afraid there isn’t.
He doesn’t know I watch him work. He’s got one boot off, his braced leg stretched long, and he charms the station manager with his eyes half shut and his free hand drawing lazy circles in the air.
There’s a muscle in his forearm that moves when he laughs. I’ve caught myself, twice now, losing whole minutes to a forearm like a woman with no sense God gave her.
Once, he catches me at it. He doesn’t say a word. He lets the corner of his mouth tip up and holds my eyes a beat too long, and I look back down at my catalog like it’s the most fascinating document in the state of South Carolina.
“You missed a spot,” he says.
I’m back up on the step stool. I tape a SAVE OUR LIbrARY banner across the front window while he directs from the chair like a foreman who’s never lifted a thing heavier than a trophy.
“You could help,” I say, around a strip of tape.
“I am helping. I’m supervising. It’s a leadership role.”
“From a folding chair.”
“It’s a command center.”
I stretch for the far corner, the stool wobbles, and before I panic his hand closes on the back of my knee. It’s warm on my bare skin, higher under my sundress than necessary.
My heart stops beating.
“Easy,” he says. “I’ve got you.”
He does not have me. He has a braced leg and two cracked ribs and no business catching a falling person. But his hand stays, and my pulse gallops like one of his thoroughbreds racing right through me.
I step down off the stool too fast. His hand slides away. I miss it the second it’s gone, which makes me furious.
“Thanks,” I say, brisk. “Don’t do that again.”
“Catch you?”
“Touch the back of my knee like it’s yours to touch.”
He grins and his eyes darken.
“Sorry.”
But he’s not sorry and we both know it.
I feel foolish snapping at him just because I can’t keep my emotions in check.
“Sorry I snapped,” I tell him.
He goes back to his phone. I go back to the desk. We both pretend the last thirty seconds didn’t happen. I’ve gotten good at pretending. He’s better. He’s a professional.
“Question,” he says, not looking up. “This event of yours. It got a name yet?”
“It’s got a petition and a shoebox. Names come later.”
“Names come first. You want folks saying it before they even know what it is.” He taps the phone against his good knee. “Books and Boots.”
“No.”
“A reading rodeo.”
“Absolutely not.”
“The Great Langston Book Drive.”
“You’re joking.”
“There she is.” He grins down at the phone. “Knew you had opinions in there somewhere.”
“You’re gonna miss me when you’re healed and gone and there’s nobody left worth telling no.”
I don’t answer that.
Mrs. Ellery comes in to return a book she hasn’t read and spends ten minutes not looking for another one while she looks at him.
By closing, three women my mother’s age have found urgent library business. The Langston telegraph is warmed up and humming. By supper the whole county will know Ada’s girl has Perry Sterling in her front window.
He’s here because Kendrick asked him. I keep that fact front and center.
He’ll heal. He’ll leave. Leaving is the one thing Perry Sterling has always been dead reliable about.
Thursday nights belong to the knitting circle, and the knitting circle belongs to gossip.
We meet in the church annex, six to nine of us. I’m thirty years younger than the next youngest and I mostly listen.
Miss Ruthanne, Miss Cora, the Deekes twins who haven’t agreed on a single thing since Eisenhower, and Deborah, the pastor’s wife, who knits prayer shawls and hears everything said in this county whether she’s in the room for it or not.
Tonight they’ve got a subject, and the subject is me.
“Now, Kylie.” Miss Cora doesn’t look up from her needles. “A little bird tells me you’ve got yourself a helper down at the library.”
“I’ve got a lot of help. It’s a community effort.”
“A little bird says the help is tall,” says Miss Ruthanne.
“And walks with a crutch,” says one Deekes twin.
“And looks like that movie star, what’s his name? Michael B. Jordan?” says the other, and the whole circle cackles like a henhouse at dusk.
“He was in the window,” Miss Ruthanne says, delighted with herself. “A Sterling boy. Imagine that.”
“He’s Kendrick’s friend. He’s bored and benched and my brother volunteered him. It’s charity.” I keep my eyes on my scarf, which has been the same scarf since March. I’m a poor knitter and a worse liar.
Deborah, who is quiet, who hears everything, sets down her shawl.
“I remember you at twelve years old,” she says, gentle.
“Trailing those Sterling boys around the county fair with your whole heart up in your face. The youngest boy especially.” She smiles at me, soft.
“Some things a woman doesn’t outgrow. She just gets better at hiding them. ”
The needles stop clicking and clacking. Everyone looks at me, not unkindly.
She isn’t guessing. Deborah knows what she’s talking about. She loved the pastor for six years before he ever looked up from his hymnal and saw her.
She knows wanting a person who stands three feet off and a hundred miles gone.
“I was twelve,” I say. “I also wanted to marry a horse.”
“You did love that horse,” Miss Cora allows, and the moment ends.
I knit three bad rows and don’t hear another word of the gossip. Deborah’s right, is the trouble of it. Fourteen years I’ve spent getting better at hiding it. And in six days a man with a torn knee and a borrowed reason has undone most of the practice.
Kendrick calls Sunday night while I’m eating cereal for supper over the sink.
“How’s the campaign,” he says. “Perry pulling his weight?”
“Perry’s pulling strings. There’s a difference. He got Novaleen to cater at cost and the radio to run a spot for free.”
“Told you he’s good in a room.” Kendrick inhales. “He behaving himself?”
“He sits in a chair and makes phone calls, Kendrick. It’s not a cage fight.”
“I mean with you.” His voice shifts, goes older-brother serious.
“Look, Ky. I love him. Best friend I’ve got in this world.
But I’ve watched him leave a trail of nice girls from here to Cheyenne, and not one of them saw it coming, because he’s never cruel about it.
He just… goes. It’s what he does. So don’t… ” He stops.
“Don’t what.”
“Don’t be one of them. You’re worth ten of those girls, and you’d be the one he’d feel worst about, and that’s the one that ends up hurt.”
I could tell him. Right here over the sink, I could say it plain. Kendrick, it’s already too late. It was too late when I was twelve. But he’s a thousand miles off in a truck cab, and he loves us both, and there’s not one thing he could do with the truth except lie awake on it.
“Nothing’s happening,” I say. “He’s benched and bored and I’m using him for his phone contacts. He heals, he’s gone, I’ve got a library. That’s the whole story.”
“Okay.” He doesn’t believe me. He’s my brother. “Okay. Love you, Ky. Go save your library.”
We hang up.
I stand at the sink with the water running.
The back of my knee still remembers the warm press of his hand.