15. Kylie
Kylie
Eight days out from Books and Boots, I am running a fundraiser, a library, and a broken heart on four hours of sleep and pure spite, and I’ve decided spite is the most reliable of the three.
I don’t think about him. I’ve made not thinking about him a full-time position with excellent benefits.
I think about vendor deposits and volunteer schedules and whether the stage-rental company means to honor its quote, and every time a Perry-shaped thought tries to file itself, I slam the drawer so hard it rattles the whole cabinet.
I’ve got a spreadsheet with forty-one volunteer slots and eleven of them filled.
A stage company that won’t return my calls.
A caterer who will. A board chairman who keeps dropping the word inevitable into his emails like he’s doing me a kindness.
I’ve been eating standing up and sleeping at the desk and running on Novaleen’s coffee and the one mean little engine that still turns over clean: I am not losing my mother’s life’s work on my watch.
It mostly works. It works right up until Thursday afternoon, when the front door groans and I look up, and he’s standing in it.
He’s got a box from Novaleen’s in one hand and his crutch in the other and about a week of trouble on his face, and my traitor heart lifts for exactly one second before I wrestle it back down.
“We’re closed,” I say. We are not closed.
“I know.”
“Then you know to leave.”
He doesn’t leave. He sets the box on the far edge of the desk, out of my reach, the same as I did to him with those exact rolls the first morning in his mother’s kitchen. I hate that he remembers.
“I’m not here to ask you for anything,” he says.
“I don’t have the right, and I know it. I came to tell you two things, and then I’ll go if you want me gone.
” He waits. I don’t tell him to go, which I’ll be examining later, alone, with the lights off.
“First. I turned down Dallas. Called Dale from the bench outside Novaleen’s and told him no.
There’s no comeback. I’m staying in Langston. ”
I keep my face at the desk. I’ve had a lifetime of practice. But something drops through me, hope or dread, and I can’t tell the two apart anymore where he’s concerned.
“That’s your business,” I say. “Not mine. You made sure of that.”
He takes it. He doesn’t argue, doesn’t reach for the grin, doesn’t do one single thing I braced myself for. He just nods, once, like a man accepting a bill he ran up himself.
“The second thing.” He doesn’t flinch off it. “You’re going to win this fight. Not on account of me. On account of you spending your whole life earning this town, and it’s about to pay you back.
But you’re doing it alone, eight days out, running on fumes.
I’ve got exactly one thing I’m good for.
So I’m going to point it at your library whether or not you can stand the sight of me.
” He finally lifts his eyes. “You don’t have to forgive me, Kylie.
You probably shouldn’t. But you’re going to let me help you save this place, because it’s bigger than you and me and one bad night, and you already know it. ”
“Three weeks,” I say. “You had three weeks and a hundred chances to say one true word to me, and you let a knitting circle do it for you. And now you want to ride in and fix my library and call it love.”
“No.” He doesn’t look away. “I want to ride in and fix your library and call it the least I owe you. Love’s a separate conversation. I haven’t earned it, and I’m not going to insult you by trying to have it today.”
I want to throw the cinnamon rolls at his head. I want to tell him to take his family name and his easy charm and his three-weeks-too-late grand gesture and go.
But I’ve got eight days and half a stage and a board already counting this building as sold, and I am not going to let my pride cost this town its library. My mother raised me smarter than that.
It’s the worst sort of trap, the one where the right thing and the thing that guts you are the same exact move.
I need him. Not him. His name, his phone, his family, his knack for making a county show up.
And so I have to stand here in my mother’s library and invite the man who broke my heart to stay in it.
“The library,” I say. “Not you and me. There is no you and me. You help because it’s right, you keep your distance, and when it’s done you go be a Sterling somewhere I don’t have to look at you.”
“Deal,” he says, quiet. I can see what it costs him. I don’t let myself care.
He picks up his crutch. At the door he stops, not turning around. “I know you didn’t ask,” he says. “But I’m proud of you. This whole thing. Your mama would be too.” And he’s gone before I can decide whether that’s the kindest or the cruelest thing a man ever left on my desk.
I think that’s the end of it. One man, one box of rolls, one miserable little truce.
I am badly wrong about the size of what I’ve just agreed to.
The Sterlings arrive the next morning like weather.
By eight a.m. there are three Jubilee Hill trucks parked around the square and a woman I have never met in pink tasseled boots is reorganizing my entire campaign.
“You’re Kylie.” She sticks out a hand with a manicure fresh from a city salon and a grip like a longshoreman. “Sasha Brooks. Herc’s. I do marketing for a living, and honey, no offense, but your flyers look like a ransom note. We’re fixing all of it. Where’s your email list?”
“I don’t have an email list.”
She looks at me like I’ve announced I don’t believe in Tuesdays. “We’re building one by noon.”
Herc runs the stage build like a battlefield, clipboard in hand and hardly a word out of him, and the rental crew that’s been ducking my calls for a week suddenly discovers it can deliver a day early after all.
Axe hauls tables and lumber one good arm at a time and insults his brothers for sport, and half the single women in Langston develop an urgent need to volunteer near him.
Sienna turns up with fabric swatches and a whole vision, and by afternoon the sad courthouse lot is becoming something out of a magazine, string lights and hay bales and a banner that no longer looks like a ransom note.
And Wade, the quiet cousin, I find flat on his back under the ancient window unit that has cooled this library badly for thirty years, doing something to its guts with a wrench nobody handed him.
When he slides out he doesn’t say he fixed it.
He nods once at the vent, where cold air is pouring out actually cold for the first time in my living memory, and goes back to whatever he was already doing.
Vivian comes at noon with two coolers, since a Sterling operation runs on Vivian’s cooking, and she lays a whole spread across the reading table and feeds every volunteer in the building and has all their names memorized inside an hour.
When she reaches me she takes my face in both hands, the same as she did the morning I carried the cinnamon rolls out to Jubilee Hill a hundred years ago.
“Whatever happens with my fool son,” she says, low, only for me, “you are always welcome at my table. You hear me? Always.” Then she puts a plate in my hands and orders me to eat, and I do, because you eat when Vivian Sterling tells you to.
By the second day it isn’t only Sterlings.
The knitting circle has commandeered the bake-sale tent.
Deputy Gil appoints himself a parking committee of one.
Anson’s flatbed makes eleven trips. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, the thing stops feeling like the Sterlings rescuing my sad little fundraiser and starts feeling like the whole county deciding, all at once and out loud, that they are not going to lose this place.
Which, it turns out, is the only thing I ever actually needed. Not a hero. A crowd.
I stand in the middle of it all, in my mother’s library, watching a family I’m no part of turn my impossible eight days into a thing that might genuinely work, and I have to step back into the stacks a minute so nobody catches my face.
Perry keeps his word. He works the phones from a chair in the far corner, that easy drawl reeling in favors from every rodeo contact and radio station and beer distributor in three states, and he does not come near me once.
Every time I glance up he’s already looking away.
He brought the whole storm and then went and stood on the far side of the room in it, handing me every inch of distance I asked for, and somehow that is worse than if he’d crowded me against a shelf.
That evening Sasha finds me in the stacks, pretending to shelve.
“He told us not to expect a thing from you,” she says, leaning on the cart.
“Said he burned it down himself and he’s only here to hand you the win.
No strings.” She studies me a moment. “For what it’s worth, and I know it’s worth about nothing right now, I have watched a Sterling man decide he’s done running.
It is not a small thing. They don’t do it twice. ”
She looks around the stacks, and something in her sharp face goes soft.
“I used to hide in here,” she says. “Whole summers of it. Only place in this county a weird city kid could disappear and nobody made her feel wrong about it.” She lays a hand flat on a shelf.
“You’re not just saving a building, you know.
You’re saving every kid who ever needed one room that was theirs.
” Then she straightens, brisk again, city again.
“So we’re going to save it. And whatever you decide to do about my idiot near-brother-in-law is entirely your own business. ”
I don’t tell her the truth, which is that I stopped being able to hate him somewhere this afternoon, watching him hand me the win from clear across the room and never once turn around to ask for a thing back.
I go back to shelving books that don’t need shelving, in a library that is suddenly, impossibly, going to have a fighting chance. And I let myself feel the one thing I’ve refused to feel all week. A little hope, small and stubborn and terrifying.
Not for him. Not yet.
For the library. Just the library.