Chapter 5
Behind the fancy, red-bricked, new town library, there is a building that is now rendered the former Cranberry Public Library.
It’s nestled between woods made up of oaks and pines and waxy-leaf tulip trees, with the occasional wild cranberry bush tucked in, full of ripening fruit this time of year like an adornment of rubies and amethysts.
The building itself is ancient, the gray stained sidewalk leading up to the glass doors cracked, the doors themselves so heavy and swollen, they get stuck about a dozen times a day and I have to put a foot on the doorframe to get the momentum to swing one open.
After all that, I enter the main floor, where my boss, Anise, greets me.
She wears a violet pantsuit that looks stunning on her curvy figure and dark brown complexion.
She’s matched her lipstick to the suit and she gives me a wide smile, her eyes crinkling up like she’s genuinely happy to see me.
I know she’s forty-eight years old because we celebrated her birthday with cupcakes only a month ago, though she doesn’t look a day over thirty-six.
Anise is one of the few people in town who is consistently nice to me, but even then, I sometimes get scared that her kindness isn’t real.
“How you doing this evening, Sky?”
I’m thankful I cleaned up my makeup in the car, so I can more easily lie. “Great! Had some lasagna for dinner.”
Anise raises an eyebrow. “Nadia made lasagna and you didn’t bring me any? What the hell?”
“Don’t worry, don’t worry, there’s two whole pans. I left one with William, so I’ll bring you some of the other one tomorrow, okay?”
“You better.”
I make my way to the elevators, which are for sure as old as this whole building. They take an age to open, and when I step inside, they creak in a way that reminds me of what it must sound like inside a great blue whale experiencing extraordinary indigestion.
After incremental drops down to the basement, the doors open so reluctantly, I get the feeling they’re experiencing pain in their old age. After patting them a little bit as they groan getting the final inches widened, I tell them, “Great job,” and step into the basement.
Crooked cherrywood bookshelves are arranged in a bit of a labyrinth, the books within faded, with paper so brittle, I have to put on white gloves when handling them.
To my left and right, the walls are filled from top to bottom with even more books, and each of these has its own swinging library ladder, just like what Belle had in Beauty and the Beast. Those are what William acts like are going to kill me ever since I had to open my big mouth about them.
To be fair, they creak about as much as the elevators, and Anise did warn me to use them slowly, which I may or may not have neglected to do…
but still. I’ve fallen from much, much higher up and turned out… sort of okay.
There are little slits of windows along each wall, letting in wide, short rays of the glowing terra-cotta sunset.
Every time I step in here, I feel like I’ve entered into a just-unearthed dwelling that’s one thousand years old, and it’s filled with equally old relics and words and the smell of leather, paper, and cherrywood.
It’s dark. It’s dusty. And I fucking love it in here.
The carpet is faded blue-gray and leaves a lot to be desired, but I walk briskly across it to my desk.
I found this desk when I first started here, in a storage room on the second floor, covered in piles of unused fax paper.
I decided to ask for forgiveness rather than permission with regard to my claim to it.
I donated the paper to the children’s library, as scrap for children to draw on, and then I pushed the desk onto the elevator, not certain if it would break the surely already unraveling cables that hold it up.
So far no one has noticed or cared about the missing storage desk, so as far as I can surmise, it’s officially mine now.
My desk looks a bit messy to anyone else but me, were anyone around to actually see it besides me, that is.
But I know where everything is. My notes are categorized on Post-its in a shape on my desktop as labyrinthian as the shelves on this floor.
A book is opened to its center, where I’d left my work from last night, the pages as thin as rice paper, the words so faded, some spots are unfortunately illegible.
Technically, my job title is library technician, the same job I’d had briefly at St. Theresa’s.
I kind of pretend it’s a bit fancier in my head—and it certainly is fancier than what I was doing at St. Theresa’s, which was basically working as a glorified receptionist. So now I call myself a library historian, or a preserver of history.
Specifically, I was hired for the Cranberry Codex Restoration Project.
Basically, when the big move happened from this building to the new and shiny library out there, they left behind the oldest books, many of which were donations from local wealthy families.
This means that a good percentage of the books have local historical significance.
I spend my days slowly going through the hundreds, maybe thousands of books left behind.
And I have a checklist that assists me in discerning if the book has the kind of significance the city is hoping for.
If it does, I catalog the book in the library system and organize it on one of the few shelves I emptied my first week here.
Anise will then take a look and let me know if the book needs to be documented—scanned—or not, and I do that work as well.
Scanning old books is my least favorite part of my job, because that means I need to leave my sacred space—the dusty, dark, old basement—and go to the well-lit, floor-to-ceiling-windows-surrounded new library building up front. With people.
I hate people.
I didn’t start out hating people. Once upon a time, Sky Flores was the quirky, tall girl who the other girls in school would invite to get smoothies and French fries on the weekends.
My junior year, three boys had crushes on me, and so from them, I got to pick my first boyfriend ever.
His name was Ramón and he had the longest, curliest lashes I’d ever seen, and whenever we kissed, they would flutter like a storybook princess’s.
I had sex for the first time in the back of his old blue pickup truck when we were both sixteen.
“That was amazing,” he’d said. “Really?” I’d responded.
He didn’t get mad at my tone or anything like that.
He laughed and said we’d find out what I liked together.
Eight weeks later, I fell.
I recently saw Ramón at Piggly Wiggly. He had his toddler daughter sitting in the front of the cart, making baby noises at him.
He saw me watching them from the poultry section and immediately froze, those eyelashes going up and down over my frame, whatever for, I don’t know.
Could he not believe I was there? Was he remembering that summer and how close we’d been?
I would even say high school sweethearts.
The old gods know there’s been no one else, for me at least.
I can’t say, because he then pushed his cart past me and pretended like I was never there at all.
My sisters said he’d cried at the memorial they’d thrown for me, since everyone assumed I was dead and all.
So I don’t understand why he just acted like I stopped existing.
Even an “Oh, hi, Sky” would’ve been better than…
that. And it’s not like I expected to pick up where we’d left off.
I knew he was married. I knew he’d made that beautiful baby with his wife.
But we were friends once. Like, best friends, even.
That’s why I no longer like people. Falling didn’t just take away too many years from my life.
It also kind of ruined my life. Because Ramón pretending he didn’t know me is actually an example of the kindest thing strangers do to me whenever I leave my home or my workplace basement. The alternative is far worse.
For some reason, Adam’s face opens up in my brain, the image as clear as if I’d taken a photograph.
What was it William had said to him? Something like I know you’re going through a rough time right now…
What on earth could Adam’s rough time entail?
What could the golden child of Cranberry have had go wrong for him?
He could have any journalist job he wants, it seems, and any woman, too.
The whole town worships him. He’s tall, and beautiful, and his voice so gravelly and intense, it almost distracted me from the bizarre and dumb words coming out of his mouth this evening.
I close my eyes and decide to abandon the book I’m analyzing at the moment for the restoration project. I really need my sisters right now.
Group Chat: Hermanas de Flores
Me: What are y’all up to right now? Want to get lunch this weekend?
It only takes a few minutes for the typing bubbles to begin, and I smile and allow myself to relax just a little bit.
Teal: I need to finish up the wallet inventory this weekend!!! How about…let me check my planner…not next week, but the following Wednesday?
Me: um. Let me check my planner now…okay, Wednesday lunch. Two weeks from this Wednesday.
Teal: Oh, on Wednesday I can only do dinner. Does that work?
Sage: Tenn’s auntie is in town to help with Oak that week. So I will have a babysitter.
Me: I work on Wednesday night, right through dinner time. What about breakfast?
Sage: I’ll be sleeping in that week. I need it.
Teal: You’ll probably be sleeping all damn day. Be honest with yourself. That baby literally won’t sleep more than ten minutes at once. I timed it the last time I watched him.
Me: You got to watch Oak? When?
Sage: Oh, just when I needed a quick shower last week. I gotta run, chicas. Tenn’s about to be home and I am depositing the baby in his arms and heading straight to bed.