Chapter Six #3
Lottie watched the slow care of his writing. He formed each letter deliberately, pressing harder than necessary. When he finished, he set the pencil down and stepped aside.
Lottie moved close enough to see.
PETERSON.
Just that.
No Christian name. No C. No first name offered to the page or to her or to anyone in the room.
Only Peterson.
Delly’s gaze flicked from the ledger to Lottie.
Lottie touched the edge of the page with one finger, not the name itself. She understood more than she had yesterday and less than she wished. A man who would not write his whole name was not merely being difficult. He was keeping part of himself where no one could handle it roughly.
“All properly recorded,” she said.
Peterson glanced at her, wary.
She smiled. Not brightly. Not with the full force of hope he seemed to distrust. Gently, because gentleness was sometimes the only way to hold a thing without bruising it.
“I shall expect it back by next Tuesday, Mr. Peterson.”
He nodded once. “You’ll get it.”
“I believe you.”
The words left her before she weighed them. Lottie had the sudden, breathless sense she had handed him something larger than a book, and he knew it.
Then Luke from the camp put his head through the door. “Peterson. Boss says if you’re done courting the shelves, he needs the nails.”
A burst of laughter came from the men outside. Peterson’s face closed at once. There it was. The retreat. Fast as winter.
Lottie turned toward the door before he could answer.
“Mr. Peterson was not courting the shelves,” she said calmly. “He was repairing them. If shelves were courted so efficiently, I imagine more women would marry carpenters.”
Luke blinked.
Cornelia bent over the table with one hand pressed to her mouth.
Delly looked at Lottie as if she had discovered a new and alarming family trait.
The men outside laughed again, but this time the sound had changed. Less cruel. More surprised.
Peterson stared at Lottie. She had the terrible thought she might have embarrassed him further.
Then his mouth moved.
“Best mind yourself, Luke,” he said, still looking at Lottie. “Miss Bellamy has books enough to flatten a man.”
Luke grinned. “Yes, sir.”
Peterson tucked Tennyson carefully beneath his arm, picked up the nail box with his left hand, and walked toward the door.
At the threshold, he paused.
“Miss Bellamy.”
“Yes?”
He did not turn all the way back. “The shelf will hold.”
Lottie smiled. “I know.”
He looked over his shoulder then. “You know because I built it?”
“No,” she said. “I know because you cared whether it would.”
For a moment, the whole of him seemed caught there in the doorway. Then he looked down and left.
This time, he carried one of her books with him. The meeting hall remained quiet for three entire seconds, then Mrs. Schulte released a breath. “Well.”
Delly closed the ledger. “That was not nothing.”
Lottie kept her gaze on the open door. Peterson’s footsteps had already faded into the street, but the room felt changed by his having been there. The shelf stood against the wall, plain and sturdy. The first books waited in their places. Tennyson was gone.
Not lost.
Borrowed.
“No,” Lottie said softly. “It was not nothing.”
Delly came to stand beside her. For once, she did not warn, correct, or measure the moment out loud.
After a while, she said, “He did not write his first name.”
“I saw.”
“He keeps it close.”
“Yes.”
“That may be wise.”
Lottie looked at her sister. “Or lonely.”
Delly’s expression folded into concern before she could hide it.
“I am not trying to save him, Odelia,” Lottie said.
“I know you believe that.”
“No.” Lottie turned back to the shelf. The Bible, primer, botany book, Moonstone, Dickens, and Shakespeare stood together in the late afternoon light, a whole future balanced on fresh brackets and stubborn hope. “I am trying to know him.”
Delly was silent. Lottie was at least hoping for an argument. At last, her sister reached over and straightened Shakespeare by a quarter inch. “Then know him carefully.”
Lottie slipped her hand through Delly’s arm, the way she used to in Chicago when the street was icy and they had to share their balance.
“I can try.”
Delly looked toward the shelf Peterson had built. “Trying is not a plan.”
Across the room, Cornelia lifted the first lending book into place and smiled as if the Lord had answered a prayer she had nearly given up praying.
By dinnertime, three more books had been borrowed.
At closing, Mrs. Beck had promised cookies for anyone who came to “inspect the literary progress.” Mrs. Hanford began drafting a rule about clean hands before touching the precious pages.
Delly rewrote it in fewer words and with sterner consequences.
Lottie worked until her back ached and her fingers smudged with dust. Now and then, she looked at the empty place where Tennyson had been.
Not empty, she corrected herself. Open. There was a book out in Wild Rose Ridge now with Peterson’s name beside it in the ledger.
Only Peterson.
For now.
Lottie ran her thumb over the blank space after his surname and did not write what had not been given.
She could wait.
A library, after all, was built on faith that what left would one day return.