Chapter 1
Nora
I have a theory about libraries that I have never said out loud to anyone, because the people who would understand do not need to be told, and the people who would not understand will only laugh.
The theory is this: a library is a cathedral.
Not in the religious sense — although I will admit that the high south-facing windows of the Clover Ridge Public Library, when the late-afternoon sun comes through them at a slant, do something to the rows of book spines that I have not seen anywhere else outside of a place of worship.
I mean cathedral in the older sense. A place built deliberately to be quiet.
A place where people come to look for something they cannot find anywhere else.
A place where you are, for one set of hours in your loud and crowded life, permitted to be small without anyone asking you to be bigger.
I have been the head librarian of the Clover Ridge Public Library for two years and three months.
In that time I have replaced the carpet in the children's section, started a Tuesday-morning senior book club that has not missed a single meeting, painted a mural of a sleeping fox along the back wall of the reading nook, and persuaded the town council to fund a reading garden in the courtyard out back.
I planted the climbing roses myself. They are blooming this week, fat and white and pink along the trellis, and every time I walk past the back window I feel a small private flare of pride that I keep tucked inside me like a folded note.
This is my kingdom. It is not large. It is not loud. But it is mine.
It is a Thursday in late May. I am at the circulation desk re-shelving returns when the trouble walks in.
There are four of them, three boys and a girl, all of them somewhere between fourteen and sixteen, all of them too loud the second the front door swings shut behind them.
I know them by face if not by name — the two tall boys are brothers, the older one a sophomore at Clover Ridge High; the girl is the daughter of someone who comes in for romance paperbacks; the smaller boy with the chipped front tooth I do not know.
They are not here for books. They are here because it is raining outside and they have nowhere else to go, and the library, bless it, will always be warm and dry and free.
I set my stack of returns down on the cart. I take a small breath. I straighten my cardigan. I cross the floor to where they have draped themselves over the armchairs in the periodicals corner like a set of damp coats.
"Hi," I say, in my library voice — soft, low, friendly. "I just want to remind y'all that this is a quiet space. Inside voices, please."
The older brother smirks. "Sorry, Miss." He does not lower his voice.
He is performing for the girl. The girl is performing for him.
The smaller boy with the chipped tooth is the one to actually watch — he has that loose, hungry energy of a kid trying to prove he belongs.
He picks up a copy of National Geographic and tosses it across the table to the other brother like a Frisbee.
It hits a coffee cup somebody left from the morning.
The cup tips. Coffee, cold, but still — coffee — pools across the table and runs down onto the carpet I am personally responsible for.
I close my eyes for half a second.
I open them.
"Okay," I say. My voice is quiet but I have stopped smiling. "I am going to ask you to leave."
The girl giggles. The smaller boy says, "We didn't do nothing.
" The older brother stands up — he is taller than me by a head — and steps toward me with that ugly, dawning grin that boys learn at fourteen, the what are you gonna do about it grin.
I have seen this grin in three states and it is always the same grin and it always makes my throat close up in the same place.
I do not back up.
I am proud of myself, later, for this. I do not back up. I keep my voice steady. I say, "I am not asking. I am telling you. Leave my library, please. You can come back when you are ready to respect the space."
The older brother stares at me. The girl gets up. The smaller boy says something under his breath that I do not catch, and I am glad I do not catch it, because if I had I would have to do something about it, and I do not want to do something about it. I want them gone.
They go. Slowly. The older brother brushes my shoulder as he passes — not hard, but on purpose, a you didn't win gesture — and the smaller boy with the chipped tooth shoves the periodicals shelf as they walk out.
The whole tall metal shelf, full of bound magazines and oversized art books, rocks back on its base and slams into the wall behind it with a sound that makes my heart go briefly sideways.
The bell on the front door jangles. They are gone.
I stand alone in the periodicals corner with cold coffee on the carpet and my hands shaking and the bound copy of Smithsonian face-down on the floor like a fallen bird.
I bend down. I pick up the magazine. I smooth its cover. I put it back on the shelf.
Then I see it.
The periodicals shelf — a tall metal unit, eight feet high, bolted to the wall when the library was built in 1962 — is no longer flush against the plaster.
There is a wedge of daylight visible behind the top, where it has pulled forward maybe two inches from the wall.
The bolts at the top have torn loose. I can see the broken anchors.
The shelf is leaning. Just slightly. But leaning.
I take a step back.
Eight feet of metal, loaded with maybe three hundred pounds of books, slightly leaning toward the carpet of my library, which is where, in a normal afternoon, four children sit cross-legged for the homeschool reading hour.
I press my hand flat to my sternum and try to remember how to breathe normally.
I close the periodicals corner. I run yellow caution tape — actual yellow caution tape, which I keep in the supply closet because Mrs. Albright once asked me what kind of librarian keeps caution tape in the supply closet, and I told her the kind whose building was built before I was born — across the entry to the nook.
I put up a paper sign. I print it on the laser printer.
CLOSED FOR REPAIRS. I tape it to the caution tape with three pieces of clear tape because two pieces would look unbalanced.
Then I go to the phone.
Tom at Clover Ridge Hardware answers on the fourth ring. I can hear the bell over his front door jangling in the background.
"Tom, it's Nora at the library."
"Hey, sugar. What can I do you for."
"The periodicals shelf — the big one in the corner — it has come loose from the wall. The anchors are out. It is leaning. I need it fixed today, please, if at all possible."
I hear him exhale. I hear him flip a page. I hear him do the small, polite, regretful sucking sound men do when they are about to deliver bad news while pretending they wish they could deliver good.
"Hon. I'm two weeks out. We got a busted main on Sycamore took out three of my guys, and the rest of us are doing the new build over by the high school. I can come Saturday week, maybe. Not before."
"Tom."
"I know, hon."
"Tom, it is going to fall on somebody."
"Then rope it off."
"I have roped it off."
"Then it'll keep till Saturday week."
I close my eyes. I open them. I say, "Thank you, Tom," in my politest voice, because my mother taught me to thank people for bad news, and I hang up the receiver too hard. The little bell on the desk dings on its own from the vibration. I apologize to it, out loud, which is something I do.
I stand at the desk. I look at the leaning shelf. I look at the children's section, fifteen feet away. I look at the schedule on the corkboard behind me — homeschool reading hour, four p.m. tomorrow.
I have, at the most, twenty-four hours to fix a shelf that the only person in town qualified to fix has just told me he cannot fix.
The bell on the front door jangles.
Briar Holloway walks in. Mrs. Briar Creed, now, technically — she and Silas had their courthouse wedding last fall — but I cannot make my mouth call her anything but Briar Holloway because that is who she was when she became my first real friend in this town, the morning I walked into her flower shop two years ago lost and homesick and asking for something small and inexpensive to put on the circulation desk to make the library feel a little more alive.
She had handed me a sprig of forget-me-nots on the house and told me I had a face that looked like it needed a porch swing and a glass of sweet tea, and we have been friends ever since.
She has a bouquet in her hand. White peonies, a few stems of dogwood, a single sprig of something tall and purple I do not know the name of. She is wearing her flower-shop apron over a denim dress and her hair is up in a clip and there are little petals stuck to her sleeve.
"Hi, sunshine," she says, and then she sees my face. "Oh no. What."
I gesture, mutely, toward the periodicals corner.
She walks over. She looks at the shelf. She looks at the caution tape. She comes back to the circulation desk and sets the peonies down on the counter and says, "Okay. Tell me."
I tell her. The teenagers. The coffee. The slam. The anchors. Tom. The two weeks. The reading hour at four tomorrow.
Briar listens with both hands flat on the desk. When I am finished she taps her fingers against the wood twice and says, "Call the club."
I do not say anything for a second.
"The club," I say.
"Iron Thorn."
"Yes."
"Right."
"Briar."
"I know what you're going to say."
"I do not — I do not know how to — I would not even know how to —"
"Sugar."
"Briar, I cannot walk up to a motorcycle clubhouse and ask the —"
"You absolutely can. Half those boys have library cards. Silas has a library card. Diesel has a library card and Diesel does not read."