2. Kylie
Kylie
The Langston Public Library has three sounds, and I know every one by heart.
The front door sticks in summer and announces each soul who comes through it with a groan like an old man getting up out of a low chair.
The ceiling fan over the reading table has run off-balance since before I was born, ticking out a rhythm my mother used to hum under.
And the card catalog drawer, oak worn smooth as a river stone, slides shut with a click I could pick out of a hundred others.
I’m standing at that catalog now, a returned book in my hand.
I’d been hoping the county would have the funds for us to transfer everything to computers this summer, but once again that’s not happening.
Only half of the books are online. The other half, the older books and archived materials, are still accessed only through the card catalog.
Good thing my mother taught me the card catalog before I could read properly.
The book I’m holding is a large-print mystery.
Mrs. Ellery brought it back two days late and swore up and down she finished it, though the receipt tucked at page forty says different.
I don’t call her on it. My mother never called anybody on anything.
You keep their card and you keep their secrets, she told me, and you keep your mouth shut about both.
Ada Barnes ran this library for forty-five years. She knew every patron’s number and half their business, and she guarded the two the same.
When her hands went bad and the county forced her to retire, she held the chair the only way she knew. She waited.
She waited out my four years of school three states over, and my loans, and the one bad boyfriend I don’t discuss, and she kept her library open until I graduated and could step in.
I took her chair eight months ago. I still think of it as hers.
The door groans. Deputy Gil Hartley comes in stamping dust off his boots, all six and a half feet of him, and heads straight for the westerns without a word to me.
He’s been reading his way through that whole section since March. I pulled three he’d like and set them behind the desk a week ago. I slide them across before he asks.
“You’re a peach, Ada’s girl.” He tips his hat and goes.
Ada’s girl. I’ve been Ada’s girl my whole life. In this town I’ve got a mother’s name and a brother’s shadow and a library card older than most marriages, and somewhere inside all of that I keep waiting for one person to look up and see the actual woman shelving their books.
I’m not bitter about it. Mostly.
Fine. Mildly bitter about it.
I go back to the desk to face the thing I’ve been dodging all afternoon. A letter from the state. Another from the County. Both of them telling me there’s no more funding for Langston Public Library.
The County’s letter calls it a Notice of Proposed Consolidation.
That’s the phrase they picked. As if the Langston branch is a duplicate they can fold into the regional library forty minutes up the highway, where the air runs colder and the parking runs worse and not one soul behind the desk will know to put aside books for the deputy.
The County’s cutting the branch budget in the fall. There’s a board vote in six weeks. If it carries, they box up eighty years of this town and sell the building on the courthouse square to whoever wants a pretty brick shell.
I’ve read the budget. And the bylaws twice. There’s a path to fight it, but it requires money I’m not sure I can raise. Not in six weeks anyway.
I mean I could raise it. If I prove this library still matters to enough people and we’re loud enough about needing it to remain open. But again…there’s only six weeks.
The Library Board thinks it’s a done deal. They’ve been kind about it, offering to extend my contract by two months so I can look for another job.
My only skills are books, books, and more books.
Nobody says a hard thing to my face. They say, bless your heart, Ada’s girl, we know how much this place means to you.
Like it’s a feeling and not the last public building in this town with a pulse in it.
I press my thumb to the inside of my other wrist, feel my own pulse knock back, and make myself breathe out.
Six weeks. A plan half-drawn in a notebook and nobody to help me carry it. But six weeks.
I take the returns cart down the fiction aisle to set the day back in order. Shelving steadies me. Everything on these shelves sits exactly where it belongs, and when it doesn’t, I’m the one who can put it right.
I’m halfway down the row when I reach the Ls, and my hand knows before my head does.
Louis L’Amour. He wrote eighty-nine books, most of them Westerns or Five copies. One of them soft and re-taped, checked out more than any other westerns or “frontier stories.”
Langston owns thirty-nine of them. All have been checked out several times by a Sterling brother. Different Sterling names, but I know it’s the same brother who’s reading the books.
Like reading is a crime he’s got to hide.
I was twelve the first time I saw him walk in here and borrow one of these books.
A dead Saturday, the library empty, my mother in the back mending bindings. The door groaned, I looked up from behind this exact desk, and Perry Sterling walked in.
Everybody in Langston knew the Sterling boys. The oldest one, Hercules Sterling, I called sir out of respect or plain fear.
The middle one, Achilles Sterling, or Axe, raced cars down the county road and got hauled home by his ear.
And the youngest, Pericles Sterling, or Perry, was the one the older girls wrote about in the margins of their notebooks.
He was seventeen and bronzed like the Greek hero he was named after. He was always grinning and having too much fun to ever turn up in a library on a Saturday.
Yet, there he was.
He didn’t see me at first. He went straight to this aisle, this shelf, and pulled down a L’Amour like he’d done it a hundred times.
Then he carried it to the far chair by the window, the one nobody used, and he read with his hat pushed back and his boot up on his knee for two whole hours.
His face changed like molding clay as he smiled, frowned, and cursed with each page he turned.
Those margin-scribbling girls would not have recognized him.
When he finally stood to check it out, he caught me watching.
I braced for him to be dismissive. Or mean. Boys that pretty are usually one or the other.
Instead he set the book on the desk, leaned down close like we were the last two people left on earth, and grinned at me.
“You won’t tell on me, will you, Kiki Barnes?”
“It’s Kylie,” I whispered.
He shook his head and reached into his back pocket for his wallet and his library card.
“I prefer Kiki.” His smile said it was a done deal. I had undergone a name change.
I couldn’t have made a sound if the building caught fire. I shook my head. Then nodded. “Okay.”
“Good girl.” He winked. “Our secret.”
I wasn’t sure what the secret was. That he was reading a book or that he’d baptized me with a new name.
I kept both.
He checked the book out under his brother’s name, tipped an invisible hat, and walked back out into the sun. I sat there twelve years old with my heart and soul rearranged.
He never brought it up again. I don’t believe he remembers it happened.
He came home off the circuit twice a year after that and slipped in whenever he was in town, and every single time I checked his westerns back in without a word and shelved them.
Fourteen years I’ve kept his secrets.
He’s kept none of mine, on account of never once asking me for one.
My phone buzzes against the desk. Kendrick.
My brother calls me maybe once a month from whatever town the circuit’s hauled him to. Twice in one week means something’s wrong.
“Hey, you,” I answer. “Still in Oklahoma?”
“Ky.” His voice is off. Tight. “You sitting down?”
My stomach drops. “What happened. Is it Mama.”
“No, no. Mama’s fine. It’s…” He blows out a breath. “It’s Perry. He went down tonight. Bull hung his hand up and stomped him good. Cracked ribs, tore the knee up. He’ll be alright, but he’s done for the season.”
I’m already on my feet.
“Ky? You there?”
“I’m here.” It comes out level. I’ve had years of practice keeping it level where Perry Sterling is concerned. “Is he in the hospital?”
“Nah, they patched him at the clinic. Vivian’s driving him home to Jubilee Hill tonight. That’s the thing, Ky.” He pauses. “I can’t leave the tour. I’m under contract through October. And Perry’s gonna be home all summer, laid up and losing his mind. You know how he is.”
I don’t, is the truth of it. I know a young man reading in a library and a name in a rodeo program and the well-thumbed books he returns. None of that is the same as knowing him.
“He’s got Vivian,” I say. “And two brothers.”
“Yeah.” Kendrick goes quiet a beat. “Just be good to him if you run across him in town, huh? He’s fixing to have the worst summer of his life.”
“When am I ever not good to people.”
“Never. That’s your whole problem.” I can hear him almost smile. “Too good, Ky. I gotta run, they’re calling the next section. Love you. Call Mama.”
He’s gone.
I stand behind my mother’s desk, in her library, holding a phone gone dark, and I make myself say the sentences plain so they can’t ambush me later.
Perry Sterling is coming home.
My brother wants me to be good to him.
The boy I’ve loved since I was twelve years old, in secret and for no good reason, is going to be four miles up the road all summer long.
And I’m still the girl he doesn’t remember.