5. Perry
Perry
Four days home and I’ve counted the ceiling.
There are one hundred and twelve boards in the ceiling of my bedroom. I’ve been flat on my back under them since Tuesday, and a man can only ice a knee and stare at pine so long before he starts doing arithmetic to stay sane.
Mama brings me trays like I’m convalescing in a novel.
Buck comes by to report on my horse, who does not miss me.
Axe stops in twice a day to sit by the window and gloat, gentle about it, like a man who spent his whole life getting stomped and finally has some company in it.
“You’re twitchy,” Axe says today, boots up on my bed frame. “You’ve got that look you get right before you do something dumb.”
“I’m bored, not dumb.”
“With you that’s a short bridge.”
I throw a pillow at him. It costs me a rib and misses him clean.
Here’s the truth I don’t tell Axe. Since Sunday I’ve spent more thoughts on a snarky-mouthed librarian than on a torn-up knee.
She got under something that Kiki Barnes.
Kylie. I need to remember her real name is Kylie.
In my head, she’s still Kiki.
Kendrick’s little sister, and I gave him my word I’d help with her library funding thing.
So far, I’ve spent four days doing the exact opposite of helping.
I need to get on that project. That’s the excuse I use to go see her again.
It’s a clean, honorable reason to visit her, and it saves me from analyzing why helping her with the library fundraiser seems exciting all of a sudden.
Driving is a negotiation. The ranch truck’s an automatic, and I can work the pedals with my left boot if I don’t think about it too hard and don’t tell my mother.
I make it into Langston on spite and second gear and park crooked in front of the library on the courthouse square.
Truth is I know this library better than I ever let on.
Twelve years on the road, and every time I rolled back through Langston I slipped in for a fresh L’Amour, quiet, off-hours, when a bull rider reading westerns wouldn’t make the paper.
I’d trade the old one out and go. I never once looked hard at who checked it back in.
The library has high ceilings, and a rounded dome that was built in the 1800s.
The wood floors are waxed. A ceiling fan ticks overhead. There’s an air conditioner in the children’s and Young Adult section only.
The rest of the place is cool, but not sweater-weather like most places in town when summer arrives and air conditioners crank up.
Behind the front desk, up on a step stool with her back to me and a stack of books braced against her hip, is Kylie Barnes.
She’s different here. In Mama’s kitchen she stood like she was braced for a blow. Here she moves like she owns the ground, sure and quick and easy in it.
I stand in the doorway longer than I mean to. I watch her shelve books and forget what I came to say.
She’s got a pencil shoved behind one ear and reading glasses pushed up into her hair she’s clearly forgotten about.
She talks to the books under her breath while she sorts them, low and private, a running argument with the alphabet. It’s the least practiced thing I’ve watched a person do in years.
The door creaks and gives me up. She looks over her shoulder, and whatever’s on my face stops her cold on that stool.
“No,” she says.
“You don’t even know what I’m gonna ask.”
She steps down off the stool and dusts her hands. “How did you even drive here?”
“Poorly. Left foot. Don’t tell Vivian.”
“What do you want?” she asks. “Your Lewis Lammor books are that way.” She points to the Fiction aisle.
Damn. She remembers.
“It’s Louis L’Amour,” I say with the correct pronunciation she taught me almost ten years ago.
She smiles.
Wow! She’s freaking gorgeous. When did that happen? Does Kendrick know?
I take a shallow breath so my ribs don’t act up. “I’m here to help,” I say.
“Help with what.”
“The library. Kendrick told me you’re fighting the county alone. He asked me to pitch in while I’m laid up.” I lean on the crutch and give her the straight version, which I don’t do often. “So. Pitch me in.”
The color comes up her neck, and it isn’t the good kind. “Kendrick asked you.”
“Before I came back. Yeah.”
“My brother arranged for Perry Sterling to babysit my library.” She says my whole name like a citation. “While recovering from a rodeo injury. Because he doesn’t believe I can save it on my own.”
“That’s not…”
“That’s exactly it.”
I look around the place instead of answering, because she’s not wrong enough for me to argue it fast. There’s a hand-lettered sign taped to the desk: SAVE OUR LIbrARY.
A jar with a slot cut in the lid and a thin handful of bills inside.
A wall of children’s summer-reading stars, most of the slots still empty.
A stack of county letters she hasn’t thrown out.
She’s fighting a war with a petition jar and a step stool.
“How much you gotta raise?” I ask.
“That’s not your…”
“How much, Barnes. And it is my business because I’m a constituent with a library card.”
“It’s not only money.” She sets the last books down. “It’s the vote. I have to show the board this place still matters to enough people, loud enough, in five weeks. Money helps. People help more.” She lets out a breath. “I have a plan.”
“Tell me the plan.”
“Why?”
“I’m bored, I’m benched, and I’m apparently a babysitter.” I hold her eyes. “And I’m real good at getting people to show up somewhere. It’s the one thing I’ve never been bad at. You said it yourself. I get noticed.”
She’s quiet for a moment. Then she pulls a notebook from under the desk, the cheap kind with a bent spiral, and flips it open to a page covered in handwriting.
“Don’t you have a laptop?”
She glares at me. “I prefer to carry around my notes.”
I shrug. “Okay, tell me.”
“Five weeks from Saturday, the board votes,” she says.
“If I walk in with half the citizens behind me and financials big enough to make a difference, I’ve got a shot.
So I want an event. Something this town hasn’t seen in years.
Food, music, the whole square. People pay at the gate, sign at the door, and they come to that meeting because they had a good time and remembered why this place matters. ”
She says it fast, like she’s defending it before I can laugh.
I don’t laugh. It’s a good plan. It’s a plan that lives or dies on one thing, and we both know what that thing is.
“You need a crowd,” I say.
“I need a crowd.”
“And you hate that the fastest way to a crowd in this county just drove himself here on the wrong foot.”
“With my whole heart,” she says.
She studies me a long moment. I can see her running it, whether letting me in is worth what it’ll take out of her to do it.
“One condition,” she says.
“Name it.”
“You work. You don’t hold court. This is not a photo op, and I am not one of your…” She stops herself.
“One of my what?”
“Kendrick warned me about you,” she says. “Different speech. Same subject.”
“Let me guess.” I lay a hand over my heart, easy. “Hands to myself.”
“Among other things.”
“Barnes, I’m held together with tape and a brace. Your virtue has never been safer in its life.”
“It’s not my virtue I’m worried about. It’s my time.” She squares the notebook to the desk edge. “I don’t have any to spare, and I won’t waste it entertaining a bored cowboy who quits the second something more fun rolls through town.”
That one lands where she aimed it. She doesn’t know how true it is. Quitting when something more fun rolls through is most of my résumé.
“Alright.” I ease down into the chair she isn’t offering. “Put me to work. What do you need shelved, filed, hauled, charmed?”
“You can’t haul anything. Torn knee, cracked ribs.”
“I can charm sitting down. It’s a gift.”
That earns me the start of a smile she shuts down before it finishes. She points me at a cart of returns and hands me a pencil and a list, and I get the feeling this is a test she expects me to fail.
So I sort. Spines and call numbers, a stack at a time, slow and one-handed. It’s the first useful thing my hands have done since the bull, and I don’t hate it as much as I planned to.
The bell over the door rings, and a woman comes in with a toddler on her hip and a stack of picture books to return.
Kylie knows the child’s name and the mother’s, and the book the boy’s been asking after. She pulls it off a display without looking.
Out on the circuit I’ve had ten thousand people scream my name into the dark, and not one of them knew a true thing about me. Kiki knows the reading level of every kid who comes through that door.
I sort another stack and try to name the last thing I built that would still be standing if I quit showing up to it. I don’t come up with a single one.
Halfway down the cart my hand closes on a paperback gone soft at the spine. Louis L’Amour. The drifter, the worn-out ranch nobody else would touch. For a second the whole room tilts under me. Something about this book. This chair. Her.
I look up. She’s behind the desk, watching me hold it, and there’s an expression on her face I can’t read, wide open and half afraid, like I’m standing at the edge of a thing she’s kept a long time and never set down.
“You alright?” she says.
I look at the book. I look at her. The thread is right there in my two hands. I can almost pull it.
Then my phone goes off in my pocket, Axe wanting to know where the hell I got to, and the moment turns loose and drifts off.
“Yeah,” I say. “Just… feels like I’ve read this one before.”
“Maybe you have,” she says.
She turns back to her shelf, and I don’t see her face again for a good while after that.