11. Kylie
Kylie
Perry Sterling is in my kitchen at seven in the morning in nothing but his jeans, my dish towel slung over one shoulder like he pays rent here, and I have flat forgotten how to work a coffee maker I’ve owned six years.
“You’re staring,” he says, not turning around. He’s got a carton of eggs open on the counter and a skillet he bullied out of my cabinet, and he’s cooking one-handed, braced on the counter’s edge, the bad leg stuck out behind him at an angle.
“I’m supervising. It’s a leadership role.”
“She learns.” He cracks an egg with far too much confidence and gets half the shell in the pan. “Aw, hell.”
“You want help.”
“I want you to keep sitting there in my shirt looking at me like that. The eggs are a bonus.”
“You’re smiling,” he adds, fishing shell out with a fork. “I like it when I catch it before you can put it away.”
“I don’t put my smiles away.”
“Barnes. You’ve got a whole system.” He points the fork at me. “There’s the one for patrons. The one for the county board. And then way in the back, behind glass, break-in-case-of-emergency, there’s the real one. I’m collecting the real ones.”
I don’t have a thing to say to that. He’s right. Nobody in my life has ever bothered to sort my smiles before, let alone go hunting the good ones.
I look down. I am, in fact, in his shirt.
It smells like him, cedar and hay and something warmer underneath, sleeves shoved up, hem down near my knees, and I feel like a woman in a magazine, and the whole picture sits so far off from my actual life that I keep expecting to wake at the circulation desk with a crick in my neck and a due-date stamp stuck to my cheek.
I keep waiting to feel like myself and I don’t.
Myself eats cereal over the sink and turns the lights out by nine.
Myself does not have a rodeo star burning eggs in her kitchen and calling her Barnes like it’s a love word.
I’ve been somebody else for two weeks, and I like her, and that frightens me worse than anything, how fast I’d hand my whole quiet life over to keep being her.
He plates the eggs, which are ugly and probably wonderful, and carries both plates over in one hand and kisses the top of my head on his way into the chair beside me.
Like it’s nothing. Like he’s done it a thousand mornings.
And my chest aches in the brand-new direction it’s ached for two weeks straight.
Here’s what I don’t say. Saying it would break the spell, and I’ve turned coward about the spell. I know this ends.
I’ve known since the first cinnamon roll. Men like Perry Sterling don’t stay. They blow through a town like good weather, leave it greener and lonelier than they found it, and a smart woman stands out in it while it lasts and doesn’t lie to herself about the forecast.
I am not being smart. That’s the whole trouble. Two weeks of ugly eggs and that mouth and him saying Barnes like it’s a complete sentence, and I’ve gone and started to hope, which is the one thing I swore on my mother I wouldn’t do.
“You went somewhere,” he says. He’s watching me over his coffee, and he sees too much, he always has. “You do that. Go off behind your own eyes.”
“Just thinking about the fundraiser.”
“Liar.” Soft, no heat in it. He reaches over and hooks a finger in the collar of his own shirt where it’s slipping off my shoulder, and instead of fixing it he tugs it lower and sets his mouth to the bare skin there, slow, and my whole body forgets the forecast.
“Perry. We have a vendor meeting at ten.”
“Then I’d better be quick about it.” His hand slides up my thigh under the hem, warm and certain, and his mouth finds the spot below my ear he learned in the library and hasn’t forgotten, and my breath goes ragged on me.
He tips my chin down and kisses me, filthy and unhurried both, and draws me up out of the chair and into his lap, minding the leg, gathering me in like a thing he’s already decided is his.
And God help me, I let the eggs go stone cold.
The event has a name now, and it wasn’t a single one of mine.
We landed on Books and Boots. He wore me down, and Novaleen had it printed on the napkins before I could veto it, and now there are flyers in every window on the square and a stage going up in the courthouse lot.
The radio runs Perry’s spot twice a day, that easy drawl telling the whole listening county to come out and save their library, and the phone at my desk hasn’t quit since.
Tuesday night I hold a volunteer meeting. I expect six people. I get forty.
They fill the reading room and spill back into the stacks.
The whole knitting circle in the front row, needles going the entire time.
Deputy Gil with a clipboard he appointed himself in charge of.
Anson shut the general store an hour early and brought his flatbed for hauling.
Mrs. Ellery, who has not returned a book on time in her natural life, wants to run the bake sale, and I let her, and she tears up over it, and I look hard at my notes to spare us both.
“Now here’s how I see it,” Deputy Gil announces, rising to his full and considerable height. “We’re gonna need parking marshals. I’ll head that up.”
“Gil, honey, you’ll head up traffic and scare half the county home,” Miss Cora says, not looking up from her needles. “Put Anson on traffic. You go stand by the pie table and look official.”
“I can do both.”
“Nobody can do both. Sit down.”
He sits down. Forty grown adults have been organized in under a minute by a woman with a ball of blue yarn, and I think, not for the first time, that this town could run a small nation if it could ever agree on where to have lunch.
Then I stand up in front of all of them, and my hands want to shake, and I don’t let them.
I’ve spent my whole life at the edge of the picture. Now the picture is looking back at me, waiting, and I open my mouth and, to my everlasting surprise, the words come.
I tell them about my mother. Forty years at that desk.
I tell them what a library is to a town like this one, the only door that never once asks you for a dollar, the only cool room in all of August, the place a child with nowhere to go gets to be somebody for an afternoon.
I tell them the county has decided we’re a line on a spreadsheet, and in five weeks we’re going to walk into that meeting and show them we’re a town instead.
And they clap. These people I’ve quietly shelved books for my whole life, they clap for Ada’s girl, and I have to study the ceiling fan a second to get my face back under me.
Anson stands up in the back, hat turning in his big hands.
“Ada taught my boy to read in this room,” he says, gruff.
“Couldn’t sit still, couldn’t learn a lick anywhere else.
She sat with him after hours, no charge, no fuss, till it finally took.
He drives a rig now. Reads to his own babies at night.
” He clears his throat, hard. “Whatever you need, Kylie. Store’s yours. I’m in.”
And that’s how it goes, one after another, a whole room of people standing up and handing me back pieces of my mother I never knew were loose in the world, still working, long after her own hands quit.
Perry stands in the back the whole time, leaning on the last shelf with his crutch, and he doesn’t say one word.
He lets me have it. When I sit back down he catches my eye across the length of the room and, for once, he doesn’t grin.
He just looks at me like I hung the moon myself, with my own two hands, and forty people watch him do it.
When it breaks up, Miss Ruthanne corners me by the returns cart, purse on her arm, eyes bright as a wren’s.
“That young man watched you the whole meeting,” she says.
“Didn’t hear a word you said. Watched your mouth make the words.
” She pats my cheek. “Your mother watched your father just like that, God rest him. You come to knitting Thursday. We won’t say a thing.
” Then the whole circle sails out in a cloud of lavender and gossip, fully intending to say a great many things.
By Wednesday the county knows. Ada’s girl and the Sterling boy. I hear it at the post office and the Piggly Wiggly and in the long pause before Miss Cora asks how the “fundraising” is coming, both eyebrows up around her hairline.
I don’t correct a soul. That’s the thing I notice about my own self. A month ago I’d have died before I let this town put my name in its mouth. Now I catch myself something close to proud. Something close to brave. He did that to me. Or I did, and he only stood in the back and let me.
Three weeks to the vote. The board sent a letter this week, cordial as a closed casket, reminding me the consolidation timeline proceeds regardless of “community sentiment.” I taped it over my desk beside the first one.
I read them both every morning now. They’re about the only thing keeping my feet on the ground while the rest of me floats four feet off it like a fool in love.
The crack shows up on a Thursday, and it’s so small I nearly file right past it.
We’re at the ranch, at the kitchen table, working down the vendor list. Vivian’s gone to her church circle and the house is quiet around us.
We’ve got a system by now. I read the list, he knows everybody on it, and he tells me which vendor shows up late and which one will pad the invoice and which one owes the Sterlings a favor going back to a fence-line dispute in 1994.
It’s easy. That’s the part that scares me, how easy it’s gone, his boot hooked around my chair leg under the table, the both of us bent over the same page like we’ve done it for years and mean to do it for years more.
His phone buzzes face-up on the table between us, and I see the name on the screen before he lays his hand flat over it. Dallas Ortho Group.
“Doctor,” he says, and takes it into the front room.
I’m not a listener. I’ve never once been a listener.
But the walls at Jubilee Hill are honest old walls, and even so a few words carry back to me, low and clipped, in a voice I haven’t heard him use on me.
Something about a facility. Something about a timeline.
And once, quiet, in a tone like a word he didn’t want loose in the house, the word commit.
He comes back and sits down and picks the pen right back up like nothing at all happened.
“Everything okay?” I say.
“Insurance stuff.” He smiles at me, easy, the smile that’s talked him clear of six states’ worth of trouble. And for the first time in two weeks it lands on me as a thing he does instead of a thing he means. “Where were we. Vendors.”
I watch him a second too long. He’s already back down in the list, pen moving, easy as anything, and there’s not a seam on him anywhere I can point to.
That’s almost the worst of it. A man who can go somewhere cold and clipped in the next room and come back to me warm without a crack showing is a man who’s had practice at it.
We go back to vendors. I let it go, since I want to let it go. The other choice is to look straight at it, and I have had exactly two weeks of the best thing that’s ever happened to me, and I am not ready to hold it up to the light and see clean through it.
But I file it. I’m a librarian. I file everything.
I put it away in the back of the catalog, in the drawer I keep shut: Dallas, a facility, a timeline, commit, and that easy smile he reached for like a tool off a shelf. Then I close the drawer, and I go back to pretending I believe in good weather.