Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
PRESTON
“Good night,” Preston called to his last student. He watched from the piano bench as Mason climbed into his mother’s car. The headlights swept across the little fenced yard and the darkened windows at the front of the house.
Finally everything was quiet and still. Just Preston and the piano, the walls covered in bookshelves, the glow of the lamp. It wasn’t as if more work wasn’t waiting for him—the dishes, and figuring out what the hell he was going to say at Tuesday’s town hall meeting—or that the couch and his book resting open on one armrest didn’t beckon temptingly. But he couldn’t seem to move from this spot.
Now that it was peaceful, the stress from the day came rushing back to him. He’d thought he’d been holding everything together, but he hadn’t noticed Lacey wasn’t getting to eat her lunch, and god knew how long it had really been going on. He was fucking things up again, and Lacey was suffering for it. Again.
He began playing to drown it all out. Rachmaninoff. Variation 18. If Lacey was actually in bed like she was supposed to be, maybe it would help her fall asleep. Then he started noodling around with a new melody, something that felt like moonlight.
He hadn’t had time lately to compose much, but he didn’t really mind. He loved his sister, and he loved his job. He didn’t mind going into work on Saturdays for concerts in the community room swarmed by seniors and families, or heading back over with Lacey some afternoons to supervise whatever clubs the teens who had nowhere else to go after school wanted to try out. He wanted the library to be a haven for everyone, like it had been for him when he’d been a weird kid looking for someplace to hide. Before he had sorted out all the ways being autistic made certain things hard for him and honed the skills and tricks to cope, the library had been his retreat. And he’d been able to bring that peace home, even. Escape inside the stories he’d found, when his parents were arguing again about him.
And these “concerned citizens” were trying to take the books away. The books that kids needed most, books where they could find characters like themselves, where they could see their lives and what they could be. Preston’s hands danced over the piano keys faster, fiercer. Imagine thinking kids needed to be protected from books, of all things. Not parents who weren’t safe to be around, or prejudice, or mental health issues, or anything like that. It must be nice, to live the kind of life where you could believe kids only faced problems that could be solved by Mom and Dad with milk and cookies or a hug.
Preston’s fingers stilled on the keys, white and black. He’d really fucking like a hug.
But his own mother was gone, nearly five years now, and Lacey’s sensory issues meant she preferred pinkie promises and high fives to any other contact. And no one else was offering. So he did the next best thing, and called Dani.
“Preston, hey.” He could picture his mom’s oldest friend in her studio at her place outside town, short curly hair bound back by a silk scarf, phone on speaker while she shaped clay or painted. “How’s it going?”
He set his own phone on speaker and rested it on the piano. “Fine.”
“Uh-huh. Fine fine or you’re spiraling but won’t admit it fine?”
Preston spun the silver ring on his thumb. “Can you take Lacey next Tuesday?” Dani had helped his mom out a lot when Lacey was tiny, after their dad left and Preston was off at college. They’d kept up the routine after Preston moved home. Routine was important for Lacey.
“Sure. You got a hot date?”
Annoyingly, the image of the woman from that afternoon, outside the library, flashed through his mind. “Er—with my civic duty?”
“What?” Dani sounded distracted. Definitely working on something.
“With the town council and probably several angry parents?” What if they got an entire group together to mob the meeting? These people had too much time on their hands. And money and energy and more than rudimentary social skills cobbled together from years of therapy.
“Oh, god, Preston. You have got to get out there. Do something for yourself for once.”
“I don’t have to listen to you; you probably have clay in your hair.”
“I do.” Dani laughed. “But you should still go on an actual date sometime.”
“Yeah.” A familiar longing stirred through his chest. He did want that. And more. The whole romance thing. Someone to be with in the quiet at the end of the day, instead of just his own worries. Hugs. But he knew from experience how unlikely that was, how hard he was to love. Besides, he had no time. “I’ll do that, during the forty-five minutes while Lacey’s at group, maybe.”
“When was the last time you saw your therapist?”
Besides the grief counseling sessions he’d gone to with Lacey? His last therapist had worked for his grad school’s health services. So. About five years.
He pushed up his glasses and deflected. “What are you working on?”
“Oh, a vase. Supposedly. A thing of beauty is not what this is. Gonna smush it down and try again tomorrow.”
“You still good with supervising the GSA on Friday?”
He wasn’t sure if Dani’s grunt was of acknowledgement or from her working the clay. But she said, “I’ll be there.”
“Even with all the extra attention we’ve been getting?” He spun his ring again. “Can’t promise an angry parent won’t show.”
“Preston, I have been an out lesbian in a small town for decades. Nothing can hurt me. And I really like working with the kids. And helping you out. If you wanted to go out more,” she added meaningfully.
Dani made it sound so easy. Go out. With—someone. But this was a small town and people weren’t exactly lining up to date a twenty-seven-year-old bookworm with a budget-frozen civil servant’s salary and a fourth grader. Who wasn’t selectively nonspeaking like his sister but who was still much better talking to family or within the set scripts of work.
“I want to be there for Lacey and for you,” Dani went on. “It’s okay to lean on me, babe.”
His mouth quirked. “But you’re so short.”
Her snort crackled over their connection. “Respect your elders.”
“Right. I forgot you’re very old and wise.” His fingers began plinking out the minuet he’d worked on with Mason that evening. Beethoven.
“Forty-six is not old. You’re just an actual, literal baby still.”
His fingers traveled lightly over the keys. “And babies should be dating?”
He could hear the smack of her palm against clay. “Yes. That is my wisdom. Go on a date, you infant.”
“You first.”
“Oh, Preston, I had my chance.” The resigned sadness in her voice was chased by the next smack of the clay. “Sometimes it just doesn’t work out. But I don’t want to see you miss yours entirely because you’re making it harder than it has to be.”
A door slammed somewhere upstairs, bringing Preston’s playing to a halt. That meant a window was open. “I should check on Lacey.”
“Ha, good luck. Night, babe.”
“Night.”
He made his way upstairs, thinking about scripts. He needed to plan out exactly what he wanted to say at that meeting. He was not going to pull the books Cheryl Weaver had complained about—supposedly because of sexual content, but funny how they were all only books with queer or POC main characters. And one was a picture book, for god’s sake. Pronouns were not sexual content.
But he also didn’t want to get fired. There were plenty of libraries in California, but that would mean moving away from Dani’s support, and disrupting everything he and his mother had worked hard to establish for Lacey—her therapists who understood her, the home she’d always lived in. Routine and consistency. He couldn’t uproot her like that.
Just like he couldn’t pry her away from her telescope, where he found her crouching in her pajamas at her bedroom’s open window.
He leaned a shoulder against her doorframe. “Bedtime, Space Lace.”
She kept her face glued to the eyepiece. “It’s not my fault this crab is nocturnal.”
“Cancer? That’s the—” He knew this, she’d been telling him.
“Beehive cluster.” She turned to her desk and began jotting something down in a notebook. “I’m already at a hundred and ten observed member stars. Galileo found forty.”
“Um, wow. Should we alert the university?”
She looked at him sternly. “There are over a thousand.” She returned to her notes. “I’ve logged a thirty-two-point-five percent rate of red dwarfs so far, which is under half of what the Smithsonian says is the total—why do you think that is?”
Preston blew air through his cheeks. “Is this one of those questions where you ask but then just tell me?” Lacey didn’t answer and didn’t stop scribbling in her observation record. She couldn’t manage bothering with shoelaces or pouring her own milk for her cereal, but for her beloved stars she tracked and predicted paths of constellations and measured magnitudes, doing calculations he already couldn’t quite follow. Shit, should he be getting her a tutor? An astronomy tutor? Did those exist? Books and the Chromebook he’d gotten her for Christmas— which was open on her desk—would have to do for now. He walked over and shut its screen. “No computers after dinner,” he reminded her.
Lacey peered back through the telescope. “I needed to check if I was right about 42 Cancri’s magnitude.”
“Yeah.” He folded himself into Lacey’s desk chair. He was used to the intensity in her voice that so many took as defiance or rudeness, when she did speak around them. Getting Lacey proper accommodations had been like a third job for a few years there. He ran his finger along the spiral binding of her notebook. “And you need to tell me right away if someone’s picking on you again, okay? Asher or anyone else.”
“I thought he was my friend. Because we were sharing. The recess supervisor said maybe he picks on me because he likes me.” Her nose wrinkled. “She said boys used to pull on her pigtails.”
“No.” Preston leaned forward and tugged Lacey’s hand, gently facing her toward him. “That’s not right. When the right someone comes along, they’ll be kind to you and just tell you they like you. They won’t pull your hair or steal from you.” Again he felt that ache, keen as the stars up there against the black, for something like that for himself.
Lacey wound a strand of her hair around one finger, like she often did when she was calculating. “Good. Because I like my sandwiches, but I do want a boyfriend.”
That was officially one thing too many for Preston to deal with today. “Did you brush your teeth?”
“I forgot.”
Like pretty much every night. He waited while she finished getting ready, shut the window, and flicked out the lights, leaving her star projector dimly casting blurry constellations over the walls and ceiling. “Night, Lace Face.”
He headed back downstairs to where only work waited for him and, if he was lucky, a little reading time. Despite Dani’s cajoling and offers of babysitting, that was how his nights mostly ended. Looking for a relationship was way down his to-do list, as much as he might have wanted to find someone. Someone who might want to curl up and discuss what they were reading. Someone kind, like he’d said. Though he wasn’t against a little hair-pulling among consenting adults.
And yeah, maybe he spent too many of his slivers of free time retreating into books. But autistic burnout was no joke. He couldn’t afford to fall back into more sensitivity and meltdowns and trouble communicating, less able to take care of himself, let alone Lacey. He had to work to be accepted, to be masked, to be useful—sometimes he wished he could just be . Or be someone else, who didn’t have to work so hard at it all. Books gave him that. So, he’d have to settle for reading love stories for the time being. He knew their solace was mostly fantasy, but it was enough to blot out for a while the truth he’d learned, indelible as the ink on their pages, that he and his life were too difficult, too much, for anyone to love. Not love enough to want to stay, anyway.
It was enough to let himself imagine that there could be someone.