Chapter 4
“I’ve been waiting forever!”
“Sorry,” I told her. “I’m really sorry.” I was, because I felt bad that she was so clearly upset. But I was also feeling annoyed. What did she expect me to do about it?
She explained that. “It’s my turn now,” she informed me. “Get off!”
Her last words had been loud enough that the librarian hustled over.
“Is there a problem?” Cadence wanted to know, and the other woman started a long story about how she had to use the computer because she had lost both her phone and the power cord for her laptop (so that was dead), and this person (me) was so annoying by not sharing, and why was there only one computer available—there should have been more!
Also, she was mad about all the disabled parking outside.
“I don’t see anybody using a wheelchair in this library!” she announced. “It’s unfair to people who don’t have them so we have to park farther away and walk.”
At that point, I was pretty much done with the computer.
I also didn’t want to argue in the Whitaker Reading Room, which had become one of my favorite spots to hang out.
As winter ended and the weather had warmed, Kolter’s house had gotten more comfortable in terms of temperature.
But there were other things about it that were not as comfortable, so I liked to be here instead.
I told the girl to go ahead and have it and I moved to one of the chairs in front of the fireplace, although no logs burned there anymore.
I had spent enough time in the Whitaker Reading Room that Cadence, the librarian, and I had gotten to know each other.
We had always said ‘hello’ and ‘how are you,’ but we’d also been sharing information.
She was aware of my fear of the cemetery that was located near where I lived and she had asked questions about the guys I had dated—she was very interested in my relationship history.
I had talked a little about my list of worries, the things about bears but also the idea that someone would mistakenly bury me at a crossroads.
I kept the other issues, like Kolter and hunger, to myself.
She had told me stuff that she wanted for her future, like having her own family.
“That may not happen and I’m ok with it,” she had said, but she’d turned bright red and then added, “I’m trying to be ok with it.
” I was aware that this spring, she was going to try a vegetable garden for the first time.
She had also talked about a side career she was trying to start, doing watercolor paintings of babies and children.
She had gotten as far as making business cards and she had given one to me although I didn’t have a child and I didn’t have any money to pay for a painting, either.
“Keep it just in case,” she’d suggested.
“I had fifty made and no one seems to want them.” She was worried that she would never get her enterprise off the ground and she was also worried about the frost date, which gardening websites explained was late in the year this far north.
She couldn’t plant her tomato and pepper seedlings outside because they could freeze overnight when the temperature dropped.
And yes, it was still chilly at night—I could also feel it even though it was May.
“Sorry,” Cadence said after she had gotten the other patron settled in front of the monitor. “I know that you still had fifteen minutes left on your sign-up.”
“I don’t care.” I really had been close to finished. “How is your mom feeling?”
“Better,” she said, smiling. Her mom had gotten a cold and Cadence had been concerned. They lived together in a house that had first belonged to her great-grandparents and I loved the idea that it had been in their family forever. “How is your situation?” she wanted to know.
“Well…” I thought. “Things have changed a little.”
“Did Kolter calm down?”
I had told her about some problems I’d had over the winter, like how the furnace had been on a march to oblivion and about my attempts to get the oven working for heat and so that I could make bread.
My fixes hadn’t worked but I was still making preparations for baking.
Slowly, by visiting numerous thrift shops, I had accumulated some of the tools I would need (like a nice bowl, a liquid measuring cup, and a scale to measure ingredients that seemed to work ok).
I had kept other things to myself and I continued to do that today.
“He’s all right,” I said. The last time I was here, I had mentioned that he was out of work again and had been pretty upset.
I had been upset, too, because it had led to an argument between us about our living situation and about money.
He’d been fired two more times after losing the job when he’d thought that his boss had disrespected him (and he had peed in her car).
I hadn’t shared that with Cadence, or how he’d lost his latest job after grabbing a coworker’s breast. It had been a joke, he’d said, but she hadn’t thought it was funny. Neither had their boss or the police.
Cadence glanced over at the girl who had crowded me off the library computer. “You can sit at my desk and use mine,” she suggested. “Or I can help you research.”
I knew that she really loved helping people track stuff down, like books whose titles they had forgotten, a great spy movie, new ways to look for jobs, and everything else.
Since I’d started spending more time here, I’d heard a lot of weird asks but she was usually thrilled to jump right in and hunt.
Poisonous caterpillars in Australia? She could come up with a list. What car is the best in snow?
She had websites for that. How many pine cones could a kid eat before it became a problem?
She had recommended Poison Control. She had found Nolan Whittaker’s address in a heartbeat, too, because she was a real whiz.
But I also wasn’t ready to share what I was looking for, so I only shook my head. “I’m good,” I told her. “I got what I needed.”
“Good,” she echoed back to me, and then I watched her start to poke around in her hair with her finger.
“Yesterday at the gas station, I ran into a girl I graduated with. From high school,” she clarified.
She had found a fat, springy curl and she slowly twirled it.
“We weren’t really friends but we knew each other.
” She told me about a field trip that they had all taken to a town with great fried chicken restaurants, but that wasn’t the point of the story.
She twirled faster as she got to that: “She said that she’d just seen Nolan Whitaker.
Remember how you were asking me about him a few months ago? ”
“Yeah, I remember.” I hadn’t discussed him with her since then, though. There hadn’t been much to say.
“He told her he had been away for a while, but now he’s back.”
The last time I had seen him, he had been on his way home from the airport after a trip. “I guess he gets around a lot,” I commented. “You had said that he has his own plane.”
She nodded and quickly spun her hair. “I was also thinking about how you wanted to see pictures of his house. It’s not too far from here,” she noted. “Maybe half an hour.”
I knew that, because I had done a little more looking on the library computer when she hadn’t noticed. Not on my own phone, though, because that had turned into an issue. “It seemed very nice.”
“It is. I went out of my way to drive by there,” she said.
She was talking fast and swirling her hair even faster, like the top speed of a mixer in the baking videos I’d been watching.
“Wasn’t that weird? I don’t know why I did it but when I heard that girl talking about him…
I don’t know. Yeah, it was weird,” she answered her own question.
“I’m twenty-eight, not eighteen. But when I was a teenager, I wouldn’t have done that.
It would have taken too much nerve and I was afraid of almost everything back then. I’m much better now,” she assured me.
“Did you see him there, at his house?” I asked, but she shook her head.
“I would have been very embarrassed because then he might have seen me, too.” She took a moment to find another curl and started to spin that one instead. “Um, have you talked to him lately?”
“No. We had coffee once, but that was in January.” I had thought that maybe I would hear from him afterwards because that was what he’d said, that he’d be in touch.
But I hadn’t heard anything and it had probably been for the best. “I have no idea how he is or what he’s doing.
” Maybe he had returned to Hawaii or maybe he’d gone someplace where he’d needed to speak French.
He had known what “crudités” meant, after all.
“Oh. Never mind,” she said, and went quickly over to her desk.
I had to get to work, too. I had one house to do and then I was going to see about picking up something else to add to my income.
My cleaning business hadn’t expanded very much, although Cadence had tried to help by editing my online ads.
She had worked with me on making a spreadsheet of my schedule and the contact info of all my clients, so I was more organized (she was a huge fan of organization).
She had also posted about my services on her social media. “I only have ten followers,” she’d admitted. “But maybe one of them is looking for help around the house.”
All of those things had been great, but unfortunately had not resulted in any new business for me. I was having to look elsewhere for income, which I wasn’t looking forward to…I just wasn’t sure what else to do. It had been a hard winter.
I left the library and cleaned the one house, and the whole time?
I was thinking about Nolan Whitaker again.
It wasn’t as if I’d spent the past few months with him stuck in my brain but he had run through my thoughts once or twice.
Or more. I had wondered what he was doing and I’d looked at pictures of Maui, imagining him there.