The Library of Borrowed Hearts

1. Chloe

I found the book hidden behind a box of rusted plumbing parts.

The faded green cloth cover had been eaten away by damp and mites. The binding was loose and the corners broken. To all outward appearances, the thing belonged in the nearest dumpster—if not a hazmat facility three layers of yellow rubber deep.

Naturally, I kept it.

So far, it was the only book I planned on rescuing from the basement storeroom where I’d spent the better part of the past week, clearing out what my boss called “the unwanted masses.” For decades, the Colville Public Library had been storing stacks of old and outdated books down in these subterranean hallways. Although many of them went on to good homes in one of the library’s monthly book-sales-cum-purges, the piles had been growing higher and higher as the years progressed.

People just didn’t hoard books like they used to. They especially didn’t hoard books that had long since passed their sell-by date.

The more fools they.

I felt almost giddy as I ran my hands over the cover of the book, my fingers tracing the embossed title. Even though I wasn’t technically a librarian here—you needed a degree for that—I was an employee, and a damn good one at that. Some days, I functioned as janitorial staff. Others, I filled in at the checkout counter. This week, my sole responsibility was to do the thing that no one else had the stomach to do: say goodbye to the past fifty years.

Goodbye to the dog-eared romance novels boasting the faded flowing locks of Fabio. Goodbye to the poorly aged self-help guides full of body-shaming advice. Goodbye to cookbooks that were way more obsessed with aspic and gelatins than the modern-day digestive system could handle.

I was good at the task, too. I’d always excelled at doing the dirty deeds no one else wanted to tackle. If I’d lived in a big glamorous city or had ties to the high-powered political world, I might be known as a “fixer.” As it was, living in a town with a population of five thousand residents, an hour’s drive south of Canada, deep in the forests of Washington state, I was…what, exactly?

A cleaning woman? A general factotum? A drudge who had to do what she was told or risk losing the closest thing to a bookish job she’d ever get?

Okay, maybe that last one was a touch dramatic, but my back hurt from hauling all these stupid boxes up and down the stairs. Also, there were cobwebs in my hair and so many paper cuts that my fingers looked like they’d just escaped a miniature slasher flick. Drama was the only thing keeping me going.

“‘I have no money, no resources, no hopes,’” I read aloud as I lifted the book’s cover and scanned the first lines. “‘I am the happiest man alive.’”

I knew what would happen if I kept turning the pages. Despite the fact that I was little more than a drudge in my small Washington town—or, more likely, because of it—most of my free time was spent deep in the pages of a book. Unless you were super into hunting or fishing, there wasn’t much else to do around here. I worked and I took care of my family. I did the things no one else wanted to do.

And I read. Always, I read.

Which was why I chuckled and tucked the book in my tote bag where no one would accidentally stumble across it. Tropic of Cancer wasn’t the sort of novel you wanted to keep lying around the break room—especially a break room like ours, where the fridge sat stuffed with homemade meals in Tupperware containers and the community billboard was tacked with colorful reminders about prayer meetings. If one of my coworkers were to pop the book open and start counting the number of times the words prick or rosebush or—sorry, literary censors—cunt appeared, I’d probably be charged with assault with intent to kill.

It was that kind of workplace—and that kind of book. In fact, Tropic of Cancer was most famous for having been banned in the United States for decades after it was first published. I had no idea when or how the Colville Library had gotten its hands on a copy, but I could see why someone had tucked it away in the basement. In the fifties and sixties, people had gone to literal jail over this book.

“Hey, Chloe.” A head popped in through the basement doorway. It belonged to my coworker Pepper, the library’s bookmobile driver and the only other person I’d trust with my illicit treasure. “Gunderson says he’s giving you a reprieve. He’s not going to make you throw away any more books until garbage pickup. Apparently, we’re creating a fire hazard.”

I gave a grateful sigh and wiped my hands on the seat of my jeans. I didn’t normally dress so casually, but like I’d said, I was on special basement-cleaning duty this week. My shoulder-length red hair was swept up in a bandanna, an oversized T-shirt tied in a knot at my waist.

Not exactly glamorous, but then, neither was I.

“I thought the fire department was more concerned with the fire hazard down here,” I said, kicking at one of the dusty boxes. “They can’t have it both ways.”

Pepper shrugged. “I don’t make the rules. I just abide by them.” She nodded at one of the boxes overflowing with discarded Fabios. “Most of the time, anyway. What are you planning to do with those beauties?”

“Toss them out with all the rest. As much as it hurts to throw all these books away, I’m under strict orders not to let anything slip through my fingers.”

“Mind if I take a stab at slipping them through mine? My grandma is obsessed with all those old Harlequins. I keep telling her there are way more diverse romances these days, but she likes the way these ones smell.”

I’d known Pepper’s grandmother my entire life, so I could easily accept this as fact. Lonnie Pakootas was as hard-core as they came—a woman committed to tradition when it suited her and absolutely in defiance of it when it didn’t. Pepper was the same, though I wasn’t allowed to say so. I’d tried pointing out the similarities once—the ones that went beyond their wide-set brown eyes and impossibly long black hair, the buoyant laugh that could chase even the darkest thoughts away—but Pepper had refused to speak to me for a week afterward. Pakootas women valued their uniqueness, thank you very much, and woe to the best friend who said otherwise.

“I’d be happy to save these poor rejects, but we’ll have to sneak them past Gunderson first,” I said. “You know how weird he gets about following library protocol.”

Pepper dropped her voice in an exact imitation of Gunderson’s, all stuffy and nasal. “An employee of the Colville Public Library is a community leader, a model of decorum and dignity,” she said. She even managed to purse her lips so it looked like she had a mustache similar to the one he’d been trying to grow out for the past two months. “We can’t be seen carting contraband around the streets.”

“Speaking of contraband…” I reached into my tote bag and fished out the copy of Tropic of Cancer. “Take a look at this bad boy. Emphasis on bad.”

She glanced curiously at the book before allowing it to fall open to a page somewhere in the middle.

“‘He is about to walk away when suddenly he notices that his penis is lying on the sidewalk. It is about the size of a sawed-off broomstick. He picks it up nonchalantly and slings it under his arm.’” A grimace twisted Pepper’s lips as she read aloud. “What the hell, Chloe? Ew. Ew.”

I couldn’t help giggling. “I know. It’s a terrible book. But it’s, like, super famous for being terrible. You couldn’t even get a copy in the United States for fifty years after it was published. Not to buy from a bookstore and definitely not to borrow from a public library.”

I could tell I had her interest. “And you found it here?” she asked. “In the basement?”

“Yep.” I took the book back and flipped it open to the last page. I tapped my finger on the small print: Imprenta de Mexico, 1940. “Unless I’m mistaken, this is one of the bootleg copies that circulated back in the book’s heyday. This company called Medusa Publishing printed them in Mexico and then smuggled them here. This book is probably worth a thousand bucks, even in this condition.”

“Ohhh.” Pepper nodded as though that made perfect sense. Which, considering how much she knew about my life, was true. “That’ll help a ton. New roof?”

“A down payment, if I’m lucky. Or I might just throw caution to the wind and get a dishwasher instead.” I tried not to dwell too much on the prospect of such luxury. No point getting my hopes too high. “I’ll have to wait and see how much this little guy nets me first… Oh, crap. Never mind.”

“What’s wrong?”

Both my expression and my spirits fell as I caught sight of a scribbled note in the margin at the end of the book. For all its obscenities, Tropic of Cancer ends on a surprisingly sweet note: The sun is setting. I feel this river flowing through me—its past, its ancient soil, the changing climate. The hills gently girdle it about; its course is fixed.

There, in a scratchy hand, I could make out a message that some long-ago reader had left behind.

Good idea. I’ll meet you at our river when the sun is setting.

In a different hand, this one much more florid, the message continued.

When the sun is setting? But I thought The Sun Also Rises?

No. No more Hemingway. You promised.

“That’s cute,” Pepper said, reading over my shoulder. “Someone left notes.”

“It’s not cute.” I thumped the cover shut. “That’ll cut at least half off my sale price. Doesn’t anyone respect library property anymore?”

“Are you asking the woman who’s about to smuggle out a box of thirty-year-old Harlequins for her grandmother?”

“Good point.” I tucked the book back in my tote bag. Half a treasure was better than no treasure at all.

“So how do you want to play this?” Pepper asked. “If Gunderson finds out, it’ll mean your job, not mine. He can’t get rid of me. I’m the only one who knows how to work the clutch on the bookmobile.”

I ran through several scenarios in my head until I landed on the easiest one.

“It’ll be best for me to carry the box out like I’m adding it to the pile out back,” I said. “You just need to keep Gunderson distracted long enough for me to slip it under the bookmobile’s passenger seat. Then you can drop it off wherever you want on your rounds tomorrow.”

Pepper pulled a face. “That’s disappointing. No pulling the fire alarm? No secret handoffs in the break room? I thought you were supposed to be devious and resourceful.”

It was true. I was devious and resourceful, but only because I had no other choice. Necessity could drive a person to do strange things. Sometimes, it meant slapping on a bandanna and breathing in basement toxins for the sake of a paycheck. Other times, it meant petty not-exactly-theft of ancient, crumbling treasures that were being thrown away anyway.

“It’s a box of dusty old books, not a Kandinsky,” I said. “Look, do you want my help or not?”

“Fine. Some fun you are.” Pepper rolled her eyes, but in an exaggerated way that I took to mean she understood.

The nice thing about Pepper was that she understood a lot of things: That I needed the money from the sale of that broken-down book more than I was willing to admit. That I’d liberate a dozen copies of a dozen broken-down books if it meant I could keep a roof over my family’s head for one more day.

Also that if there was one person she could count on to see her through, well, anything, it was Chloe Sampson.

A fixer. A general factotum. A drudge.

And, apparently, the proud new owner of a bootleg copy of Tropic of Cancer.