Лори Касс: Booking The Crook

“Good morning!” Lloyd Goodwin shuffled in the door. Mr. Goodwin was in his late seventies, and if we’d been allowed to have favorite patrons, he would have been in everyone’s top five. Full of good humor and friendlier than a puppy, Mr. Goodwin had a self-professed medical need for morning coffee, and because of this, we’d opened up the staff break room to library patrons. The only bad thing was that Mr. Goodwin and Kelsey both liked coffee brewed strong enough to burn your stomach lining—some mornings it was a race to the coffee grounds.

Mr. Goodwin received a chorus of return “good mornings.” He nodded at everyone and asked, “Do you folks know how to keep Canadian bacon from curling? No?” He smiled. “It’s easy. Take their little brooms away.”

A half second of silence was followed by multiple laughing groans, and I took the opportunity to sketch a smiling wave and head out. It was bookmobile time.

• • •

Fresh-fallen snow blanketed the world. In Chilson there’d been barely an inch of fresh white stuff, but in this part of Tonedagana County at least six inches had come down overnight. I smiled at the sight. New snow transformed the world. Yesterday’s line of dark green cedar trees was now a bumpy white row. The dirty rawness of a local gravel pit had been magicked into a soft hole. And that little five-acre lake was now a field of white. If you didn’t know there was a lake under there, would you know there was a lake under there?

“Don’t tell me you’re smiling at the snow,” Julia said.

“Mrr,” Eddie said in a way that sounded like a Julia echo.

I glanced at the passenger’s side of the bookmobile. My part-time bookmobile clerk was, as per usual, resting her feet on Eddie’s strapped-down cat carrier. Eddie was flopped against the carrier’s door, his black-and-white fur sticking out through the wire in square sections. “The snow likes it when we smile.” I’d texted basically the same thing to Rafe when I was working through the bookmobile’s preflight checklist, and he’d sent back a tiny, one-second cartoon of a stick figure’s head exploding into falling snow. I didn’t know exactly what message he’d been trying to send, but I’d decided to assume kindly humor.

Julia snorted, connoting in that one short noise disbelief and a bit of derision that was covered up with humor. It was a lot to convey with a snort, but if needed, she could have troweled on three additional messages.

Though Julia had been born and raised in Chilson, she’d moved to the big lights of New York City before the ink dried on her high school diploma. She’d intended to find fame and fortune as a model, which hadn’t worked out, so she’d tried her hand at theater. This had worked out far better—as it turned out, she oozed acting talent and had more than one Tony Award to show for it.

At a certain age, however, offers for leading roles tend to slow to a trickle, even for the best of actors. Just before that happened, Julia and her husband moved back to her hometown, where she had too much time on her hands until the bookmobile came along. Now she and her storytelling abilities were woven into the fabric of the bookmobile as much as Eddie’s hairs were.

“Everyone needs a smile now and then,” I said. “Even the snow.”

“Snow is not a sentient being.”

“Maybe. But what if it was? What if it had feelings? Thoughts and dreams for a better future?”

“Mrr.”

Julia tucked her long strawberry blond hair behind her ears and gently tapped the top of Eddie’s carrier with one heel. “I’m pretty sure he said you’re loony tunes and shouldn’t be allowed out in public.”

“I’m pretty sure he said you should stop pounding on his roof.”

When I’d hired Julia, Eddie’s presence on the bookmobile had been a deep, dark secret I’d been trying to keep from Stephen, my then-boss. Eddie had been a stowaway on the vehicle’s maiden voyage, and I’d intended it to be a one-time deal until Eddie’s absence on the following trip had caused the lower lip of Brynn, a young girl with leukemia, to tremble.

There was no way I could deal with her tears, so Eddie had been installed as a permanent passenger. Soon after, the doctors had declared that Brynn’s cancer was in remission, something that Brynn’s mother tended to give Eddie credit for. Now everyone knew the bookmobile cat, and I was pretty sure more people knew his name than mine.

Julia leaned forward against her seat belt’s shoulder strap. “Which of us is right, Mr. Edward? Please indicate with a point of your elegant white-tipped paw.”

Eddie yawned and rolled into an Eddie-size ball, tucking all four of his paws underneath him.

I laughed. That Julia played along with my game of talking to Eddie as if he were fluent in the English language was one of the reasons I hoped she’d work with me forever. “Last stop of the day,” I said, and took a right turn into a convenience store parking lot, which I was glad to see had been plowed clean of snow.

The day hadn’t been a stellar one, as far as the number of patrons went. Though the main roads had all been plowed by the time we were traveling them, many of the side roads were not, and people didn’t tend to make optional trips on unplowed roads, even with four-wheel drive. The few people who had come aboard, though, stayed long and borrowed much, which pleased my librarian’s soul to the core.

I parked and we quickly went through the preparations. Unlatch Eddie’s cage, rotate the driver’s seat to face a small desk, turn on the two laptop computers, release the bungee cord that kept the office chair in the back in place, and ensure that no books, DVDs, jigsaw puzzles, or our most recent loan item of ice fishing poles had jostled out of place.

Eddie took part by jumping onto the dashboard, his current favorite spot. This meant I would later be cleaning paw prints off the dash and nose prints off the inside of the windshield and my arms weren’t long enough to do it easily, but doing the cleaning was far easier than getting Eddie to change his mind.

“Think we’ll have anyone show up?” Julia asked.

“Rowan,” I said. “Thanks to her son, she recently discovered that she likes fantasy. I have a stack of Tad Williams and Ursula K. Le Guin books waiting.”

Julia made a face at Rowan’s name but didn’t say anything.

I knew many people found Rowan Bennethum unfriendly and abrasive, but I tended to find her dryly dark comments funny. Rowan had become a dependable bookmobile patron since last summer when she’d started working from home three days a week. She was a loan officer for the local bank and, thanks to computer magic, had convinced the higher-ups that not only would she get more done at home, but it would be even more secure.

Julia, in her early sixties, was about fifteen years older than Rowan, so her animosity couldn’t be due to high school rivalries. And as far as I knew, they weren’t related. I looked up from the daily chore of picking Eddie hair off the long carpeted riser that served as both sitting area and a step to reach the top shelves. Vertically inflated people, such as Julia, didn’t need the step, but vertically efficient people such as myself found it very helpful.

“Why don’t you like her?” I asked.

After a moment, Julia said, “Personality conflict.”

I was about to drill down and get a real answer out of her when I realized the dashboard was feline-free. “Have you seen Eddie?”

Julia glanced around. “He was here a second ago.”

Cats had an amazing ability to compact themselves into half the volume they should reasonably occupy. I’d found Eddie in places a small squirrel shouldn’t have been able to fit into, including the thin space underneath my dresser and out a window when the window was open maybe two inches.