When Billy was a child, she wanted to be a librarian because she assumed she would spend her days reading. Experience had long since relieved her of this idea. But every once in a while, her job struck her as very nearly perfect. She was having one of those moments—or rather, she should have been having one of those moments—on Monday morning. During a lull in activity, she was sitting at the checkout desk, sipping her latte and perusing a copy of Publishers Weekly for ideas on new books to order for the library. Ordinarily this was one of her favorite things to do, but today she was having difficulty concentrating on the page in front of her. Instead she kept seeing a picture of Luke hanging off of the edge of that bridge, the river’s boulder-strewn rapids rushing beneath him. She shook her head a little now to dislodge this image from her mind and tried to refocus her attention. But there was something else bothering her, something other than Luke’s recklessness. She stood up and, coming out from behind the checkout desk, walked over to the windows that faced Main Street. There, three bicycles idled, unlocked, on the sidewalk in front of the library. The boys were still here. She’d forgotten about them. They’d been so quiet—too quiet, she realized now. She headed back to the computer area, passing Rae on the way.
“Everything all right?” Rae asked, looking up from the books she was reshelving. Billy had debriefed her that morning about the incident with Luke on the bridge, and Rae, who’d been thoroughly exasperated with him, seemed especially sensitive to Billy’s mood now.
“It will be,” Billy said under her breath, walking faster. She turned right after the last aisle of books and saw the boys grouped around a computer, their urgent whispers punctuated only by the occasional guffaw.
“Oh my God, she’s so hot,” Billy heard Joey Stengel say as he pointed at the screen. “I would totally go out with her.”
“Yeah, right. Like she’s going to go out with an eleven-year-old,” his friend Clay Lewis said.
“Hello, boys,” Billy said, coming up behind them. Joey and Clay and Clay’s younger brother, Theo, all jumped. Joey hurried to close the page, but not before Billy had a chance to see what they were looking at: a suntanned and windblown woman in a lace-up pale pink teddy, a come-hither expression on her face. Billy recognized a Victoria’s Secret model when she saw one.
“That’s it. No more lingerie Web sites for the three of you. And Theo,” Billy said, “you are nine years old. You are way too young for this.”
“Sorry, Ms. Harper,” the boys all mumbled more or less in unison.
“Now, outside, all three of you,” she said, shooing them away. “Go get some sunshine and fresh air.” And as they shuffled out she wished, not for the first time, that the library’s Internet filter, which screened out pornography Web sites, would also screen out lingerie catalogs. She made a mental note to speak to Anton, the high school student who was their unofficial tech support, about this.
She started to push in the chairs the boys had been sitting on, then changed her mind and sat down on one herself. With a quick glance behind her to make sure no one was watching, she reopened the web browser and typed “Cal Cooper Seattle” into the search bar. Five minutes later she was still skimming over web pages, so absorbed in what she was doing that she didn’t even notice Rae come up behind her.
“What are we looking at?” she asked Billy.
“Nothing,” Billy said guiltily, closing the web browser. “Is anyone else here?”
Rae shook her head. “Just you, me, and the mice. And speaking of the mice, it might be time to call pest control again.”
“Here, have a seat,” Billy said, indicating the chair next to hers. “I want to show you something.”
Rae sat obligingly. Billy relaunched the browser, opened the history, and clicked on a site. “What’s ‘Forty under Forty’?” Rae asked of the article Billy had pulled up.
“It’s Seattle Magazine’s annual ranking of the most influential young people in the city,” Billy said, clicking through the slideshow. She stopped on number seventeen, Cal Cooper. In the photograph, he was dressed in a crisp blue shirt and suit pants, and standing in a glassed-in corner office, a view of downtown Seattle behind him.
“Very nice,” Rae said. “He’s got a killer smile. I definitely approve of”—she leaned closer to read his bio—“Cal Cooper. But why are we looking at him?”
“Because he’s the guy who was driving the Porsche. Remember? The one Officer Sawyer pulled over on Friday afternoon?”
“That’s him?” Rae said. “Okay, yeah. I can see a resemblance. I mean, I didn’t have a great view of him from across the street.” She shook her head. “Jeez, he’s even better looking than that car of his. How did you know who he was, though? You wouldn’t even come to the window to see him.”
“I met him on Saturday,” Billy explained, “at Daisy’s wedding. He’s Allie Ford’s brother. And . . .” She hesitated, but only for a second. “I’ve been in that car, too. He gave me a ride in it.”
“And you’re just mentioning this to me now?” Rae said accusingly. “After we’ve been here for two hours?”
“I know. But . . . nothing happened. We had a five-minute conversation at the reception, and then, when Officer Sawyer called about Luke, I told him—Cal—that my car was in the shop. He gave me a ride. That’s it. End of story.”
Rae raised an eyebrow. “If that’s ‘end of story,’ why are you Googling him?”
“Because . . . I was curious, obviously,” Billy admitted. “And because . . . he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring,” she added. “At least, not at the wedding.”
Rae started to say something, but Billy held up a hand to silence her. “No, it’s not what you think,” she said, returning to the browsing history and opening another web page. “See?” she said, gesturing at the screen. “He’s married. He’s very married.”
“‘Beauty and the Builder,’” Rae murmured, reading the title of the feature in Seattle Met Magazine, and studying the photograph that accompanied it. In it, a barefoot Cal, wearing a crisp white shirt and impeccably faded blue jeans, was sitting on a white couch next to his wife, a petite blonde in a sleeveless white dress with an asymmetrical neckline. The apartment was also white—white rugs, white couches, white coffee tables—with only a few hints of subtle color in it, mainly grays and sea foam greens. What would it be like to live someplace like that? Billy wondered. Someplace that perfect? And her mind went, involuntarily, to the state of her own house when she’d left it that morning. Breakfast dishes in the kitchen sink with congealed egg yolk on them, a hamper in the laundry room overflowing with dirty clothes, a chewed-on bone of Murphy’s that she’d almost tripped over in the hall on her way out the door.
“That’s his apartment?” Rae asked in disbelief.
Billy nodded. “And that’s his wife,” she said. “Meghan Mills-Cooper. She’s an interior designer. They work together sometimes, according to this article. The rest of the time, apparently, they’re just wearing their perfect clothes, sitting on their perfect furniture, living their perfect lives.”
“Any children?” Rae asked.
“No, or at least not when this article was written. But he says somewhere that he wants them. I’m sure they’ll be perfect, too.”
“Hmm. I don’t know about that apartment, though,” Rae said doubtfully. “I mean, you couldn’t drink a glass of red wine in that living room, much less have a child running around in it.” Rae was very fond of red wine, less fond of children.
“Wait until you see this,” Billy said, clicking on the browser history again and pulling up another photograph. This one had been taken at the American Institute of Architects Seattle Honor Awards reception in 2015. In it, Cal wore a suit and his killer smile. His wife, standing next to him, wore a silver cocktail dress that probably cost more than the twelve most expensive items in Billy’s closet combined. “Look at her,” she said, pointing to Meghan. “How is it even possible for someone to have a waist that small?”
“Photoshop?” Rae suggested.
“Then they’ve photoshopped all of her.”
“Oh, please,” Rae said dismissively. “She looks like a milk-fed calf. And don’t think for one minute that men find that attractive, either. They don’t. They like a woman with a little extra flesh on her,” she added, poking at her own waist. “Really. It’s because of evolution. They did a study on it.”
“I’ll have to remind myself of that the next time I get on the scale. Right now, though, we need to get back to work.”
“Indeed, we do,” Rae said, but when Billy started to get up, Rae stopped her.
“Billy?”
“Yes?”
“I’m proud of you.”
“For what? Surfing the Internet during working hours?”
“No, for noticing Mr. Porsche. First you checked to see if he was wearing a wedding ring, and then you Googled him. Even if he is married, I’d say that’s progress. You were interested. That’s a good thing.”
“I guess,” Billy said noncommittally.
“Of course . . . he’s no Beige Ted,” Rae drawled.
Billy rolled her eyes, but as she went back to the checkout desk, she thought about Beige Ted. His real name was Ted Whitaker, and Billy had dated him, briefly, two years ago. She’d met him at the library. He was an accountant whose office was down the block, and whose hobby of growing bonsai trees made him a frequent visitor to the library’s gardening section. (Who knew there were so many bonsai books? Certainly not Billy.) The two of them had struck up a casual friendship, and when he’d asked her out, she’d thought, why not? She hadn’t dated much since she and Luke had moved to Butternut three years before, and given her public role in the community, she was determined to date only someone she considered a safe choice. Ted was safe. He was a respected, if forgettable, figure in town. He was attractive, too, although in such a bland way that when Billy wasn’t with him, she could rarely hold a clear image of him in her mind.
They’d gone out on a few dates, and they might have gone out on more but for one thing: Billy introduced Ted to Luke. She’d been warned about how difficult it might be to introduce a prospective boyfriend to her son, but in this case, it had been anticlimactic. Ted had come to pick her up for dinner, and she’d brought him into the den, where the babysitter was reading a magazine and Luke was working on an elaborate Lego construction.
“Luke, this is Ted,” Billy had said brightly. “Ted, this is Luke.” Luke had looked up and, leaning back on his heels, given Ted a thorough once-over. What Billy had seen in Luke’s expression was not anxiety or jealousy or any of the other things she’d thought she might see, but instead, a complete and total lack of interest.
“Hi, Ted,” Luke had said dismissively, and he’d gone back to his Legos.
It was right around this time, too, that Rae had started referring to Ted as Beige Ted. Billy couldn’t remember now if it was because he often wore beige clothing, or his sandy hair and light brown eyes could be construed as beige, or his personality was somewhat colorless. In any case, the nickname stuck, and after Billy heard Luke—who must have heard it from Rae—refer to him as Beige Ted, she knew it was time to break things off.
Billy was settling in again at the checkout desk when the front door opened, and Maggie Donahue, a pretty, blond mother in her early thirties, came in with her three children, all of whom were under the age of six. Maggie always seemed a little frazzled—and who could blame her?—but this morning she seemed exhausted. “Hey, what’s going on?” Billy asked, coming to meet her.
“Nothing. We just had a bad night,” Maggie said, barely suppressing a yawn. “Bella’s teething,” she added of the eleven-month-old she was holding, “and she was up and down every few hours.”
“Here, let me take her,” Billy said, reaching for Bella and settling her on her hip. Elliot, Maggie’s five-year-old, scampered off now. Billy knew where he was going: to the children’s area, to pull out all the books on airplanes, and then to lie on his stomach and stare at the pictures in them. Ian, Maggie’s three-year-old, was shier. He hid himself partially behind his mom and looked up at Billy with a gentle curiosity. “I remember when Luke was teething,” Billy said now, looking down at Bella, whose fuzzy blond hair called to mind a dandelion in bloom. “My grandmother kept telling me to let Luke suck on a dishcloth dipped in bourbon, and I kept thinking, ‘Thanks, but I’d rather not have a drunken baby on my hands.’ Have you tried the teething necklaces, though? They can be helpful sometimes.”
“I have a couple of those,” Maggie said. “I just can’t find them. I think the dog might have gotten to them.” She yawned again, and Billy smiled sympathetically. She remembered how chaotic those days were, and that was with one child, not three. Of course, unlike her, Maggie was married, but married to a man who traveled at least two weeks out of every month. Maybe, in a way, that was harder, Billy mused. To have that help and then not to have that help. Billy’s parents, at least, had always been there.
Bella babbled something now, and Billy, whose nose was inches from her wispy blond hair, said, “She smells wonderful, like . . . cinnamon toast.”
“That’s what she had for breakfast. I think she got some of it in her hair.”
Billy nestled Bella against her and reached out for Ian’s hand. He smiled cautiously and, coming out from behind his mother, put his little palm inside hers.
“Go,” she said to Maggie, pointing her chin at the door. “Make a break for it. I can watch them while you get a coffee at Pearl’s.”
“Oh, God, I would love a cappuccino, Billy. Five minutes, I promise,” she said, making the Scout’s honor sign.
“Go,” Billy said again, though when she was gone, Billy had Rae to contend with. Rae didn’t say anything; she didn’t need to. Her look said it all: I don’t know why you’re always doing that for her, Billy. You are not a babysitting service.
Billy’s look back at her said, I know, I know. But she looks so tired. And it’s only for five minutes. And let’s face it, her kids are so cute. And Billy felt the little pang she got every once in a while when she held someone else’s baby. A pang accompanied by the knowledge that while she’d always wanted another child, the opportunity to have one was very possibly slipping away. Billy smiled down now at Bella, and Bella smiled back at her, revealing a tiny front tooth just coming in. “There it is,” Billy said, “the tooth that kept you and your mommy awake last night.” She let go of Ian’s hand long enough to smooth out Bella’s cinnamon toast hair, then said to Rae, who was hovering disapprovingly nearby, “Do you want to smell her head?”
“Her head? No. Why?”
“Because it smells so good. It’s like, you know, a thing. Smelling babies’ heads.”
“Not for me, it isn’t,” Rae said.
“Your loss,” Billy said blithely. She took Bella and Ian over to the children’s area where, as predicted, their older brother Elliot was already sprawled out on the rug, surrounded by books. Billy perched on one of the little chairs, at a little table, and balanced Bella on her lap. “Do you want to do a puzzle?” she asked Ian. A wooden puzzle with large, easy-to-grasp pieces was on the tabletop.
Ian shook his head. “No,” he said, pointing to it, his blue eyes serious. “Missing piece.”
“That’s true. It does have a missing piece.” Billy sighed. “No sooner do we buy a new puzzle and put it out than one of its pieces goes missing. I don’t know what becomes of them, Ian. It’s a mystery.”
Ian’s eyes widened. He liked the idea of a mystery, Billy saw. “Who do you think could be taking them?” she asked.
He considered this. “A monster?” he said finally. Softly. He didn’t look afraid at this possibility, though. He looked fascinated.
“Maybe.” Billy smiled. “But if it is, it’s a friendly monster.”
He had some ideas about this, and by the time his mom had come back with her cappuccino, they’d talked about the monster—a puzzle monster—at length, and even done the puzzle, despite the missing piece. Billy had also put Bella down on the rug and followed her around as she crawled, pulling books out of the bottom shelves with gleeful abandon. After their mom had collected them, Billy reshelved these books, and thought about what Luke had been like when he was Ian’s age.
He was so sweet, so curious and, in a way, so much easier than he was now. Yes, he’d needed her more then, in more immediate and practical ways than he did today—needed her to run his bath, tie his shoes, and make his chicken fingers. Motherhood was physical then, and physically tiring. But at least she’d understood what he needed. He needed her to love him, take care of him, and keep him safe. She’d never doubted her ability to do these things. Not really. Not after the first new mother jitters had worn off. She’d thought that this would be enough, that this love would see them through.
When, she wondered, shelving a last book, had things gotten so complicated? Yes, Luke still needed her. She knew that. But she didn’t always know who he needed her to be, the loving parent or the disciplinarian? And the rules . . . the rules were constantly changing. Be involved, but not too involved. Foster independence, but not too much independence. There was always some elusive medium she couldn’t find.
It wasn’t just the rules that were always changing. Luke seemed always to be changing, too. This, it turned out, was the most fascinating and exhausting and challenging part of raising a child. You, the parent, might feel as if you were an established person with specific characteristics, interests, and traits. But your child was always changing from one year to the next. Sometimes from one month, week, or day to the next. Whereas the young boy of ten might give you a hug when he got home from school, the eleven-year-old might suddenly one day not just stop hugging but also appear to be altogether appalled by the possibility. The boy who had loved drawing in middle school might one day put away his colored pencils and never use them again. She remembered picking Luke up after school about six months ago on a rainy day, and when she’d asked him how school had been, instead of giving her his usual commentary about everything from the funny stories his history teacher had told them to amusing tales of his table in the cafeteria, he’d simply said, “It was okay.” And then he was silent for the rest of the ride home. She’d tried to cajole him with stories of her day at the library, but he’d seemed intensely preoccupied, and eventually she’d turned on the car radio. That general silence had prevailed since, undermining the confidence she used to feel parenting Luke. She would give anything to get their easy camaraderie back. Give anything to know the right thing to say and do again, when everything she said and did now felt tentative and uncertain, a test balloon she was sending up to see how Luke would respond.
Just as Billy finished straightening up the children’s area, there was a flurry of activity at the checkout desk. The summer tourist season was under way in Butternut now, and everyone wanted the perfect book to take to the beach, or read on the dock at their cabin, or maybe just fall asleep with in a lakeside hammock. Along with choosing which books to order, recommending books to patrons was the best part of Billy’s job, and she quite happily took it upon herself to find the right book for everyone. This took a lot of reading on Billy’s part. The Jane Austen books were for the back porch only. On her bedside table there was always a stack of contemporary fiction and nonfiction.
The rest of the morning flew by, and after she’d eaten her brown bag lunch on the library’s back porch and was settling back in to work at the checkout desk, she heard a familiar voice say, “Ms. Harper?”
“Hi, Mara,” Billy said, looking up and smiling at Mara Shepard, who, at ten years old, read more than anyone else who patronized the Butternut Library. “Are you done with those already?” Billy asked her of the stack of Louisa May Alcott novels Mara was balancing in her arms.
Mara nodded and slid them across the desk to Billy.
“How many times does that make for this series?” Billy asked, opening the top book—Little Women—and sliding the wand over its bar code to check it back in.
“Three times,” Mara said. And then she added shyly, “But I still cry every time I read the scene when Beth dies.”
“I know,” Billy said with a sigh. “Just thinking about it, even now, is enough to get my tear glands working. When I was your age, I used to reread it and think maybe this time it would end differently. But of course it never did. What are you going to read next?” she asked, checking the second book back in.
“I don’t know. Do you have any suggestions?”
Billy smiled. She always had a suggestion for Mara. She had never not had a suggestion for Mara. And what was so satisfying about Mara was that, unlike some of the patrons who asked for a recommendation from Billy, Mara actually followed it. She read the book and then, more often than not, she read it again. Since Mara had started coming here five years ago—her family lived across the street from the library—Billy had overseen her reading list, starting with her personal favorites, the Little House books, and progressing through the Betsy-Tacy books and the Chronicles of Narnia, with many other books between. Mara showed no sign of slowing down.
“I do have a recommendation for you, Mara,” Billy said, jumping up and coming out from behind the checkout desk. “I’ve been saving this for you to read next year, but I think you’re ready for it now.” She led Mara to the Ls in the fiction section and ran her finger along the book spines until she found it. She pulled it out—it was a lovely leather-bound edition—and presented it to Mara.
Mara examined the title. “A Wrinkle in Time?”
“That’s right.”
“Is it good?”
“It’s really good.”
“All right. I’ll read it.” Mara smiled.
“Let me know what you think of it,” Billy said. As they went to check it out, she envied Mara reading it for the first time.
Once Mara left, the afternoon dragged. Billy was rarely bored at work because she didn’t have time to be bored, but occasionally the day could feel heavy on her hands. The new books that had come in recently needed to be processed, cataloged, and covered with a clear plastic film for protection before she could shelve them. When she was done with that, there were bookkeeping, budgeting, and preparing for the next board meeting. At one point, staring at her computer screen, she felt her eyelids droop. The library’s ambient noises weren’t helping—the drone of the air conditioner, the humming and clicking of the copy machine, even the rythmic ticking of the antique grandfather clock that was a gift from one of the patrons. All of these made her feel it would be a miracle if she could keep herself awake. But she did. And by three o’clock, she got a second wind and decided to do some housekeeping, something that she enjoyed doing much more at the library than at home. “I don’t think the new cleaning woman is dusting,” she commented to Rae as she ran a feather duster over one of the shelves.
“Genevieve?” Rae said of the woman Billy had recently hired to clean the library after hours once a week. “Oh, Genevieve is as blind as a bat.”
“Hmm.” Billy frowned. “Well, she might have mentioned that.” She watched as the dust motes she’d disturbed swirled in the sunlight slanting in through the west-facing windows. “Rae,” she called as her friend started to wheel the book cart back to the book return bin.
“Yes?”
“I called my mother this morning. You know, about Luke.” This conversation had taken place in the bathroom at home, with Billy running the shower so Luke could not hear her as she told her mom about Saturday’s incident.
“What did she say?”
“Well, she said if I wanted to send him to North Woods Adventures for Teens—a program Officer Sawyer suggested—she’d split the cost with me.”
“That was nice of her.”
“It was. But . . . when I broached the subject with Luke at the breakfast table, he said, ‘No. No way.’ The thing is, though, I think he’d really like it. A year ago, he would have jumped at the chance to go. I mean, the program for his age is ‘The Call of the Woods: Hiking, Canoeing, and Camping the Superior Hiking Trail.’ It’s two weeks with three counselors and twelve other boys. Shouldn’t that sound like heaven to him?”
“It probably does. He just doesn’t want to give you the satisfaction of admitting it,” Rae said.
Billy, still dusting, frowned. “I was on their Web site last night. I think it would be good for him. I don’t want it to feel like a punishment, though.”
“It doesn’t sound like a punishment,” Rae said. “And even if it was”—she shrugged—“that’s your call.”
“You sound like my mother.” During their phone call this morning, her mother had said, “You don’t need to be his friend right now. You need to be his parent. And if, as his parent, you feel strongly about him going on this trip, then he should go. Stop doubting your own authority.”
And Rae, as if privy to this conversation, gave Billy a reassuring pat on the shoulder and said, “You’re a good mom, Billy. You just have to trust your instincts.”
Billy was about to point out that her instincts seemed to be failing her lately, but Mr. Finch came in then for his late afternoon nap and stopped to chat with her on the way to his armchair.