An Imperfect Librarian - Elizabeth Murphy [74]
“Stop interfering. Leave Francis alone!”
“If you’re foolish enough to care about Francis, you deserve what you get.”
She shakes her head. “Who appointed you judge of what I deserve? How dare you, of all people, pretend to know what I need? Francis was right about you.”
“Meaning?”
“He told me you were spying on me.” She pauses. “He told me there was a librarian watching, checking on me. I didn’t believe him. Who could be that anal to want to spy on other people?”
“Is that to get me back for the comment about being an idiot?”
“It’s to show you that I couldn’t believe you’d be so preoccupied with someone else’s affairs. It’s none of your business what I was doing in that room. If I want to take my father’s materials that’s my business. If Francis wants to help me that’s our business. None of it has anything to do with you.”
“It’s about time you admitted you’re involved with him.”
She pounds her fist on the counter. “I’m not admitting anything. What we were doing is none of your business.”
“That’s where you’re wrong.”
She turns her back to me and faces the sink. “I never should have bothered with you. I shouldn’t have even approached you at the booth that day. I was only doing it to prove to Francis that you were harm–”
“You were using me.”
She picks up the cloth and scrubs the counter again. “I was defending myself. I didn’t know who you were, beyond some computer technician who–”
“I’m a librarian. Don’t you realize that by now? You were dishonest from the beginning, all the way throughout.”
“It’s ironic you interpret it that way. My perspective is the exact opposite.”
“So it’s my fault. Is that it?”
“If you hadn’t interfered–”
I stand up from the table. “If I hadn’t interfered, we may never have met each other.”
“Perhaps that would have been better,” she says.
The sentence has the clarity I’ve been expecting and dreading at the same time. “Goodbye, Norah. Thanks for everything. Lessons, meals, bonfires.”
She throws the cloth in the sink. The counter sighs relief. She goes to the living room then up the stairs to the peak. I take a last glance across the stretch of hardwood floor to the windows. I open the door to the porch. Folio is waiting for me. She has no photos to throw in my face or surprise revelations that make my stomach churn. I pat her head and rub her ears. She licks my hand. “That’s enough now. Stop that. Don’t jump up. Folio. No!” I squeeze out through the door backwards. I hold her off with my hand. She takes one last lick.
In the rear-view mirror I see the red of the hexagon, the same one in the photo she threw on the table. I turn off of Norah’s road onto the two-lane highway. Something small and fast darts in front of me. I slam on the brakes. The car twirls around. I turn the wheel and the car spins in the opposite direction then stops with a thud against the pile of snow on the side of the road. Octavo and Quarto run out of the woods, across the road, then back into the woods again, chasing whatever it was that almost caused me to end up in a ditch. A man knocks on my window.
“You OK, buddy? Need some help?” he says.
I roll down the window. He stares in at me.
“I’m OK. It’s the dogs from the lane to Cliffhead. They were chasing something. I saw it, braked, lost control.”
“That’s Myrick’s hounds. She’s wild as they are, talkin’ to herself like that all the time, livin’ by herself in the woods over the cliff. If somethin’ like that runs out in front of you, keep on drivin’. Run it over if you got to. Don’t kill yourself for a cat, fox or rabbit.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
happy valentine’s, goddess
SO MUCH FOR MODERN MEDICINE. The new man reverts to feeling like the old man after a few weeks into the new year. Mercedes and Cyril lend me their daughter’s room while Cyril finishes renovations in the basement. “You’ll be more comfortable in her room,” Mercedes says. Comfortable in pink? Pink carpet, bedspread, furniture, wallpaper and curtains. Sometimes, in my pink dreams, Norah loves me. I wake in the deepest pink of the night and remember the conversation