An Imperfect Librarian - Elizabeth Murphy [81]
“Basta!”
“Look,” he says. “The Room is waking up.”
“You know something else I’ve had enough of?”
“I’d say biscuits and coffee. You should learn to share.”
“Enough listening to you accusing me of being hypnotized by the computer screen when you’re hypnotized by what you see through my office window. Enough serving you coffee and cookies, cleaning up your mess. No more advice, no more making my life any more complicated than–”
“Blaming again. You’re the one who loves to keep tally. How many times is it that you’ve blamed me? If you gave me a biscuit for each one, I’d leave here satiated for a change.”
“I’m not giving you any more cookies. There’s enough crumbs under your chair to feed you for a week.”
“I knew you were a cheap fellow but I never imagined you’d resort to feeding me biscuits from the floor.”
“They’re not biscuits! How often do I need to explain the difference?”
“How often? Do you want an exact number or merely an estimation?”
“I’m struggling to have a serious conversation yet you sabotage it every time.”
“There’s your other problem. You’re too serious,” he says.
“I have more important things to do than waste my time on conversations that go round in circles. Didn’t you say you were leaving?”
“More important things to do, have you?” he says. “Like chasing after women who are unavailable?”
“I refuse to continue this conversation. I refuse to allow you to play the psychologist. I told you that before. I simply want to be left alone.”
“You said, ‘I told you that before’ already.”
“There you go again. Why do you have to twist and torque my meaning?”
“You can’t use it as a verb.”
“Will you stop handling my papers, jabbing at my computer keyboard. What can’t you use as a verb?”
“Torque is a measure used in physics so I can’t very well torque your meaning or torque anything for that matter.”
“I’m not in the mood for this today, Henry.”
He abandons my desk and moves over to the coffee stand. He opens the lid of the cookie container then slides a cookie into his mouth like a child stealing a sweet. He turns side on. He’s wearing the longest shirt I’ve ever seen on him. His belt isn’t even visible.
I place my hand on the doorknob. “I’m not in the mood.”
Henry chews without paying attention to me. “You should try repeating yourself less.”
“Some people can’t understand you no matter how often you repeat things. That’s why this conversation is such a waste of time.”
“You’re the one doing most of the gabbing. Change the subject.”
I open the door to close the conversation. “Goodbye, Henry.”
He looks down to his belly, swats off something from his shirt, shakes his head, then, for his parting line, says, “Bloody biscuit crumbs.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
tempest in a teacup
CYRIL TELLS ME ABOUT THE Sheila’s Brush that hit the city less than twenty-four hours ago. “It’s the wife of St. Patrick sweeping away the last of the winter storms,” he says. We travel to the pond on borrowed snowshoes. There’s no sign of Norah anywhere. I hardly recognize Cliffhead in the snow. If it wasn’t for the strips of orange plastic that Norah tied to the trees during the summer, Cyril and I would never be able to follow the trail.
The gulls and crows are scarce. Cyril says if you sit still with some seed on your hand, the chickadees will eat out of it because there’s so little food available to them now. We don’t have time to feed the birds. I want to walk across the pond to retrace the route Norah made me swim from the beaver’s house to the shore. Cyril holds his arm out to stop me. “Where’re you going? See there where the stream runs in, the grass by the bog with the condensation? Mercedes would have my head if she knew we were traipsing on the ice this time of year. There’s nothing here anyway. Where’s this meadow you were telling me about?”
My last visit to the meadow was in the fall. We were on our way back to her house from berry-picking. Norah had filled two five-pound buckets with berries. I had two ice cream containers full. We sat near the