“Don’t tell me you’re still hoping that life is going to start being fair,” I said, smiling a little. “Do your kids know you’re so unrealistic?”
She laughed. “It’s because of them that I keep on hoping.”
“Speaking of hope,” Josh said, “I heard that Jennifer is trying to find money for more computers in the lab.”
“Oh? She’s been asking me to cut the bookmobile’s budget.”
Josh smirked. “Then I guess we know where that money is going. And who better to get it than the computer lab?”
Though I’d been in the act of reaching out to fill his coffee mug, I abruptly yanked it away. “No way am I pouring you coffee after a remark like that.”
He grinned. Josh, better than anyone other than my friends Rafe and Kristen and my brother Matt, knew exactly how to push my buttons. And he probably enjoyed it more than any of them. Well, except for Matt.
“If you’d wanted to be Jennifer’s favorite,” Josh said, “you shouldn’t have let your cat puke all over her shoes.”
I tried to keep a straight face, but ended up laughing. The day Jennifer had interviewed with the library board, we’d had to abort a bookmobile run and Eddie ended up in the library for the day. In spite of my efforts to keep him contained in my office, my fuzzy friend had wandered out, made a beeline for the candidate’s Italian shoes, and rid himself of some troublesome hair balls.
“Eddie has excellent taste,” Kelsey said, giggling.
I sensed the turn the conversation was about to take, and though I wouldn’t have minded joining a Jennifer-bashing session, I couldn’t. Assistant directors didn’t do that kind of thing. Or at least they shouldn’t. “She’s working a lot of hours.”
“Check it out,” Josh said to Kelsey. “She’s sucking up to the boss when the boss isn’t even here.” He made a vacuum cleaner noise.
“Nice,” I said. “That pretty new manager of the wine store is getting to be a regular patron. If she asks about you again, I know what I’ll tell her.”
“Yeah?” he asked cautiously. “What’s that?”
“Now Josh,” I said as patronizingly as I could, “you know I always tell the truth.” I bestowed a wide smile upon him. “And now I have to get back to the business of the library. Cheers.” I toasted my friends with the sludge in my mug and headed to my office.
But though I’d intended to sit down and get straight to work, I stood at the window for some time, trying not to worry about Leese.
Chapter 3
For the first time in I couldn’t think when, Rafe and Kristen and I had planned to get together for dinner.
Back when I’d first moved to Chilson, the three of us visited every restaurant in Tonedagana County, most of the eateries in Antrim, Charlevoix, Cheboygan, and Emmet Counties, and a few down in Grand Traverse County.
It had started as a casual resolve not to eat in the same place twice, quickly morphed into a Thursday night event, and had solidified Kristen’s resolve to open a restaurant of her own. Since then, however, the three of us, who’d become friends on a beach before we were teenagers, had become so busy with our own lives that coordinating our schedules took a monumental effort.
When Kristen’s restaurant opened, the two of us established a Sunday evening habit of me arriving after the dinner rush for dessert in her office. Often we ate crème brûlé, but sometimes it was a new recipe she wanted to try out.
Rafe and I, because his house so was close to Uncle Chip’s Marina, saw each other frequently. I’d stopped last week to check out his progress on the downstairs bathroom and caught him crouching on the floor and frowning at the beadboard he’d put in the previous week. The tallish and lanky Rafe stood, brushed sawdust out of his straight black hair, and asked what I, as an impartial observer, thought of the knots showing through the paint primer, and had appeared annoyed when I’d said I couldn’t see any knots, even when he was pointing directly at them.
To distract him from an unnecessary scrutiny of his work, I’d suggested the three of us go out to dinner, just like in the old days.
“What’s the matter?” he’d said. “Did my man Ash finally figure out that you were never going to learn the infield fly rule and he couldn’t take it any longer?” He’d grinned. “Or have you finally realized that you’re deeply in love with me and are only waiting for the right time to break it off with him and fall into my arms.” He spread his arms wide and made loud kissy noises.
I rolled my eyes. “Eww. No, they’re down a couple of deputies and he pulled night shift this month.” My boyfriend was also taking classes at the local community college; it was a minor miracle our paths ever crossed. Still, I saw him more than I’d seen my previous boyfriend, an emergency room doctor. If Ash’s shift hadn’t been too exhausting, we got together to run or bike a few mornings a week, but mornings were growing darker and darker and I wasn’t sure how much longer that would last.
I tried to remember the last time Ash and I had done even a semiromantic thing together. Dinner? Movie? Snuggling in front of his fireplace? It had been weeks, but I couldn’t pin it down. Why wasn’t I making sure those things happened?
Suddenly, I realized that Rafe was staring at me with an odd expression. I felt my face turn warm and quickly said, “Kristen’s flying solo now that Scruffy is back in New York, but we could add a fourth. Who are you seeing these days? Invite her along.”
Rafe’s love life was a complicated thing. As far as Kristen and I could figure, three months was the maximum he’d dated anyone. We figured that’s how long it took a woman to realize that she was never going to change him. Of course, his versions of the multitude of breakups varied from “Too clingy” to “Couldn’t stand how she laughed” to “Didn’t like beer,” but Kristen and I knew too many of the women to believe any of his explanations.
“Right now I’m footloose and fancy free.” He’d dropped to his hands and knees to peer at the woodwork, but looked up at me, flashing his smile, a bright white against the permanently tanned skin he’d inherited from his distant Native American ancestors. “Want to hear what happened with Stacey?”
“No.” I had no idea who Stacey was, but I was already on her side. “Do you want to do dinner or not?”
In the end, it turned out he did. For the next two days we had a three-person round of texting about dinner details and it was seven o’clock when Rafe parked his battered Jeep Cherokee at the Weathervane in Charlevoix. Originally a grist mill, its riverside location next to a drawbridge was a big attraction in summer, when the number of boats passing through from Lake Charlevoix to Lake Michigan seemed to rival the number of cars driving over the bridge itself.
Since the weather was still mild, we sat on the deck. Kristen and I ordered wine, and our designated driver sighed and ordered a beer. “Don’t give me any more,” he told our waitress. “No matter how much I beg.” He gave her a huge grin.
When she smiled back, Kristen and I exchanged glances. Rafe’s long-standing habit was to flirt outrageously with female waitstaff, and more often than not, at the end of the meal he’d have a new number in his cell phone and a smirk on his face.
“Plan number one,” I said to Kristen.
“On it.” She gave a thumbs-up.
Rafe looked from one of us to the other. “There isn’t a snowball’s chance that either one of you is going to tell me what’s going on, so I won’t waste my precious time in asking.”
“Should have figured that out years ago,” Kristen said.
I nodded. “Think of the things you could have accomplished with the energy you’ve expended so uselessly.”
“Moved mountains.” Kristen made a shoving motion.
“Learned two new languages,” I said.
“Invented a cure for the common cold.”