only the day before, I felt my heart sink at the prospect of trying to deal with the woman. That chip on her shoulder was the size of Stone Mountain, and everything you asked of her, everything you said or did, had to be filtered through Beverly’s resentment.
Feeling the familiar twinges of guilt, I recited my comforting mantra to myself: I was as glad to see black library patrons as white, I thought black kids were as cute as white kids, I worked as well with black librarians as white. Except Beverly Rillington.
Still, there were days when Beverly would just do her work and I’d just do mine, and I’d hoped fervently this would be one of those days.
But it wasn’t.
I could hear the book cart slamming into corners as she rolled it along from shelf to shelf. The muttering faded and grew stronger as she turned from the cart to the shelf, then back to the cart. I couldn’t quite make it out, of course, but I had a stronger-than-ever feeling it had to do with my faults.
I sighed and unlocked the desk to get out my scheduling notebook. I had two telephone message slips waiting on the blotter, and they both contained requests for special storytelling times for a couple of day-care centers. WeeOnes had asked for the time I’d slotted for another group; I searched the appointment book and made a note of two different times it would be convenient for them to come. Kid Kare Korner wanted to come in the afternoon; that would be feasible only if I stayed late or if Beverly were willing to do the story hour.
I sighed again. Getting to be a habit.
It would almost be better to work late without getting paid for it than to ask Beverly to do a story time. She violently resented being asked to do it, but she was offended if you didn’t ask. In a cowardly way, I put off making a decision, and began to work on the list of suggested books one of the kindergarten teachers had asked me to prepare. I’d gone over the list compiled by the previous children’s librarian and taken a dislike to a few of the books she routinely recommended, so when a new list had become necessary I’d found myself combing the shelves. I had a pile on the table in front of me I’d been reading, and I picked up the top one to whittle down my stack still further.
“Some of us have to come in here and really work, not just sit at a damn desk,” the muttering resumed, suddenly quite clear.
I clenched my hands. I read another page. If the children’s area had been a real room, instead of a corner of the ground floor, I would have shut the door and had a discussion with Beverly. As it was, I could just hope to ignore her until I could talk to her away from the patrons. There weren’t many, but there were some; I saw Arthur Smith waiting impatiently at the checkout desk while Lillian put a pile of children’s videos into a bag, and Sally had come in and was talking to Perry in a hushed tone by the water fountain. A youngish man I didn’t know was browsing through the new books shelved close to the entrance, and it occurred to me that he’d been there an awfully long time.
To my surprise, Angel came in the double front doors, dressed quietly in blue jeans and a striped T-shirt. She was carrying a shopping bag from Marcus Hatfield and a gift-wrapped box. I didn’t recall Angel ever coming all the way inside the library before, and she was looking around now curiously, her head turning smoothly from side to side like a large cat surveying a new territory.
She spied me and came toward me just as the volcano that was Beverly Rillington erupted.
“Does just one of us work here?” Beverly asked venomously, approaching me from the left side.
“What?” I could not believe I was hearing her correctly, and her stance was even more threatening. Beverly was too close, her hands clenched, leaning forward, aggression in every line of her body. Beverly had never been pleasant, but she was obviously under a stress so extreme she had lost all judgment.
I was afraid that if I stood up Beverly would actually hit me, so I stayed in my chair at the low desk with the open book in one hand. Angel, who was