through the window, spatula in hand.
“What are you doing back there?” CJ called to him.
“I was c-conscripted,” Dennis lamented.
“He’s paying for all the free food he’s scrounged from me over the years,” Maggie corrected. “Mike is sick, so Stuttering Sam is your cook du jour.”
CJ looked through the window to see if Dennis was going to take offense at the name, but either he hadn’t heard or he’d chosen to take out his irritation on the food preparation process.
“Let’s hope you cook better than you . . . well, better than you do anything,” CJ said.
“What’ll you have, sugar?” Maggie asked.
“The usual,” CJ said, and the moment the words left his mouth he marveled at the sound of them. He’d been in town long enough to have a usual. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that.
Maggie hung his ticket on the wire, and Dennis took it, aiming a mischievous grin at his friend. While CJ waited for his food, he pulled a small notepad from his coat pocket and then found a pen hiding amid a jumble of receipts and gum wrappers in the other pocket. He sat there for a while, alone with his thoughts, and then began to jot some of those thoughts down. It felt good to be doing that; it meant he was serious about actually plying his trade—his real one, not the one that had him stocking shelves and suffering electrical burns.
“What are you doing?” Maggie had come up to him, not hiding the fact that she was straining to read what he’d written.
“I’m just making a few notes to myself,” he said. He let it go at that. He had few hard and fast rules about writing, but one of them was that it was bad luck to talk about a project before one had fleshed most of it out on the page—even the small nonfiction piece he was working on.
“So now you’ll be writing about Adelia, from Adelia,” Maggie said. Seeing that he was about to argue that, she waved him off. “I know, I know. Your novels aren’t autobiographical.”
She picked up the coffeepot and stalked off, muttering and leaving CJ to marvel how he had angered a woman without saying a word. Then again he’d worked that magic on Janet more than once, so he supposed it was a talent.
As he started to put pen to paper, Maggie slid a plate of food in front of him, and before she could walk off again he said, “Maggie, have you heard about anything strange going on with the prisons?”
As soon as the question went out he could hear how strange it sounded—how open-ended. And if he had any doubt about that, all he needed was the look on Maggie’s face to confirm it.
“What’s on your mind?” she asked after a moment’s thought.
CJ picked up his fork and shrugged. “I’m not sure. Last time I talked to Gramps, he mentioned something about it.” He chuckled. “Of course, he was also convinced his toaster was out to get him, so who knows?”
Maggie shared his laugh and then leaned forward on the counter.
“Honey, if you want strange, you don’t have to look any further than right here,” she said.
CJ suspected that was true. With a smile he speared a sausage and took a bite. When he looked up, Dennis was watching him through the serving window, and he was smiling too.
There was always something that felt odd to CJ about going to a library, and it had everything to do with the fact that most people had their introductions to the library when they were children, and then they went through a period where going to the library was the furthest thing from their minds. Once they finally, as adults, returned to it—perhaps with their own children—there was the feeling of stepping into a place where they no longer fit. For those who attended college, where a good library would serve as their best study partner, this process was circumvented. But that didn’t eliminate the oddness they felt when stepping back into a place where, at one time, they couldn’t see over the counter.
The smell was the first thing that struck CJ, taking him back to his childhood in the same way getting out of the car at the house on Lyndale did his first day in Adelia. Still, that was the only thing similar. The library had undergone a renovation at some point, and it looked modern now, with an extra wing to accommodate