Duncan coming here was going to break my heart. But this was worse than what I’d braced myself for. It wasn’t just the agony of wanting someone I couldn’t have. It was like the guy I’d loved so much for so long no longer existed—even though he was standing right next to me.
It was more like grief than heartbreak.
There was an upside, though. The old Duncan had been intimidatingly awesome.
That was not a problem anymore.
The tour took us two hours—hours when I should have been making dinner for Babette, or organizing library shelves, or putting together that dumb hanging sculpture I’d ordered.
Over and over, I tried to tell Duncan about the building’s history—how a famous bank robber had tried to hide here in the 1890s before being apprehended, and how it had been used as a military hospital during World War II, and that it had been a set for a movie with Elizabeth Taylor in the 1950s. And over and over, he countered those amazing stories with questions like, “Why don’t any of the classroom doors have locks on them?”
I give myself credit for doing an epic job of stalling, pausing to call his attention to big things and minutia alike—from our painted rock garden to our rain-collecting barrels. I showed him the back staircase where we’d painted a number on each step going up, and then added the English word for that number, the Spanish word for it, and the number in braille dots. I showed him how the rubber “floor” of the playground was patterned in Fibonacci spirals. I showed him the fifth-grade science room that had a periodic table painted on the ceiling. I took him past Alice’s room, where she had drawn a semicircle of angles on the floor under the spot where the classroom door opened.
I kept thinking, as the tour went on and on, that he’d finally tell me that he needed to get back to his office. But he didn’t. Finally, when there was nowhere left but the library, I made an attempt to just cruise by.
“Wait,” he said, pointing at the library doors.
“Ah,” I said, as if I’d forgotten the very place that I was in charge of. “Of course.”
Duncan opened the door for me, looking impatient.
When Max and Babette had renovated the building thirty years before, they’d been dead split over putting the library down on the lower level, near the entrance, so that kids had to walk right past it to get in and out of the building—or on the higher level, so it had views to the ocean and felt like a tree house. In the end, they compromised and did … both. The main entrance to the library was down low, off the courtyard, but they’d busted a hole in the ceiling and built a staircase to the room directly above it, making it two stories tall.
When I’d arrived, Babette had helped me paint the stair risers like a stack of giant books, and it was the first thing you saw when you walked in.
It was exactly what a library should be, in my view. Whimsical. Inviting. Infused with possibility. Not to mention sunny, comfortable, and homey. I wanted kids to come in and out all the time. I wanted the doors to be open from the moment the first kid arrived on campus in the morning until the very last kid left.
I kept a collection of crazy pens in a cup on my desk to entice the kids to come see me: pens with troll hair, and googly eyes, and pom-poms. One pen had an hourglass embedded in it, one looked like a syringe filled with blue liquid, and one was shaped like a very realistic bone. I had pens in the shapes of feather quills, and pens with bendy mermaid tails, and pens that told fortunes like a Magic 8 Ball. I had sloth pens, unicorn pens, and pens with pom-poms.
I had other toys on my desk, too—a fancy kaleidoscope, a Newton’s cradle, a set of magnetic sculpture balls, and a collection of spinning tops. I had a Rubik’s Cube, too, although it didn’t work as well as it used to since one of the first-graders had decided to solve it by peeling off and rearranging the stickers.
All to make the circulation desk feel like fun.
All to let the kids know they were safe with me.
I wanted to make sure that if kids felt an impulse at any moment to pop by the library, there’d