77 DAYS UNTIL I CAN LEAVE

Miles and I pass the next week without so much as brushing shoulders in the kitchen.

I don’t think either of us is actively avoiding the other—it’s more like, we both suddenly remember we don’t know each other and have nothing in common beyond our hilariously bad breakups. We’re back in the territory of polite nods, separate dinners, and conversation made via monosyllable.

When we got home, he made a big show of scribbling WANING BAY TOURISM on the calendar, drawing an arrow down the Sunday column, but since then, he hasn’t added anything else.

By the time my Saturday morning shift rolls around, I’m convinced that his adamancy about showing me around was a by-product of the joint we shared.

I’m out the door before he’s even up, the sun and birds out full force, though the air remains crisp. I’m early, as usual, so I decide to walk to work and even stop in at a whitewashed coffee shop overflowing with hanging plants to grab a hot chai.

It’s strange; I’ve driven this way dozens of times, but on foot, I notice new things:

A Tudor house with a lush flower garden and a wooden sign advertising it as a Montessori school. A hobby shop called High Flyers, whose theme seems to be a mix of kites and THC. Then I turn down a residential street, reading the yard signs as I go: one about Bigfoot, another promoting an upcoming arts fair, then a crooked For Sale sign in the shaggy, overgrown lawn of a taffy-green bungalow.

Its white picket fence is in disrepair, some slats entirely missing, and its diamond-paned windows are crawling with ivy. It looks like something from a storybook: magical and cozy, yet somehow wild, mysterious in that irresistible way of fairy-tale houses.

At work, I help Harvey swap out the programming corkboard for the week. Waning Bay Public Library is a small enough operation that it’s usually all hands on deck. You do whatever needs doing, regardless of job title.

While pinning a flyer for Build Your Own Terrarium Night, Harvey says, “You’ve been in brighter spirits this week.”

He bears more than a passing resemblance to Morgan Freeman, and his voice, although raspier and not quite so low, has the same kind of gravitas. It’s a voice that makes you want to do him proud.

“Sorry,” I say quickly. “I’ll be better. About not bringing all of that into work.”

Harvey harrumphs, pushes his gold wire-frame glasses up his nose. “It’s a library, Daphne. If you can’t be a human here, where can you?”

At his kindness, I feel a sting of guilt about my job search. About knowing there’s a technical services librarian position open in Oklahoma, a place I know nothing about that can’t be learned from the musical Oklahoma!

“We’re lucky to have you,” Harvey goes on, hanging the sign-up sheet for Friday’s Dungeons & Dragons tournament. “Just keep bringing your whole heart in for those kids. That’s all.”

The sting redoubles.

Harvey pats the wall, then ambles back to the office, while I move on to dismantling the origami Dinosaur Day display to make room for the Pride Month display. Afterward, I help Ashleigh finish the Juneteenth and Loving Day displays, while she fills me in on her first real date with Craig, delivering each startling tidbit of information in a perfect monotone while I try not to pee myself from laughing.

(When they got to his house after dinner, he made her sit with him in the car for twenty unspeaking minutes while the Phish album he’d put on finished playing, then did the exact same thing after he drove her home.)

“I’m glad someone’s enjoying this,” she says, but I can tell she’s enjoying telling it too. It’s fun and a little thrilling, feeling like we’re kind of, sort of real friends now.

When I get back to my desk, I field a few calls, after which I teach roughly five hundred kids how to sign in to an online game for the five hundredth time.

By then it’s the peak of my workweek: Saturday Story Hour.

Bonus: it’s a warm, cloudless day, so we can take this activity outside.

When we’re settled in a ring in the grass out front, I ask, “Who’s ready to hear a story?”

Hands go up around the circle. Shameless excitement. Open expressions of feelings.

It’s funny: As a kid, I had no idea how to interact with other kids. I felt most at home with Mom and her friends. But as an adult, I find kids so much easier to understand.

They say how they feel, and they show it too. There are fewer ulterior motives and unwritten rules. Silences aren’t unbearably awkward, and abrupt segues to different subjects are the norm. If you want to be friends with someone, you just ask, and if they don’t want to, they’ll probably just tell you.

I clear my throat and open Snappsy the Alligator to get us started, scanning my rapt audience as I begin to read.

Arham, of course, wears his trademark Spider-Man costume. A three-year-old, Lyla, has spaghetti sauce all over her face and dungarees. She’s also sucking on a lemon wedge like it’s a pacifier.

Basically, all is right with the world.

Halfway through our second story, I notice someone approaching from the parking lot, seemingly carried on a burst of summer air and sunshine. He’s gazing at the covered breezeway to the front doors like he’s never seen anything like it, possibly never seen a library, period.

His eyes slice sideways toward us, and I lose my place in the sentence. Miles’s face lights with a grin. He lifts his chin in greeting and draws to a stop just beyond our little ring.

I clear my throat and glance down at the picture book in my hand, finding my place in the sentence to begin reading aloud again.

When I next look up, he’s still there, looking enraptured.

By this story. About anthropomorphic mice. Learning to do gymnastics.

I wish I hadn’t been quite so committed to doing voices for all of the characters before he showed up, because now I’m obliged to keep at it.

So I use my high-pitched squeak for the littlest mouse’s dialogue, and my low grumble for the portly older mouse with the distinguished mustache. Every time I scan the crowd, Miles’s smile is a little bigger, goofier. He keeps looking around at the kids, parents, and nannies, like, Can you believe this shit? Wild!

When I reach The End, the toddlers’ caregivers give the mild applause appropriate for a late-afternoon library trip, whereas Miles sticks his fingers in his mouth and whistles, which somehow instantly turns all fifteen kids from sleepy angels into rowdy buccaneers, drunk on distilled-belowdecks rum. A couple of moms eye my scrubby, wolfish roommate curiously.

He is blissfully unaware, ambling toward me through the crowd as the other patrons gather their diaper bags and sticky-handed children to pull them toward the parking lot.

“I had no idea you could do that,” he says.

“Oh, yeah,” I say, starting back toward the front doors. They whoosh open and we enter the cool, musty quiet. “I’ve been reading since I was six. I’m getting pretty good.”

“I mean the voices,” he clarifies. “You were such a convincing elderly magician mouse.”

“If that impressed you, you should see me do the old woman who lives in a shoe,” I say.

“I’ll clear my Saturdays,” he says.

“I was kidding,” I say.

He grins. “Not me.”

I gesture toward the stacks. “Can I help you find something?”