“Looks like you’re pretty busy,” said Brooke.
“I could swing it,” said Jacqui. “It’s great you’re back. You were down in the city, right? Before? You’re not on Facebook, are you?” Brooke was on Facebook, but her account was hidden, except to a handful of close family and friends. Jacqui said, “There’s this group for young women, professionals. I could add you. For networking.”
“I’ll give you my number,” said Brooke. Maybe a little networking wouldn’t be so bad. So she wrote it down, with her email, pushed the brochure back, and Jacqui stuffed it into her crowded bag. Her kid was really squawking now, pulling on her hair again, and Jacqui rolled her eyes playfully, like this was adorable. Brooke knew only a few people her age who were having kids already, and this was her first instance of seeing it in real life. To be honest, it just looked cumbersome. Marianna, whose daughter she babysat, was perpetually exhausted.
“I’ll be in touch,” said Jacqui. “And keep my card around. You never know.” Prying her son’s fingers out of her hair again. “Good to see you!” she called out over her shoulder as she hurried out into the world.
An hour later, Lindsay came back to the circulation desk, and Brooke went to straighten the periodicals, which were mostly as straight as they’d been first thing that morning. Someone had taken down the day’s papers but, instead of reading them, they’d fallen asleep under them as though the papers were a tent. The sleeping man was a regular—Brooke recognized his boots—and one of the blessed few who didn’t snore. As she walked past him, she checked out the headlines again, the paper rising and falling gently with each of the man’s breaths.
When Morgan arrived for the afternoon shift, Lindsay and Brooke got to take their lunches—a half hour each, one after the other. Brooke hadn’t brought anything to eat that day, having been lacking in both time and groceries, but after four months at the library, she’d learned there would always be leftover cake in the staff room. This one, with gaudy blue frosting, was from the birthday celebration of one of the women who worked in the Tourist Information Bureau—they shared the library building, along with the Downtown Business Improvement Association—and it was only vaguely stale. Brooke slapped two slices on a plate and then stretched out on the couch to eat them, the plate balanced on her chest as she scrolled on her phone. If anyone was coming, she’d hear them on the stairs with enough time to sit up and look civilized.
Derek hadn’t replied to her texts. She thought of reaching out again, just in case her other texts had been lost in all the hubbub since the story broke, but she wisely resisted the urge. She had sent him three texts in five minutes, and she regretted it now. There were no circumstances in the world under which that would seem cool.
But Derek probably wasn’t thinking about her at all, she knew, so instead she used this time to get caught up on the latest. Nothing had been released since the memos of his team’s resignation, the party trying to act as though it hadn’t just been sunk by a torpedo, and that everybody wasn’t headed for the lifeboats. “Our party is not just about one man,” someone was saying, as though the situation was still salvageable. “We were a party before Derek Murdoch, and we’ll still be a party after he’s gone.” Having finished the cake, Brooke felt a bit ill, but blue icing will do that. She thought about how willing the party had been to make it all about one man back when it seemed that man could deliver an election victory. Derek’s face was everywhere, huge and imposing, on billboards, pamphlets, internet ads. There was relief in the prospect of not having to stare into his eyes all the time, and everywhere, that face she knew so well, and loved, but in images so bland and unseeing.
* * *
—
This was the story she’d been telling herself, and to anybody who asked: the library was a good place to work—there was no overtime, the tasks were not exacting, and it gave her the same experience of public service she’d enjoyed in her last job. It was a similar opportunity to effect change, to make a difference in people’s lives—except now she was being trained on how to deliver naloxone to prevent overdose deaths of vulnerable patrons, and helping new immigrants format their resumes, plus making conversation with frazzled new mothers whose trips to the library saved them from isolation. And there were books, which had once been such an important part of Brooke’s life—her mother had taught high school English and was an avid reader, recommending title after title to her daughter, the downside of this being that Brooke had never learned how to discover books on her own. And then, when Brooke went away to school and got so busy with work, she became estranged from books altogether. She’d fallen out of the habit of reading, and didn’t understand how to fit books back into her life, so now she appreciated her encounters with them here at work, accepting returns, shelving those copies, retrieving others, rearranging the out-of-order titles so that the next person who needed a book would be able to find it. In politics, she’d discovered that so few systems worked—but libraries did. The world was not yet wholly bereft of things to believe in.
But this was still a demotion, the end of a career path that had led nowhere. Her skills and experience didn’t count here, and maybe they never would again, never mind the humiliation of returning home to Lanark cloaked in a shame she could not delineate to Jacqui Whynacht, or anyone. “It was time for a change,” she’d explained to her family and to her friends, but ever so vaguely. Everyone waiting for her to properly account for her situation, but she couldn’t, she wouldn’t, not when she was still waiting to see what might happen next, because there had to be a resolution. And in the meantime, she was waiting, seemingly endlessly some days. The pace at the library could be so slow, she missed the adrenaline rush, and nobody ever went out for drinks after work. The job wasn’t fun, not the way that politics had been fun, and the stakes weren’t as high—but at least it was meaningful. And it was better than working in an open-plan office with meetings all day long, somebody always looking over her shoulder, no place to hide. It was better than having no job at all. Brooke had been counting her blessings, even though by the time her four o’clock home-time came around, she’d been waiting forever, and she’d have to go through the whole routine again tomorrow.
But before tomorrow, she headed down the street to Jake’s Pizzeria, whose proprietor was her father, who’d inherited the business from his father (neither one of them called Jake), and where she’d worked as a waitress all through high school, which is where Derek Murdoch had known her from before he knew her name. To lots of people in town, Brooke was “that girl from the pizza place,” cute enough with a swinging ponytail, but part of the scenery, basically. She’d served Derek several times throughout her teenage years, but he had never paid her any special attention until that night at Nellie’s—but she’d always been able to count on him for a decent tip.
The restaurant was deserted tonight, maybe because of the drizzle, but it was also early. Brooke’s dad was wiping down the counter. He said, “I wasn’t expecting you.”