Summer Hours at the Robbers Library

by Sue Halpern

  It is true that Cal did not appreciate it when I referred to myself as “the Barrenness”—he always had trouble with my humor—but he was pleased to find the shades no longer drawn when he came back from Cleveland, and food in the refrigerator, and a wife who did not shy away from his touch. Medical school was ending soon, and Cal was offered a well-regarded internship and residency at Emory, so off we went to our new life in Atlanta, where we expected to be for at least five years or eight years or possibly forever. We found a cute place near Grant Park, in a transitional neighborhood that was on the cusp of gentrification. From the outside we didn’t look any different from the other young couples standing in line at the food co-op and the hardware store. (Was everyone pulling up linoleum and refinishing hardwood floors?) We were all fresh, we were all on our way, and there was no question that that way was up. I found a job at the university science library. Cal fell in with an agreeable group of very tired doctors, and when we could, we carpooled with some of them to camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains or swim in Lake Lanier. For a day or two we could pretend, all of us, even me, that we were carefree.

  * * *

  It is not to diffuse you that you were born of your mother and father, it is to identify you . . .

  —Walt Whitman

  Since Carl died, none of his friends had been back to the library. Rusty, too, was less eager to get up in the morning and head over there. Kit was no longer at her desk, she was in the director’s office, and if Rusty wanted to see her he’d have to walk past Evelyn and knock on the office door, and how many times a day could he do that without feeling foolish? He was still working on the archive project, but without Kit nearby, and with Sunny in some kind of funk, it had lost its appeal. So did the whole idea of finding free money, which was beginning to seem as desperate to him as, he was beginning to realize, it must have seemed to others all along. It was time to get serious about finding a real job.

  “I’m about to join the ranks of the unemployed,” Rusty said, standing in the doorway to Kit’s office.

  “I thought that happened a while ago,” she said.

  “Not like this,” he said. “I am now one of those people downsized during the recession who’s at the public library to post his pathetic résumé online.” He pulled a neatly formatted piece of paper from his bag and waved it around.

  “Let me see that,” Kit said, holding out her hand.

  “I’ve got to edit it,” he said.

  “Come on,” she said.

  “No way,” he said. “I wouldn’t want you to suddenly get intimidated to be in the presence of the former senior executive vice president for client relations oversight.”

  “I see your point,” Kit said as the phone began to ring.

  “Power lunch?” he said as she picked it up. “Noon. Outside.”

  And before Kit could say yes or no, Rusty waved his résumé and shut the door. It was 11:30, just about the time the Four would have been leaving to dine at Riverton Mercy, where Carl died, a place he hoped never again to go.

  Carl’s death hit Rusty hard—harder than he would have imagined for a man he had only just begun to get to know. When he mentioned this to Kit the first time, she hardly responded, but sitting side by side on the steps of the library as they ate their lunch, she seemed to hear it differently.

  “Tell me about your father,” she said, doing her best impersonation of Dr. Bondi. She handed him half of the wrap sandwich she’d made that morning, carefully layering slices of tomato, then cheddar, then turkey and lettuce leaves onto a tortilla before rolling the whole thing up and cutting it in half, thinking as she did that she might end up sharing it with him. It was an unsettling revelation—that she was expecting to spend time with him, looking forward to it and looking out for him—and she quickly buried it under other, more benign thoughts about what the day ahead might hold.

  “He was a good guy,” Rusty said. “Everybody liked him.”

  “How old were you when he died?”

  “You know that. Eleven.”

  “And then what happened?” Kit asked.

  “What do you mean, what happened? He was dead,” Rusty said, clearly peeved.

  “I get that you were angry,” Kit said. Now she was not only impersonating Bondi, she was mimicking him. And it felt weird, like she was in two conversations at once, hers with Dr. Bondi transposed on the one she was having with Rusty. But maybe they were getting somewhere.

  “Of course I’m angry,” Rusty said. “It was hard. It was confusing. We were just beginning to really get close. We were the guys in the house, you know? We’d watch the Vikings on TV and he’d have a can of Miller in his hand and sometimes give me a sip. I didn’t like it, and I told him, and he said I’d get there and that he was looking forward to the day when we’d be watching the game, splitting a six-pack.”

  Would Dr. Bondi encourage him to keep talking, Kit wondered, or would he have gone silent, waiting like a hunter in a duck blind for Rusty to reveal himself? Rusty was leaning back, eyes closed, arms folded across his chest. Kit knew this pose, knew it from the inside out. Nearby, a driver was struggling to squeeze a black SUV into a tight parking space two doors down from the old barbershop. Kit watched her cut the wheel hard and drive straight back, bumping into the sidewalk, then pull out and try again, adjusting slightly, but not enough. She wondered if Dr. Bondi had as much trouble staying still as she did.

  “Tell me about Carl,” she said after the driver gave up on the fourth attempt and drove away.

  Rusty opened his eyes. From where they were sitting, a sliver of the river was just about visible, and Rusty trained his sights on that. “I really felt that he was looking out for me—cared about me. He and Patrick both, but I think he liked me more than Patrick did. Does,” he said.

  “Liking people was his business,” she said. Was she being mean? She was trying to be provocative. She was beginning to have more sympathy for Dr. Bondi, sitting there on the worn, ungiving library steps, than she ever had perched in the plush brown chair in his office as he patiently tried to save her from herself.

  “He wanted to help me,” Rusty said.

  “Okay,” Kit said, “tell me more.”

  “He was a good guy,” Rusty said. “Like my dad.”

  “That’s what I’m saying,” Kit said.

  “You haven’t said anything,” he complained. “You’ve only asked questions.”

  “It’s transference,” Kit said. “That’s what the shrinks call it.”

  She flashed, briefly, to an image of Dr. Bondi sitting upright opposite her the very first time they met, explaining the mechanism that would let her substitute him for Cal, or maybe for her father—she no longer remembered—and work out her feelings about them through him. “There’s been a lot of disappointment and betrayal in your life, and this will give you the opportunity to express yourself and be heard,” he said, and she laughed at him. What bunk! And now she was peddling it herself.

  “You saw your father in Carl. Carl wasn’t going to bring your father back. He wasn’t going to be your surrogate father. But he was letting you feel what your life would be like with an older, caring man in it,” she said. As the words came out of her mouth they sounded false and cheesy, but maybe they were true.

  “I guess,” he said, sounding unconvinced. It was time to go inside.

  That afternoon, Cyrus Ingram Allen edited his résumé, eliminating anything that could reveal his age, and posted it online and e-mailed it to a headhunter in New York he used to know and to the firms he’d been reading about in the Wall Street Journal that were hiring again. His heart wasn’t in it, but he no longer had the luxury of heart. Heart did not pay the bills.

  * * *

  Sunny/fugitive

  As soon as I realized that I was probably living with a fugitive, I got scared. Every time Steve got in the car, I reminded him that he could get pulled over for having a faulty exhaust system.

  “Enough with the exhaust system, Sunny,” he said after
maybe the sixth time I said something. “I’m working on it.”

  How could he be so cool? The police could come and take him away at any moment. Maybe he wasn’t guilty after all. That’s what I told myself. But then I told myself that was impossible. I was jittery. Willow noticed and made me chamomile tea. That’s her go-to cure and it usually works. Not this time.

  “What’s with you, Sunny?” she said right before bed. “Is it just teenage stuff?”

  “Teenage stuff” is what my mother calls anything to do with my changing body.

  “No,” I said.

  “Then what? You can tell me. We tell each other everything.”

  Well, that was a lie, and it made me so angry I almost told her I knew she was lying to me right then—about that and about pretty much everything else I thought I knew about our family. It was like discovering I’d been adopted and no one would admit it.

  “I don’t know,” I lied back.

  “Is it your job at the library? Is somebody bothering you? If somebody is bothering you, you need to let Kit know. Is it Kit? Is she bothering you? I’ve always hated having a boss . . .” and then she went off on this whole long riff about power dynamics in the workplace, suggesting that that might be something I’d want to do a study unit on, blah blah blah, and I fell asleep.

  I didn’t wake up any calmer. My parents have always told me that knowledge is power, but the more I knew about them, the less empowered I felt. Angus Parker was dead. He had died twice. But Steve was still alive, and if he’d done what the police said Angus Parker had done, there were people who wanted to find him and put him in jail. Willow, too. And what about me? Wasn’t I guilty, too? Guilt by association, guilt by knowing what I know and not telling anyone? No, that wasn’t true. I had told someone. I’d told Kit. So she was guilty now, too, and it was my fault.

  It was a Saturday, the day I usually helped out Willow at the kiosk. “Helping out” is a euphemism for keeping her company. Saturday is when people like to look at her jewelry, but midweek is when they buy. A mother stops by with her daughter, or a man stops by with his girlfriend or wife, and they look at Willow’s stuff and the daughter slips a bracelet over her hand and holds out her wrist and they both admire it. She puts it back and they move on, and then, a few days later, the mother reappears and says, “Remember that bracelet my daughter tried on?” (And Willow always does.) “I want to get that for her birthday.” Tuesdays are Willow’s best days.

  “I think I should stay home today,” I said, and Willow did not try to talk me out of it.

  As soon as she and Steve left, I went around to the back of the house and got my bike, which I hadn’t ridden in a while, and pumped up the tires. It was nine miles to Riverton, not counting our driveway, and I figured I could get there and back before Willow came home from work. It occurred to me that Steve might be dropping her off and coming right back, so I went into the house, wrote a note to tell him I was out for a bike ride, and set off for Kit’s house. I needed to talk to her.

  Chapter Ten

  8.9.10–8.15.10

  The dark / Encroachment of that old catastrophe . . .

  —Wallace Stevens

  It was early evening, after work. Kit was walking home when Rusty, whom she hadn’t seen for a few days, drove up alongside her, slowed, and asked if she wanted a ride.

  “I can walk,” Kit said. She’d been looking forward to this slow meander home all afternoon. It was her second full week as director, and Barbara had left her with a pile of bills, a decimated bank account, and a budget that needed to be massaged to make it all work. It made her head hurt. All she wanted was to get home, fill a glass with Chardonnay, and sit on the porch with her feet up, watching the world go by.

  “I know that,” he said. “That’s not what I asked.”

  “Since when did you become such a stickler for language?” she said, not bothering to hide her displeasure, not only with him for the interruption, but with herself for letting him think it was okay. “This is what happens,” she thought. “This is what happens and it happens in an instant: they want more, then they want more than that, and they assume you do, too.”

  “I can walk, and I will walk,” Kit said. She resumed her stroll, pleased to be on her way again, pleased to have recaptured her solitude.

  The sidewalk in this part of town was usually empty, so when she heard footsteps behind her, Kit turned around, and there he was again, Rusty, on foot.

  “I can walk, too,” he said, and fell in beside her. “I’m screwed if it rains, though. I left the top down.”

  “You could go back,” Kit suggested.

  “I could go back, and I will not go back,” he said. “Not yet. I bought us a bottle of wine, a nice Zinfandel. A big splurge for me, given my reduced circumstances.”

  He looked so pleased with himself, and so eager, she didn’t have the heart to tell him it was white wine she was craving. That, and being alone.

  “Where do you keep your wineglasses?” Rusty said as they stepped onto Kit’s porch.

  “In the kitchen. You’ll see them. I don’t have much stuff,” she said, and stopped in her tracks. “I’ll wait here.” It was easier to be with him outside than in. On the porch, the walls were only waist-high.

  When Rusty reappeared, the bottle of wine was under his arm and there were two very full glasses in both of his hands.

  “Here, take this,” he said, handing her one and putting down the other and the bottle. “I’ll be right back.”

  Kit could hear him opening the refrigerator, closing it, opening a cupboard, closing it. Opening the refrigerator again. Opening drawers.

  “What are you doing?” she called out to him, and either he didn’t hear or was ignoring her, because no answer came back until, a good ten minutes later, he reappeared.

  “I was trying to score us some snacks, but this is all I could find,” Rusty said, showing off a plate of crackers, each one dotted with tuna salad and topped with a piece of black olive.

  “Where did you find that?” Kit asked, mildly embarrassed to have the near emptiness of her larder exposed.

  “I made it,” Rusty said proudly. “Years of packing my own school lunch,” he added. “Not a lot to work with in there, though. Kind of like my house. The house where I grew up. And my condo in Hoboken. And where I am now, come to think of it.”

  Down the street, one of her neighbors was blasting reggae through a car speaker.

  “That’s what they do,” she said. “Open the car door and play music.”

  “I like it,” Rusty said. “Do you think they take requests?”

  They sat there, slowly draining their glasses, looking out at the robins pecking at the lawn, saying little.

  “This is nice,” Rusty said.

  “Is it?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “I know,” Kit said. “But this must be so different from what you’re used to. Coming from the city. The big city,” she added, unable to contain her scorn. She had seen this before with the summer people who decamped from Boston or New York to some of the lake towns near Riverton, or the leaf peepers who came back every fall, and believed that their time in the country made them better people.

  Rusty laughed: “It’s definitely different, but I like it.” He picked up his glass and motioned to go inside. “It’s getting cold,” he said, and she was amazed and disconcerted by how easily he moved into her space.

  “This is nice, too, after months of living in a motel room,” he said, sinking into the living room couch and putting his feet on the coffee table.

  As she watched him settle in like a floppy retriever, Kit felt her muscles seize up and her posture straighten. She could hear Dr. Bondi. It was as if he were sitting on her shoulder, whispering in her ear. “It’s good to be aware of your feelings, Kit, even if you don’t know why you’re having them.” But she knew. It had been a long time.

  “So,” Rusty said. “What do you do for fun here?”

  Kit didn’t know
if he meant here in Riverton or here in her house. “Not much,” she said. “Read, watch movies, look at cat videos on the Internet.” Did that sound lame? Probably, she thought. Did she care? She didn’t know.

  “What about you?” Kit asked.

  “Before I came here, or after?” he said. “You won’t like before.”

  “Try me.”

  “You’re going to think I’m really shallow.”

  “How do you know I don’t think that already?” Kit said. She couldn’t help herself.

  “It was a lot of clubs, high-stakes poker, that sort of thing. All work-related, of course,” he said, draping his arms over the back of the cushions, a smile on his face, remembering it.

  “Of course,” Kit said. She tried to imagine him, sleeves rolled above his elbows, sitting in a smoky room—cigars—chips piled high in front of him, but that image kept on getting crowded out by the famous picture of dogs playing poker.

  “And now?” she asked.

  “Ah,” he said, “now. Now I read books you literary types wouldn’t approve of, watch TV, and eat Indian food every night. Unless I’m hanging out with you.”

  “We’ve only done that one time,” Kit said.

  “My point exactly,” Rusty said. “We’ve known each other for weeks, and this is just our second date. Third, if you count lunch the other day.”

  “This is not a date,” Kit said. “You . . .” She hesitated. “You invited yourself over.” She was back to feeling cornered, and wanted suddenly, and overwhelmingly, to be alone and unaccountable.

  “Can I ask you a question?” Rusty said, and then didn’t wait for an answer. “Sometimes I get the sense that you like me, and other times I get the sense that you don’t.”