Summer Hours at the Robbers Library

by Sue Halpern

  “People would say, ‘Which one are you?’ and we’d always say Rich, just to trick them, even though when I look at the pictures, we don’t really look that much alike,” Rich the driver (Elliot) said.

  “So maybe the joke was on us,” his cousin said. “Anyway, it stuck. And Rich is a better name for a taxi driver than Elliot.”

  “So what do you think?” Patrick asked Kit as they all milled about, eating the doughnuts he had brought in honor of Carl.

  “I think it’s great,” she said. “It means that you guys will start coming back to the library, and it means we’ll be able to afford coffee in the break room again.”

  “You’ll be able to afford a lot more than that,” Patrick said, smiling widely. “As of last Friday, Carl’s account at Schwab was worth six million dollars. To be precise”—he consulted a computer printout—“$6,458,593.19. Carl was a damned good barber, but it turns out that he was an even better investor.”

  “What?” Kit asked, stunned. “What? How did that happen?”

  “I don’t completely know,” Patrick said, “but here’s where I think Rusty comes in. Carl’s great-uncle used to work for one of the original mill owners as his personal secretary and bookkeeper, and apparently he was rewarded handsomely in the man’s will.”

  “What does that have to do with me?” Rusty said.

  “Maybe nothing,” Patrick said. “But if your grandfather is who we think he is, then your great-grandfather was one of the original mill owners, so it could have been him.”

  “Seems kind of weak to me,” Rusty said, but no one was listening.

  “Carl’s uncle didn’t have any kids,” Patrick went on, “so I’m guessing that when he died, Carl inherited his money and then did very well in the market. What do you think he was doing in the library every morning? He was reading the Journal and the Financial Times like they were the Daily Racing Form. He knew about Microsoft and Apple and Intel before anyone else did. He bought gold before the crash. Of course, it’s an endowment—it’s not like you’re leaving here with your pockets full of cash. You’re leaving here with all of us being responsible for stewarding that money or finding someone who can.”

  * * *

  Sunny/the plan

  As soon as we picked up Willow from the mall, we had a family meeting, on the side of the road, in the car. Steve asked me to tell Willow what I’d told him, and as I did, her face got paler and paler, and when I was finished she said “What are we going to do?” at least three times.

  “Sunny doesn’t want to go into hiding,” Steve announced.

  “Oh, honey,” Willow began, but Steve cut her off and said, “And I think she’s right. This is my crusade, not hers. I’m not even sure it’s yours,” he said to Willow, who tried to protest, but when Steve gets going it’s hard to talk over him.

  “What can we do?” Willow asked, and that’s when Steve came up with the plan, one part of which entailed Kit letting me stay with her while they went on a meditation retreat. That was the second part.

  “That’s crazy,” I told them. “Going on a meditation retreat sounds exactly like going into hiding. You don’t get it. You need to do something now. This is a”—and then I swore—“emergency!” And for once I think my parents were listening to me. (Maybe I should swear more often.) “You need to find a lawyer. You need to turn yourself in before the police arrest you. Do you want to spend the rest of your lives in jail?” I was pretty worked up.

  “What I’d like,” Steve said, as if I were that lawyer, “is a deal to keep Willow out of jail because she was only the driver. She didn’t do anything.”

  “And what I want,” Willow said, as tears poured down her cheeks, “is for Steve to get sent to one of those prisons that aren’t so bad.”

  “Do they have those?” I asked, and told them about the Riverton jail, which broke the spell, and I was back to being me again, not some lawyer who could cut them a deal.

  “You’re right, Sunny,” Steve said, which may have been a first for Steve. “We need to find a lawyer. It’s time for me to stand up for what I believe and stop being anonymous.” He also said that maybe it was time to get a new car.

  So we went home to pack—not the whole house, because Steve was hopeful that Willow and I would be back there before too long.

  “No camping gear,” I said.

  “No camping gear,” they agreed.

  For this plan to work, we’d need Kit to agree to it, which wasn’t a sure thing, so on Monday morning we drove over to the library, and Willow came in with me to ask her. Evelyn said Kit wasn’t there, that she was at a meeting with a lawyer, which freaked Willow out—was she turning in Steve herself?—before Evelyn explained that it had to do with Carl’s will. Evelyn also told Willow that the earrings she was wearing, which Willow made, of course, were more beautiful than anything she’d ever owned, and without missing a beat, Willow slid them out from her ears and put them in Evelyn’s hands and said, “That is no longer true.” I think it’s possible that when you think that the future might bring great sadness, you become more generous than you ever had been before, so you can carry other people’s happiness with you.

  Evelyn said Kit would be back soon, so I showed Willow all the nooks and crannies of the library, and introduced her to some of the little kids I’d gotten to know from story hour. When Kit and Rusty finally showed up, they looked even worse than when I’d seen them on Saturday, but they were giddy like they had just pulled off a hilarious prank, and they called everyone in the entire library over to the circulation desk. Rusty took a couple of bottles of ginger ale out of a Dollar Tree bag and opened them, one by one, as if they were champagne, and Kit dumped out bags of Dollar Tree cookies, and that’s when she told us about Carl’s gift, and everyone clapped and whooped and stomped their feet.

  When the party finally broke up, Willow went with Kit into her office, and I helped Chuck clean up, and he said, “I hear it’s your last week,” which made me wonder where he’d heard that from—were they planning a party? Would they miss me? But then I remembered it was in big letters on the calendar in the staff room because I had written it there. Just one week more and then the court would throw away my record and at least one member of our family would no longer be a criminal.

  Willow was in Kit’s office forever, and when she came out she was smiling and crying at the same time, and Kit was telling her it would be all right, and Willow was telling Kit that it was only for a few days, and then she said the same thing to me and pulled me into a big, Willowy hug that lasted way too long, but I was glad because I was crying, too, and by the time she let go I’d stopped. I walked her back to the car and we told Steve the news, and he got teary himself and made me promise that wherever he ended up, that I’d come visit him and write to him and all that.

  “I used to think—” he said, and then stopped because there was a catch in his voice. He tried again. “For a long time, Sunny, I thought that loving the whole world—do you know what I mean?—doing the right thing, or what I believe is the right thing, to make the world a better place, was the highest form of love there was, no matter the consequences. I should have stopped thinking that the moment I saw your beautiful mother push you out into the world. But I didn’t. I’m not apologizing for what I did,” he said. “I believe it’s our obligation to protect creation, especially those creatures that can’t defend themselves, but I am apologizing for how I did it, and I hope you know that I am sorry.”

  “As long as you’re apologizing,” I said, “could you apologize for not letting me go to the doctor when I broke my foot that time when we were living at #3?”

  Steve looked stricken.

  “Dad,” I said, which got his attention. I never call him Dad. “Dad,” I said again, “I’m joking.”

  * * *

  And tell me truly, men of earth, / If all the soul-and-body scars / Were not too much to pay for birth.

  —Robert Frost

  After the celebration, and after Willow had
left and Sunny came up the library steps bouncing a beat-up roller bag behind her, Kit sat down in the director’s office to catch her breath. Rusty came to the door and she filled him in about Sunny, and asked if he’d like to stay for dinner with them, but if he did, would he go to the store and pick up some groceries.

  “I will do you one better,” he said. “I will even pick up more chairs.”

  There were four matching ladder-back chairs around the kitchen table when Kit and Sunny got home, and a pot of pasta boiling on the stove.

  “Can we have candles?” Sunny asked, and when Kit told her she didn’t have any, Sunny went into the living room, opened her suitcase, and pulled out two beeswax tapers and a pair of hammered silver candlesticks.

  “Willow made these,” Sunny said proudly, and Kit realized that she had brought them to remind her of home.

  When dinner was on the table, and the candles were lit, and the three of them were sitting on the new chairs, Sunny put her hands out, palms up, and it took her a second, but then Kit understood what she was doing and put one hand in Sunny’s and the other in Rusty’s, and then without words, Rusty reached over and took Sunny’s other hand just like they had done at Carl’s funeral.

  “This is what we do at my house,” she said. “We hold hands and say what we are grateful for. I’ll go first.

  “I am grateful for this food and for everyone who helped to get it to me—we always say that,” she explained. “And I’m grateful that I didn’t have enough money to buy the dictionary, because if I did, I wouldn’t have gotten to work at the library.”

  “Turns out it wasn’t called the Robbers Library for nothing,” Rusty said, and winked at her.

  “Very funny,” Sunny said. “I’m being serious.”

  “Sorry,” Rusty said, but he was still smiling.

  “It’s your turn,” she said, turning to Kit, who was thinking about the notebooks in the other room, filled with all the things she was grateful she was not. It wasn’t what Dr. Bondi intended when he gave her that assignment, but maybe it had been enough, an opening she could peer into and see that however bad it was for her, she was really, actually okay.

  “I am grateful for friends,” she said simply, “and especially, today, for Carl.”

  “It’s your turn,” Sunny said to Rusty.

  “I know it’s my turn,” Rusty said, “unless there are some invisible people here with us tonight,” and then looked at Kit, worried he’d said the wrong thing, but she seemed serene sitting there, her eyes iridescent in the candlelight.

  “Let’s see,” he began. “I am grateful that I lost my job. I am grateful that all my stuff burned up.”

  “Wait, stop!” Sunny interrupted. “I forgot to tell you. Remember when you asked me to make copies of all that stuff. Your mother’s bankbook. Her birth certificate. All those forms?”

  Rusty nodded.

  “I gave them to you, right?” Sunny said eagerly.

  He nodded again.

  “And they were in the fire, right?”

  He nodded again.

  “I forgot to tell you that when I made those copies I didn’t realize the machine was set to two, so there were two copies of everything, and when I realized it, I put the second copies in the recycling, and you know how Chuck only puts out the recycling like once a month? I checked this morning when I went down there with Willow and they are still there!” Sunny caught her breath and looked at him expectantly.

  “Let’s leave them,” Rusty said.

  “Leave them?” Sunny said, disbelieving. “What? Why?”

  “Because I don’t want them right now. I’m done with that.”

  “Why?”

  “Sunny, will you please let me finish saying what I’m thankful for before this beautiful pile of spaghetti gets cold?”

  “Sorry,” Sunny said sheepishly.

  “Where was I . . . ?” Rusty teased her. “Oh yes. I am grateful that all my stuff burned up. I am grateful to Kit for many things, including my underwear.” He hoped she would smile, and she did. “And I am grateful to my mother, because without that bankbook I never would have spent the summer in Riverton.”

  When they dropped hands, Sunny reached over and slid some spaghetti onto her plate. “Watch this,” she said, and twirled it expertly up her fork.

  “You could stay,” Kit said.

  Acknowledgments

  Like Kit, I am grateful for friends, Sara Rimer, Lisa Verhovek, Shawn Leary, Sam Verhovek, Barry King, Warren King, Missy Foote, Dick Foote, Andrew Gardner, Caroline Damon, Kathy Wilson, Sally Carver, and Jacob Epstein, this time especially. Thanks, too, to my old friend Andrew Rosenheim, for the introduction to the talented Sara Nelson, whose editorial guidance has been inestimable. And thanks to Sara’s team at HarperCollins, Amy Baker, Mary Sasso, James Iacobelli, and Daniel Vazquez. Kim Witherspoon, at Inkwell Management, is not only a phenomenal agent, she is a phenomenal reader, and I have been the lucky beneficiary of her insightful counsel yet again. Also at Inkwell, thank you to the tag team of Emma Schlee and Maria Whelan. In Hanover, Dr. Dominic Candida’s graduate seminar was an essential introduction to cognitive behavioral therapy. In Middlebury, my colleagues and students (and former students) were a balm, as always. At the New York Review of Books, Robert Silvers (of blessed memory), was a constant source of encouragement and perspicacity. Above all, I have been sustained and inspired by my two McKibbens, Sophie and Bill, who do such good work in the world.

  About the Author

  Sue Halpern is the author of seven books of fiction and nonfiction, most recently A Dog Walks into a Nursing Home. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, New York Review of Books, Rolling Stone, and Conde Nast Traveller. She lives in Vermont with her husband, the writer and environmental activist Bill McKibben, and is a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College.

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  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  summer hours at the robbers library. Copyright © 2018 by Sue Halpern. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  first edition

  Cover design by Sarah Brody

  Cover photographs © luoman/Getty Images (book shelves); © Jil Battaglia/Shutterstock (library card); © REDAV/Shutterstock (letters)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

  Digital Edition February 2018 ISBN 978-0-06-267897-3

  Print ISBN 978-0-06-267896-6 (pbk.)

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