Chapter 3 - The Sanctuary of Pages
On Monday morning, the elementary school library was cold. The district turned the heat off at six on Friday and didn't restore it until seven-thirty on Monday, leaving the stacks smelling of cold paper, floor wax, and forgotten paste.
I sat behind the circulation desk, running the scanner over worn copies of *Frog and Toad*. The rhythmic red laser gave me something predictable to look at. In an elementary library, everything had a classification. Fiction had spine labels with the first three letters of the author’s name. Nonfiction had Dewey decimals. When things got disordered, you simply put them back where their numbers said they belonged.
People didn't work like that. They bled over edges; they forged signatures on documents they had no business touching.
At ten, my mother arrived. Ruth did not believe in drama, but she believed in warm broth. She carried a stainless-steel thermos and a small plastic container of sliced apples soaked in lemon juice so they wouldn't brown.
She set them next to my barcode scanner and pulled up a low stool meant for second-graders. Her knees cracked softly as she sat.
"You look gray, Elise," she said.
"I didn't sleep."
"I assumed as much. Tim called your father this morning at seven."
I stopped scanning. "What did he say?"
"He told your father that you were experiencing third-trimester emotional volatility. He wanted your father to talk some sense into you about family unity."
A dry, bitter laugh escaped my throat. "And what did Dad say?"
"Your father asked him if he had lost his mind, told him that a man who trades his wife's dignity for his mother's good mood doesn't deserve the title of husband, and hung up the telephone." My mother unscrewed the thermos. "Your father has very little patience for weak tea."
I pressed my palms flat against the Formica counter. The twins fluttered within me—two distinct pulses, one high and one low, like small fish bumping against the glass of an aquarium.
"Mom, he told her she could have one of them," I whispered. The shame of it tasted like copper. "He stood in our garage and admitted it."
My mother watched me with her steady, slate-gray eyes. She had buried her own parents without letting them govern her household. She had raised three children with my father in a small house where everyone spoke their mind and no one traded peace for silence.
"A bully only operates where there is an open door, Elise," she said gently. "Linda is an obvious bully. She uses tears instead of fists, which makes people feel guilty for ducking, but she is a bully all the same. But Tim... Tim is the latch that keeps opening the door for her. You cannot fix Linda. You have to decide whether you can live with the latch."
"They're coming in three weeks," I said, my voice breaking.
"Then you have three weeks to decide whose house those girls are going to grow up in," Ruth said. "Theirs, or Linda's."
May you like
She handed me the cup of chicken broth. It was hot and smelled of thyme. I drank it standing up, looking out over the quiet rows of books, while my daughters stirred against my ribs, demanding a world that made sense.
***
