He doesn’t respond.
“I know lots of seemingly random facts. Lots of trivia. I read a lot. I look things up for people all the time and I remember a lot of it. And we did a class a couple of years ago about what to do if you come across various common wild animals around here. It started because a little boy had started feeding a stray dog in his backyard and then his dad realized it was actually a wolf.”
David is just listening.
Come to think of it, David probably knows that story. He might have been called to pick the wolf up for all I know.
“So,” I go on. “His dad brought him into the library to look up facts about wolves so he’d be able to recognize one in the future. If he ever needed to. And then as we talked, I decided we should offer a class for kids to recognize local wild animals and what to do if they happen to see one in their neighborhood or hurt alongside the road. That was the first time I did a class involving animal tracks.”
“Would have been a short class,” David says. “Since the entire instruction for if you see a wild animal in your neighborhood or hurt alongside the road is: ‘Call Game and Parks’. Right?”
“That was part of it,” I assure him. “But we wanted the kids to feel comfortable identifying the animals and what to do if they were out playing and saw a hurt squirrel or a bird with a broken wing.”
“They should still call us,” David says stubbornly.
“It’s okay for the kids to know more about the animals than that,” I insist.
“Is all of this book knowledge why you felt comfortable walking around finding animal tracks all alone miles from town?”
He’s really hung up on this. I also don’t like the way he says ‘book knowledge’. As if that’s not really knowledge. “Yes, I learned about animal tracks and where to look for them from books. As hard as that might be to believe,” I tell him.
“So why can’t you just show kids photos of the animal tracks in books?” he asks.
“Libraries have a lot more resources than just books,” I say. Though books are my true love and, obviously, the main attraction. “We offer classes and tutorials, WiFi access, help with filling out forms, movies and music, maps, we even recently started a lending library where people can borrow tools and pots and pans, and things like that.”
David continues to frown—he’s going to have terrible wrinkles by the time he’s forty—but now it’s clearly in confusion. “Why would someone need to borrow pots and pans from the library?”
“If they’re baking a cheesecake for the first time and don’t have a spring-form pan,” I say, as an example. “Or they’ve decided to try to bake bread, but don’t have a loaf pan. Or they’d like to use a crock pot and don’t have one. Or they want to make crepes and need a crepe pan. Or they want to try making a bundt cake. Or they want to try using a wok, but don’t want to buy one. All of those things are expensive if you’re just learning and aren’t sure you want to keep doing it. It’s a great way to learn and practice.”
His brow furrows, but then he nods. “You got me.”
“I did?”
“I was going to say that they could borrow a Bundt pan or a loaf pan from literally ninety percent of the homes in Sapphire Falls, but I’m thinking woks might be harder to find.”
I laugh. “And honestly, the loaf pans, crock pots, and Bundt pans are probably all being used and can’t be loaned out.”
Then the most surprising thing of all happens.
David smiles.
And yeah…he’s definitely going to be a problem for me.
Scowling David is hot. Sandwich making David is sweet. Smiling David is…panty-melting.
I take a deep breath and look away from the smile that makes me want to really study his mouth. “Look, if it weren’t for the flat tire, I would have been fine,” I tell him. “I went out, found some tracks, realized my phone wasn’t working, and was going to head back to town. It was still plenty light, the storm was way off?—”
“It was still plenty light when you realized you had a flat?” he demands.
Oops. That gives him a pretty good idea how long I’d been stuck out there. “Yes. But I was fine.”
“Sitting around for hours alone? “
“Yes. I got some…work…done.”
He lifts a brow. “What kind of library work did you get done sitting alone in your car without a working phone? “
I wrote three thousand words on my fanfiction in the notebook I always keep tucked in my glove box, as a matter of fact. It’s not work, in the make-money sense of the word. Or in the I-do-it-because-I-have-to sense. It’s actually pure joy.
