Check Me Out

by Becca Wilhite

  I waited for her to tell me what a bad idea it was. She was silent for a long time.

  I felt like I had to say something else. “Somebody could talk to Old Man Greenwood.”

  She scrunched up her eyes like she was reprimanding me. “Have you ever spoken to him?”

  “Are you kidding me? He’s like the creepy old man in every kids’ movie ever made.”

  She patted my shoulder. “Exactly. He’s probably as misunderstood as those characters, too. But I’ve burned all my bridges with him over the trash pile that he calls storage. Are you up for it? Talking to him, I mean?”

  I was sure I’d misheard. “Me?”

  “You’re young. You’re pretty. He won’t be intimidated by you. Come on. Go talk to him.” She stood up and pulled my chair out. “Just walk over there and knock on the door. Ask him if he’d be amenable to sharing the lot. He’ll probably take one look at you and say yes out of shock.”

  “Now?” I could hear my own nerves.

  “Now.” She half-walked, half-pushed me to the door. “I’m sure he’ll be thrilled at the company. He’ll probably stay calm, but if he does shove you into a closet, stick your shoe into the doorway so he can’t close it and lock you in.”

  “You’re hilarious.” I reached for an umbrella from the stand.

  “I know.” She opened the door and said, “Hustle. Don’t let the rain in.”

  The umbrella was a good idea, but the rain was driven sideways by a warm wind. Only my head stayed dry.

  I rang the doorbell and waited, staring at the piles of metal objects on the porch. I started counting coffee cans, but then got distracted by rusty tools. They were the same shade of orange as my shoes. How many orange pliers did one old guy need to keep on his front porch? Dozens, apparently.

  I heard him shuffling toward the door long, long before he actually opened it. I had time to notice that the shrubs growing beside the porch were actually giant dandelions with daggerlike edges on the leaves. Precious.

  “How could I possibly help you?”

  Well, okay. His growly voice and his crazy-man eyebrows terrified me.

  “Hello, sir. I’m Greta. I work at the library.” I pointed over my shoulder at the library, in case he didn’t know what I was talking about. Totally possible.

  He made a noise that I chose to believe communicated understanding. “And? What do you need?”

  How hard could it be? I decided to cut to the chase. “We want to use the lot between our properties for an event next month. An author is coming to talk about her books. We’d set up chairs and a sound system. Do you have any objections?”

  “Would you clean it up?” He squinted at me like a cartoon pirate, but with less interesting costuming.

  I nodded. “Before and after.”

  His gigantic eyebrows furrowed. “You have to promise not to throw anything away when you clean.”

  “Absolutely.” I nodded once, so he would know I understood his demands. And so he wouldn’t think I was interested in standing there talking on his porch for any longer than necessary.

  “Agreed.” He held out his clawlike hand. I stepped back. I avoided looking at his hands too carefully. If he had long, yellow nails I’d rather not get too familiar with them.

  “Really? You’re agreeing?”

  He pushed his hand closer to me, like he might be eager about this. “I am. You’re going to clean up the lot. Twice. I’m going to do nothing. Do you see a downside about that for me?”

  “No, sir.” I took his outstretched hand and shook it, prepared to scream if he tried to pull me into the dark house.

  “Fine, then. Do the cleanup and the setup quietly. Don’t throw anything away. Leave me a ticket at the entrance.” He turned around and stepped into the house.

  “Thank you, Mr. Greenwood.”

  He looked over his shoulder at me, a little longer than I thought necessary. His mouth moved like he was going to say something, but he seemed to change his mind. He nodded, turned his back to me, and closed the door.

  Mac and I sat on a couch in the chain bookstore by the college. He was pretending to scan shelves and I was pretending not to stare at him. This, apparently, was what one did on a date when it was too rainy to make out on a park bench.

  He looked at me. His arm went around the back of the couch behind me. “I bet you read a lot of weird books at work.”

  I tried to remember how to breathe. Maybe I laughed. Maybe I had a tiny explosion of pressure burst through me. “You have a warped idea of what it means to work in a library.”

  He brushed the hair off my forehead, and I forgot what we were talking about.

  He leaned closer, bringing his face near mine. “You said you were reading shelves.”

  Wow. Those words shouldn’t elicit such a spike in my pulse. I swallowed and regained control, after a fashion.

  My voice shook for a few words. “It isn’t like actual reading. I look at the stickers on the spines to make sure books are in the right place. They usually aren’t.”

  But his hand was in the right place, and honestly, I was finding it tricky to formulate sentences.

  “But you have to know what’s there, right? What’s good? Don’t people ask you what they should read?” His finger slid a strand of hair behind my ear.

  “I try not to work in ‘should.’ Book choice is not really a moral obligation.” There was a whole lot of breath in those words. Not so much normal, for me. More like I couldn’t quite control my respiration. What was the matter with me? This was not exactly a sexy conversation. But I couldn’t stop watching his mouth.

  He pulled out his phone with his free hand. He thumbed something into the keypad. I stared at his face and tried not to drool. After a few seconds, my phone beeped. I read the text he’d sent me.

  “I’m going to kiss you now.” I heard the words come out of my mouth, in my voice, at the same time I tried to activate my filter. I tried to swallow them back. But once spoken, such things are difficult, if not impossible, to unspeak. Time seemed to have stopped, and Mac grinned the slowest, most adorable smile I’d ever, ever seen.

  He leaned back. Our knees were touching—my right, his left—but his face, that gorgeous face with the flirty smile, was farther away than it had been a minute ago.

  What was he doing, moving away? He was still smiling, still looking right at me. Was this some kind of test? Was he checking to see if I’d make a move?

  Why not? I reached my arms to his shoulders. He sat straight and still, but that smile stayed on his lips. Those lips! Oh. I leaned. All the way in.

  Chapter 20

  Because I’d had the most recent tetanus shot, I got to clear the lot between the library and the Greenwood house. Also, I wasn’t sixty. Or a minor. Or in charge. It was a perfect arrangement, apparently.

  Julie had told me to wear something I didn’t mind getting dirty. Dirty didn’t touch it. In five minutes, my clothes were striped with rust stains from old barrels. I guessed that there were a dozen metal barrels in the lot, but when I got closer, it appeared that I’d underestimated.

  A question for the universe: Why in the world would any person need seventeen enormous metal barrels? Only sinister possibilities occurred to me. I tipped the empty ones toward my stomach and rolled them along the edges of their bases to the space by the Dumpster. The full ones I’d have to deal with later because I wanted nothing to do with emptying them. Anything could be hidden in those things. Anything. My imagination was filling in the blanks at a rapid, horrifying rate. I’d stick to the empties for today.

  After moving the ones I dared, I started on the piles. There were soggy newspapers that smelled like scary varieties of mold. I was grateful again for Julie’s insistence that I wear gloves. I lifted a stack of papers, and the once-cardboard box holding them melted into a brownish, sloppish, pulpy mess that mixed with
gravelly dirt into what had to be a toxic paste.

  But that was nothing compared to what I found in the bottles.

  Piled three or four high were stacks of glass bottles with cracks in them. And inside the bottles were “preserved” fruits and vegetables in various states of decline. This would make an amazing science fair project for someone with a steel stomach. One jar held peaches. They looked like ordinary peaches until I turned the bottle around. A hairline crack ran from the lid to the words embossed on the jar. Running inside, following the line of the crack, were dark, wet spores that bloomed like tiny poisonous flowers in the syrup.

  I used to love peaches. I would possibly never again even look at peaches.

  Under the peaches stood jars of what my grandmother would have called fruit cocktail, but the fruit was bubbling. There was a ring of foam rising from the seal—which clearly wasn’t doing its job—and the whole arrangement smelled like a distillery.

  Why was he keeping this? Was he going to poison someone?

  With every jar, bottle, can, box, and soggy pile of paper, I forced myself to add to the slightly neater piles behind the Dumpster instead of tossing it all inside and slamming the metal lid on the whole mess.

  I tried to consider it in a forward-thinking, civil activism kind of way. Demanding cleanup was like censorship, I thought. I might think it’s trash—I certainly had every right to think it’s trash—but it’s not my place to put it in the bin.

  Oh, please. It was nothing but trash. Clearly the mold fumes and the rancid fruit smells were affecting my judgment.

  I looked at the piles of what looked like clothes and blankets shoved up against the old Greenwood house. Any number of severed limbs, of petrified pets, of anything could have been folded within the manky blankets and left there for decades.

  “If it’s touching his house, I’m not responsible for it.” I told myself this enough times that I believed it.

  Hours later, I went inside the library for a break.

  “Greta, I’m glad you’re here.” Julie smiled at me but held her arm out straight. “But don’t come back here behind the desk. You’re a mess.”

  “Thanks.”

  She handed me a water bottle and watched me take off my gloves, hovering near enough that she could swat them away if they touched a book.

  “So, how’s it going out there?”

  “I’ve done a ton.” I pointed out the window. “Out of about a million tons of what is left to do.”

  “Seems like you’re clearing a good patch,” she said, trying to encourage me. Only problem? I could see the lot out the window, and it didn’t look any different—I mean zero difference—than when I’d started.

  “It’s better from the ground,” I told her. “There’s more progress than you can see from here.”

  “Sure.” She made it sound so sincere.

  I gulped down half the water from the bottle. “I wish he’d let me throw things away. Why would you need to keep decades of Yellow Pages phone books? Who’s he going to call?”

  Julie smiled. “Some people find comfort in collecting things. It helps them sort through issues of loss.”

  “I think everything Old Man Greenwood’s ever lost is actually moldering in piles in the lot.”

  “Oh, I assure you, he’s lost plenty that he can’t keep in his house or his yard.” Julie turned away.

  She had a habit of tossing out little gems like that. “Wait. You can’t say that and then not explain it. Does he have a cool backstory like those creepy old neighbor men do in the movies? Some devastating life story that will make us all feel sorry for him and want to eat Christmas turkey in his dining room?”

  Julie looked at me over the rims of her glasses. “Everyone has a story.”

  “You’re not going to tell me, are you?”

  “You could research,” she said as she walked away.

  I shot back, “Not a chance. All my research energy is channeled to the elusive Dr. Joshua Silver.”

  Librarians. Forget it. I pulled the gloves back on and hauled open the wooden door.

  After hours of manual labor and a quick shower, I found this on my phone:

  Oh, he was good.

  I met Mac the next day at Beans even though he wasn’t working. I saw him slouched against the wall as I got close. I looked around for a car, but there didn’t seem to be one nearby.

  My imagination fast-forwarded to us holding hands, walking to his house, leaves blowing around our feet as we talked about our dreams and plans for the future. Our separate futures, obviously, because it would be freaky to talk about a future together on a random Sunday afternoon in the fall. Much too complex.

  He appeared to be reading something on his phone, so he didn’t see me coming. I saw his mouth moving as he read. Huh. That was cute in a second-grade way. I decided second grade was underrated.

  Close enough to touch his arm, I said, “Hi.”

  He hurried to click off his phone.

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to stop you from whatever it is you’re doing,” I said, leaning up to kiss his cheek.

  He turned his face and kissed me for real.

  “I was writing a poem,” he said after a minute. Or two. I had to think really hard to connect those words to anything.

  “Oh. On your phone? Before?”

  “Before I blew your mind?” He smoldered at me and then kissed me again.

  I pulled back and laughed. “Yes. Before that. What poem?”

  He took my hand, and we started walking. “I just do this thing. A poem every day.”

  “Like a daily sonnet?” I said, thinking of Rilke.

  “Like a little poem.”

  Well, we couldn’t all write a sonnet a day. “About what?”

  “Just, you know, stuff.”

  He leaned in close to my ear. “The wind blows through your / Golden hair, lifting each strand, / and finds the sun’s source.” He wrapped a strand of my hair around his finger, and before I had a chance to ask him what that line about the sun’s source was supposed to mean, he was kissing me again.

  And then I forgot about poetry and the sun and the atmosphere and the law of gravity altogether.

  Chapter 21

  Marigold met me at Beans on Monday, during my lunch break and her class break, to update me on her paper and get a few more quotes from me. I didn’t mind being a source. We talked about the ads running in the newspaper and the work I was doing for the Richtenberg reading. I’d brought Marigold a printed ad for the reading, and she slid it into her bag. She didn’t change the subject, exactly, but she bent it. “What are you wearing?”

  I looked down at my zip-front hoodie covering my T-shirt dress.

  “No, I mean to your library party.”

  Oh. “I have no idea. I looked at some dresses online, but I hate that sort of shopping. I’m easily distracted.” That was true. I got distracted by another shopping site—a kind totally unconnected to dresses. A site that was full of things I might need for the next step in my Save Franklin Library plan. One where there was a virtual shopping cart full of super-secret, radical activism stuff waiting for me to type in my password (dr$ilv3r) and click Buy Now.

  “Have you ever been to Sam’s?”

  I was pretty sure we were still talking about dresses, but I didn’t know who Sam was. “I don’t think so.”

  She stood up and swept her piles of papers into her bag. “Come on.”

  “Come where? I only have forty minutes left on my break.”

  She looked at the clock, then quirked her eyebrow at me. “Then we’d better do this now. Your guy will just have to see you later.”

  I stared hard at Mac, trying to force him to look at me by the power of my mind. Which totally worked, by the way. He waved. I waved. Marigold grabbed her huge bag and pulled me out the door.

 
We walked a few blocks to a shabby little store with a burgundy-striped awning. The painted sign in the window said Wear It Again, Sam. Underneath that were the words Reclaimed Clothing.

  I couldn’t even pretend not to be annoyed. “You brought me to a thrift store? I have a master’s degree. I have a job. I can afford a dress.”

  “Don’t be a snob,” she said with a smile.

  “You sound like Will.”

  She didn’t respond, just nodded.

  “Why are people always saying that to me?”

  She shook her head as she pushed open the door. “Come on.”

  The store smelled like incense and mildew. It was strangely appealing, and a little comforting. As I glanced around the shop, I saw dozens of round racks topped with outfits displayed on dress-form dummies.

  “Decades,” Marigold said. “Are you a twenties girl?” She pointed to a clothing rack. “A fifties girl?” She spun me around the room. “What’s your decade?”

  I had no idea. “Is this a personality test?”

  “I already know everything I need to know about your personality. Passion and light. You’re optimistic and vigorous. I want to know if you’re interested in any particular time period.”

  I thought of Dr. Silver. “I like the sixties.”

  She nodded and pushed me toward a rack topped with a headless mannequin wearing a rectangular dress with huge polka dots on it—only four dots covered the whole dress. She saw me looking and said, “That’s late-sixties. That’s more me. I’m thinking mid for you.”

  She pushed a few things out of the way and reached for a dress. It was stiff; the sleeves hung like arrow points out from the sides. When she held it up in front of me, she shook her head and put it back. The next one was a suit, like Jackie Kennedy would have worn. I said no. The next one was black and knee-length with a round neck and raised flowers on the fabric, like someone had sewn them all on there with thread.

  Marigold studied it. “I love the embroidery.” She fingered a few flowers. “And this piping.” She ran her hand along the neckline and the hem where there was a line of white.