Funny Story(32)

Harvey pats the wall, then ambles back to the office, while I move on to dismantling the origami Dinosaur Day display to make room for the Pride Month display. Afterward, I help Ashleigh finish the Juneteenth and Loving Day displays, while she fills me in on her first real date with Craig, delivering each startling tidbit of information in a perfect monotone while I try not to pee myself from laughing.

(When they got to his house after dinner, he made her sit with him in the car for twenty unspeaking minutes while the Phish album he’d put on finished playing, then did the exact same thing after he drove her home.)

“I’m glad someone’s enjoying this,” she says, but I can tell she’s enjoying telling it too. It’s fun and a little thrilling, feeling like we’re kind of, sort of real friends now.

When I get back to my desk, I field a few calls, after which I teach roughly five hundred kids how to sign in to an online game for the five hundredth time.

By then it’s the peak of my workweek: Saturday Story Hour.

Bonus: it’s a warm, cloudless day, so we can take this activity outside.

When we’re settled in a ring in the grass out front, I ask, “Who’s ready to hear a story?”

Hands go up around the circle. Shameless excitement. Open expressions of feelings.

It’s funny: As a kid, I had no idea how to interact with other kids. I felt most at home with Mom and her friends. But as an adult, I find kids so much easier to understand.

They say how they feel, and they show it too. There are fewer ulterior motives and unwritten rules. Silences aren’t unbearably awkward, and abrupt segues to different subjects are the norm. If you want to be friends with someone, you just ask, and if they don’t want to, they’ll probably just tell you.

I clear my throat and open Snappsy the Alligator to get us started, scanning my rapt audience as I begin to read.

Arham, of course, wears his trademark Spider-Man costume. A three-year-old, Lyla, has spaghetti sauce all over her face and dungarees. She’s also sucking on a lemon wedge like it’s a pacifier.

Basically, all is right with the world.

Halfway through our second story, I notice someone approaching from the parking lot, seemingly carried on a burst of summer air and sunshine. He’s gazing at the covered breezeway to the front doors like he’s never seen anything like it, possibly never seen a library, period.

His eyes slice sideways toward us, and I lose my place in the sentence. Miles’s face lights with a grin. He lifts his chin in greeting and draws to a stop just beyond our little ring.

I clear my throat and glance down at the picture book in my hand, finding my place in the sentence to begin reading aloud again.

When I next look up, he’s still there, looking enraptured.

By this story. About anthropomorphic mice. Learning to do gymnastics.

I wish I hadn’t been quite so committed to doing voices for all of the characters before he showed up, because now I’m obliged to keep at it.

So I use my high-pitched squeak for the littlest mouse’s dialogue, and my low grumble for the portly older mouse with the distinguished mustache. Every time I scan the crowd, Miles’s smile is a little bigger, goofier. He keeps looking around at the kids, parents, and nannies, like, Can you believe this shit? Wild!

When I reach The End, the toddlers’ caregivers give the mild applause appropriate for a late-afternoon library trip, whereas Miles sticks his fingers in his mouth and whistles, which somehow instantly turns all fifteen kids from sleepy angels into rowdy buccaneers, drunk on distilled-belowdecks rum. A couple of moms eye my scrubby, wolfish roommate curiously.

He is blissfully unaware, ambling toward me through the crowd as the other patrons gather their diaper bags and sticky-handed children to pull them toward the parking lot.

“I had no idea you could do that,” he says.

“Oh, yeah,” I say, starting back toward the front doors. They whoosh open and we enter the cool, musty quiet. “I’ve been reading since I was six. I’m getting pretty good.”

“I mean the voices,” he clarifies. “You were such a convincing elderly magician mouse.”

“If that impressed you, you should see me do the old woman who lives in a shoe,” I say.

“I’ll clear my Saturdays,” he says.

“I was kidding,” I say.

He grins. “Not me.”

I gesture toward the stacks. “Can I help you find something?”

“I was hoping you could spell out every word of a love poem to me,” he deadpans.

“That guy already called today,” Ashleigh pipes up from the reference desk.

“Yeah, I’ve hit my limit on daily X-rated flower metaphors, so that’s the one thing I can’t help you with,” I tell him.

He shrugs. “I’ll try again on Monday. Actually, I was on my way in to Cherry Hill and I just wanted to double-check we’re still on for tomorrow. Would’ve texted, but I forgot my phone at home.”

“Tomorrow?” Ashleigh looks up from the gel manicure she’s giving herself, complete with a little light-up device plugged in between her computer and the printer. Harvey left already for his daughter’s fortieth birthday and the front desk quickly descended into lawlessness. “What’s tomorrow?”

“I wasn’t planning to hold you to that,” I tell Miles.