Chapter 1 There were days in my life when I woke up perky and cheerful. When I bounced out of bed with a smile on my face and a song in my heart. When the sun shone through windows that didn't show a single streak, when my annoyingly curly hair cooperated, and when the peanut butter didn't tear up the bread as I made my lunch. When from morning to night things got done and fun was had by all. This was not one of those days. "It's hot." I looked over at Julia Beaton. Now in her mid-sixties, a few years ago Julia had retired to her hometown in northwest lower Michigan after a successful career on Broadway. She wasn't the type who could sit around and do nothing but enjoy herself, so it hadn't been long before I'd hired her as my part-time bookmobile clerk. She charmed everyone from infants to octogenarians and beyond, she was the best-ever storyteller, and she laughed at my jokes. But she didn't like the heat. And neither did I. We were sitting on folding lawn chairs in the shade cast by the bookmobile's awning. The vehicle itself, all thirty-one feet, twenty-odd thousand pounds, and three thousand books of it, was sitting in the shade of a maple tree and its air-conditioning had been working just fine its entire life. Until today. How long had the bookmobile been on the road? More than three years, but not four, I was pretty sure of that. My half-melted brain tried to do the math and then quickly gave up. "Too hot," I murmured. Julia nodded, waving her face with the fan she'd made out of a local restaurant's take-out menu. Though she'd put her long strawberry blond hair up into a twisted bun, and tendrils had escaped onto the nape of her neck, sticking to her skin. It was actually a good look on her, as pretty much everything was, but she looked miserable with the heat and humidity. Our first sign of pending air conditioning doom had been a whine from Eddie, my black-and-white tabby cat. Eddie had stowed away on the bookmobile's very first voyage, and now if he wasn't on every trip, he would receive get-well cards from patrons by snail mail, e-mail, and text message. Twenty minutes ago, there had been an odd click from somewhere inside the rooftop air-conditioning unit. "Rrr," Eddie had said from his current favorite spot inside the storage cupboard. Julia and I had been busy setting up for the day's first afternoon stop and hadn't realized what he'd meant. Sure, I knew he usually said "mrr," not "rrr," but what I didn't know was that he was tuned in to the bookmobile's mechanical innards and was trying to warn us. Well, that or a far more likely explanation, which was that at three in the morning he'd howled so much and for so long for no known reason that the missing "m" was the feline equivalent of laryngitis. "Rrr," he said now. I looked over my shoulder. My cat was flopped in the open doorway, stretched flat from one side of the door to the other, but with his head rotated so his chin was on the very edge of the top step. How he managed that without his head falling off, I had no idea. "Sorry, pal," I said. "That fur coat of yours probably isn't helping, is it?" "Rrr." Julie waved her menu fan in Eddie's direction. "Deepest apologies for the weather, Sir Edward," she said in an upper-crust English accent. "I take full responsibility." He heaved a deep sigh and his body went even flatter, something I wouldn't have thought possible. "Want to bet on how many people show up at this stop?" I asked. The movement of Julia's fan slowed as she considered. "Twice as many as the last one." More math? The woman was cruel. "No one showed up." "And two times no one is?" "A big fat zero." I slid down in my chair and wished I had my own menu from Fat Boys Pizza to fold into a fan. When we'd discovered the air-conditioning was out, I'd called Josh Hadden, the library's IT guy, and asked him to send out a mass text to all the bookmobile patrons to let them know what was going on. He'd grumbled, saying that we were perfectly capable of doing it ourselves with the hot spot he'd set up, but I told him we were on the east side of Tonedagana County, outside of the hills and valleys and lakes of the county's western side. Although we were in the county's flatlands, it was also sparsely populated, so telecommunications were routinely inconsistent and spotty. Josh had given one more obligatory grumble, said I owed him one, and hung up. The end result was Julia and Eddie and I sitting in the gravel parking lot of a small white clapboard church, waiting for a breeze that wasn't coming. "Just like Godot," I muttered, but not very loudly, because otherwise Julia would have started quoting the play, and I'd never once been able to sit through a production of Samuel Beckett's most famous work without falling asleep. It was, without a doubt, a character flaw, but so far it was one I'd managed to hide from my coworker, and I hoped to continue to hide it ad infinitum. Which was undoubtedly another character flaw. "Snow," Julia said weakly. "Remember snow? A bare five months ago this land was covered in a bleak blanket of white. Damp cold pierced our bones and we longed for spring. For summer. And now?" She sighed. "Oh, the trickery of a wish granted." I expended some energy to turn my head. She didn't look like she was quoting from something, but it could be hard to tell. "Was that you or a character?" I asked. "No idea." She flapped the fan in her face. "Too hot to remember." "Rrr." I slid down in the folding chair so far that my chin was almost touching my chest. Sighing, I wondered how much of the scheduled stop time was left. Once we got back inside, battened down the hatches, and got rolling, at least we'd have some breeze from the open windows. My phone was in the pocket of my cropped pants, which were made marginally professional because I always wore a belt. I thought about pulling it out to see what time it was but didn't want to risk working up a sweat. If I started sweating, it would be hard to stop. Soon the only thing left of me would be a puddle of perspiration, and who would be left to drive the bookmobile back to Chilson? Julia had never wanted to go through the training to get her commercial driver's license, a requirement of the library, though not of the state of Michigan, so she was out. Eddie didn't have the license either, but he also didn't have opposable thumbs or legs long enough to reach the pedals. I closed my eyes, smiling at the image of Eddie driving the bookmobile. If he could, he surely would, because rules and regulations, whether state, federal, local, library, or mine, didn't mean much to a cat. "Hey, Minnie?" My eyelids opened slightly. "What?" "It's hot. I'm . . . hot." I sat up. Julia, the indefatigable and indomitable perpetual optimist, the instigator of many a "Minnie, pull up your big-girl panties and do what you need to do" conversation, sounded different. If I hadn't known better, I would have said she sounded human. This could not be allowed to go on. It was time to abandon the heat-and-humidity-inspired ennui. And I knew exactly what to do. Half an hour later, Julia was smiling. "Brilliance," she said. "Sheer brilliance." I shrugged. The move had more self-preservation than genius, but I was feeling pretty pleased with myself. Now, instead of sitting on a flat windless plain in an empty parking lot, we were sitting in a crowded parking lot with a gentle breeze and an outstanding view of Lake Michigan, with a temperature fully ten degrees lower than where we'd been. Waves rolled onto the sandy beach, seagulls squawked, and the big lake's flat horizon gave no hint of the distant Wisconsin. It was Chilson in August, and we were at the beach. Nothing on earth could be better, because we were also, thanks to the city of Chilson's concession stand, snarfing down ice cream sandwiches faster than they were melting, no mean feat in this weather. "You know," Julia said, chasing a drip down the outside of her hand, "we could set up shop here for the rest of the day." The thought had already occurred to me, but there was this little issue of needing a library card to check out materials. I surveyed the mass of humanity. People on the sidewalk, people on the lighthouse pier, people on the sand, people in the water. People, people everywhere. "You think any of them are locals?" "One way to find out." Julia popped the last bit of her ice cream into her mouth and stood. "Finally, all those years of cheerleading are coming in handy," she said, then held her hands to her mouth, megaphone-style, and shouted. "Two bits, four bits, six bits a dollar, all for Chilson, stand up and holler!" A woman walking past with her children gave Julia a wide-eyed look and hurried her tots along. Other than that, most people ignored the cheer, but a few laughed, and two or three actually stood up and hollered. This, of course, encouraged She Who Didn't Have an Introverted Bone in Her Body. Julia stood superhero-style, hands at her waist and feet wide. "Calling all Chilson residents!" she shouted. "Come aboard the magical Chilson bookmobile! Meet Eddie, the bookmobile cat! Discover books of fun and fancy! No learning required! It's summer!" "You sound like one of those carnival barkers," I murmured when she paused for breath. "Well, darn," she said. "And here I was trying for Lady Macbeth." Her cheeks were tinged a healthy rosy red, a much better color than her earlier washed-out paleness. A family was picking their way across the beach, heading in our direction. Something about the group looked familiar, and I squinted thoughtfully, counting. Seven people total. One dad, six kids. Three girls and . . . and then I knew who they were. "Well, would you look at that! It's the Engstrom family, come to pay a call." It had been Ethan Engstrom, the youngest boy, who had freed a hidden Eddie on the very first bookmobile trip. At the time, I'd been trying to keep my cat's presence a secret, as my then boss had been an absolute stickler for the rules, even rules that weren't actually in place. Chad, the father, homeschooled the three sets of fraternal twins, and he seemed to manage that amazing feat through an efficient combination of humor and military precision, along with a hefty dollop of reality. "Miss Minnie, Miss Minnie!" Emma, the youngest girl, who had to be nine now, skipped up the steps and threw her arms around my middle. "It's been, like, forever since we've seen you!" Ethan came up beside her. "Is Eddie still here? Where is he?" The middle set of twins, now twelve, were next inside. "He's on the console. See?" Cara pointed while Patrick made a beeline for the mystery section. Firstborn twins Rose and Trevor, who were shockingly tall at fifteen, said a polite hello to me and Julia and went to the biography and mystery sections, respectively. Chad Engstrom, about a decade older than my thirty-five, climbed the stairs. "Thought you could get rid of us, did you?" he said in a fake sneer. "Not so fast, my pretty. We may move downstate for the school year these days, but we'll come back. We'll always come back. Heh heh heh." "Daaad," Cara said, drawing the three-letter word out into forty-six syllables. "You are sooo embarrassing." He tugged on the bill of his ball cap. "Just doing my job, missy." I laughed. It was good to have the Engstroms on the bookmobile again. Five of the six kids had already pulled out books and were sitting on the carpeted step that ran along the bottom of the bookshelves, serving as seat and step to reach the upper shelves for anyone who, such as myself, had vertical efficiency. The sixth child, Ethan, was up front with Eddie, tickling his furry white belly. Chad noted my glance. "Eddie going to be okay with that? I can have Eath stop." I snorted. "He's more than okay. Hear those purrs?" Because over the mutterings of the Engstrom kids, over Julia's tapping on the computer keyboard, and over the water and human noises wafting in the open doorway, the rumbling of Eddie's purrs wafted in and around us. More than once, I'd wondered if cat purrs had healing powers. I didn't wonder out loud, though, because I didn't have a tenth of Julia's self-confidence and might never recover from the social ridicule if that thought got out into public consumption, but on my inside I speculated on what, exactly, it was about a purr that made me go all squishy. I could ask Rafe, though. My soon-to-be husband, Rafe Niswander, might laugh at me, but he also had the power to make me go squishy on the inside, so maybe there was a correlation. Chad pointed at the ring finger of my left hand. "Big day coming soon?" And there I went, all soggy inside, and probably some of my outside, too. It happened almost every time I truly looked at my engagement ring. After we were officially engaged, I'd gone ringless for some time. This had bothered Julia more than it had bothered me, but the wait turned out to be worth it. What I wore on my finger now was a reimagined version of the high school class ring I'd lost years ago on this very beach. Rafe had convinced a friend with a metal detector to spend hours and hours walking up and down the sandy stretch, and in a minor miracle, he'd actually found it. Rafe had taken the poor beaten-up thing to the city's jeweler, and had it reworked into my engagement ring. I still could barely believe that, one, he'd even remembered that I'd lost the ring; two, that he'd gone to so much trouble to find it; three, that he actually had found it; and four, that he'd followed the jeweler's advice for the design instead of going with his initial request for an exact re-creation of my old ring. "Yes," I said to Chad. "Third Saturday in September." The date, which had once seemed so far away we barely had to pay attention to it, was now rushing toward us faster than we were prepared for. Wedding and reception details were all in hand, thanks to the efforts of my aunt Frances, but the idea of becoming half of a whole was taking some getting used to. Excerpted from No Paw to Stand On by Laurie Cass All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
