Where the Light Is Best

Chapter One: The Monday Nobody Warned Him About

The first thing Nico Sheldon noticed that Monday morning was that the maple outside the library's east window had gone entirely gold over the weekend.

He stood on the sidewalk with his travel mug in one hand and his keys in the other and looked at it for longer than was strictly reasonable for a man who had a book drop to empty. The tree did this every year. Every year he stopped and looked. Cresset Point, Michigan, population four thousand and one now that the Delgatos' baby had arrived in August, had a way of handing you the same small gifts over and over, and Nico had never gotten tired of receiving them.

The library sat on the corner of Waterman and Third, two stories of red brick built in 1911 with money from a lumber fortune that no longer existed. It had tall arched windows on the south side, the kind that let light in the way a church does, in long slanted columns full of dust. Nico had run the place for six years, ever since old Mr. Deneau retired and the board discovered that nobody else in a fifty-mile radius wanted the job at the salary offered.

He unlocked the front door, flipped the lobby lights, and emptied the book drop into a canvas cart. Four mysteries, a cookbook, two picture books, and a DVD of a nature documentary that had been checked out so many times the case had gone soft at the corners. He shelved the DVD, started the coffee in the back room, and turned on the computers in the order he always did, left to right, because the third one needed a minute longer than the others to think about its life.

By eight forty-five the building smelled like coffee and old paper and the lemon oil he used on the circulation desk. It was, he thought, a good morning.

At eight fifty-two, something enormous hit the back door.

Nico set down his mug. The sound came again — a heavy, scraping thud, followed by a woman's voice saying, with great feeling, "Oh, come *on*."

He went down the back hallway past the staff restroom and the furnace closet and pushed open the door to the loading vestibule, which was less a vestibule than a narrow brick throat with a step in the wrong place. In it was a crate the size of a chest freezer, tipped on one corner, and behind the crate was a woman in a canvas jacket with her shoulder braced against it and her hair coming loose from a clip.

Beyond her, backed up to the alley, sat a rented cargo van with its rear doors flung open and eleven more crates inside.

"Hi," the woman said, not letting go of the crate. "Are you strong or are you decorative?"

"I'm the librarian."

"That doesn't answer my question."

Nico put a hand on the far corner of the crate and lifted. It came up off its pinched corner with a groan of wood. Together they walked it through the doorway, and the woman steered it — expertly, he noticed, with small corrections of her hip — around the corner into the hallway, where it settled with a boom that rattled the fire extinguisher on its bracket.

And then kept going. The crate's momentum carried it half an inch too far and its back edge kissed the end cap of the audiobook shelving. The shelf swayed. Forty plastic cases in their thick clamshells leaned as one, considered their options, and — because Nico got a forearm under the top shelf in time — decided against it.

They both stood very still for a moment.

"Okay," the woman said. "That would have been bad."

"That would have been three hours of re-alphabetizing."

"I said bad." She straightened, pushed the loose hair off her forehead with the back of her wrist, and put out a hand. "Laurel Haney. Great Lakes Natural History Museum. I'm your exhibit."

Nico looked at the hand. Then at the twelve crates. Then back at her.

"I'm sorry," he said. "My what?"

Her smile faltered for the first time. "Your exhibit. *Layers: A Story Told in Stone.* Three-week installation, opening Saturday. I have a signed agreement in the van with the Cresset Point Public Library." She paused. "You're the library, aren't you? I didn't drive into the wrong town. I've done that."

"You're in the right town."

"But the wrong week."

"I don't know yet," Nico said honestly. "Give me one minute."

He went back to his office and pulled up his email and scrolled, and there it was, sixteen messages down, a forwarded chain from Bev Pickett, board president, subject line *FYI*, sent five weeks ago and containing, buried under three layers of quoted text, a paragraph confirming a delivery date. Bev had added exactly one line at the top: *Nico — great news!! Details below. B.*

He closed his eyes for a second. Then he went back out.

"Right week," he said. "Wrong librarian. I never read past the exclamation points."

Laurel let out a breath and laughed, and it changed her whole face. She was somewhere in her early thirties, with dark blond hair and a scattering of freckles and the kind of alert, cataloguing eyes he recognized because he had them himself. She looked at the hallway ceiling, at the width of the doors, at the corner of carpet that had curled up in front of the community room, and he could see her measuring it all.

"Okay," she said. "So this is a bad morning for you."

"It's an unexpected morning."

"That's very diplomatic. Where can I put twelve crates?"

"Where were you told you could put twelve crates?"

"Main floor," she said. "South side, by the windows. Six hundred square feet. Your board president assured me there was a whole area, quote, 'nobody really uses.'"

Nico turned and walked out into the main room, and Laurel followed. He stopped at the edge of the children's section — the rug shaped like a lily pad, the low shelves, the bin of board books, and the reading nook under the tall south windows with its oak bench and its cushions and the sign a nine-year-old had lettered four summers ago that said QUIET-ISH ZONE.

"That's the area," he said.

"Ah."

"Twenty-two kids in here on a Tuesday afternoon. Thirty-five on story time Thursdays."

Laurel put her hands in her jacket pockets and looked at the lily pad rug for a long moment. "Your board president is a menace."

"Bev has a lot of ideas."

"Does she have a lot of follow-through?"

"She has," Nico said, "a lot of ideas."

Laurel laughed again. It was becoming a problem, that laugh, in a way he could not have explained if pressed.

"Look," she said, turning to him, and now her voice had a professional edge under the warmth, a woman used to being the one who fixed things in strange buildings. "I don't want to be a problem. But I do have to install this exhibit somewhere, and I have to install it this week, because Saturday's opening is already in your newspaper. I saw it at the gas station. There's a photo of a mastodon tooth."

"There's a photo of a mastodon tooth in the *Cresset Point Beacon*?"

"Page three. Above a coupon for storm windows."

Nico rubbed the back of his neck. Outside, the maple shed a leaf across the window, and the light shifted, and he found that his irritation had curdled into something much less useful: the beginnings of interest.

"Community room," he said.

"Where?"

"Down the north hall. It's eight hundred square feet, it has its own door to the parking lot, and it currently contains forty stacking chairs and a jigsaw puzzle that three retired women have been working on since Labor Day." He looked at her. "The puzzle stays. It's a lighthouse. They're on the sky."

"The puzzle stays," Laurel agreed.

"And the children's corner doesn't move. Not the bench, not the rug, not the bin."

"Deal." She stuck her hand out again, and this time he shook it. Her palm was rough at the base of the fingers, a working hand. "But I need power on three walls and I need you to not fight me about the door propped open when I'm loading."

"There's a doorstop in the furnace closet."

"Nico," she said — she'd caught his name off the ID badge clipped to his shirt, he realized — "we're going to be fine."

They were not, immediately, fine. It took two hours to clear the community room, and the stacking chairs had to go somewhere, and the somewhere turned out to be the second-floor landing, which meant carrying them up in stacks of five. Laurel carried five at a time and did not comment on it, and Nico, who had been carrying furniture up and down stairs since he was fourteen, found himself quietly recalibrating.

At eleven, Mrs. Ostergaard came in for her large-print westerns and stopped dead in the hallway to watch them wrestle a folding table.

"Nico, what on earth."

"Museum exhibit, Mrs. O. Opens Saturday."

"A museum? Here?"

"Rocks," Laurel said cheerfully, from the other end of the table. "Very old rocks. Some of them from your backyard."

Mrs. Ostergaard considered this. "My backyard's mostly sand."

"That's the punchline," Laurel said. "Come Saturday, I'll tell you where the sand came from. You'll be furious."

Mrs. Ostergaard, who was seventy-nine and had not been intrigued by anything in some time, said, "Well," and went to find her westerns, and Nico caught himself smiling at the floor.

By one o'clock they had the room empty and swept, and the crates lined up along the north wall like a freight train, and Laurel had produced from the van a rolled floor plan that she spread on the table and weighted at the corners with two staplers and a rock.

"Is that from the exhibit?" Nico asked.

"It's a rock," said Laurel. "It's from the parking lot."

He leaned over the plan. It was hand-drawn and then digitized and then hand-annotated again, dense with measurements and little sketches of station layouts, and there were three different versions of the traffic flow drawn in colored pencil with notes about which one worked for schools versus which one worked for open hours. It was, Nico thought, the work of somebody who cared more than the job required.

"You did this yourself."

"For each site. Every building's different." She tapped the drawing. "This one's my last stop."

"Last stop on the tour?"

"Last stop, period." She said it lightly, but he noticed the lightness was applied, like a coat of paint. "The outreach program is grant-funded. Grant's up in November. Either the numbers from this run are good enough that they keep it, or they don't, and I'm a very qualified person with a lot of stories about rural loading docks."

"So it matters."

"It matters," she agreed, and rolled up the plan.

They worked until four. Somewhere in the middle of it, over a shared bag of pretzels from the vending machine that had been in the staff room since before Nico's tenure, they discovered that they had the same sense of humor, which is to say a dry one delivered without warning. Laurel said the exhibit's mastodon femur had been dropped twice in Alpena and was now, technically, an art project. Nico told her that the library's furnace made a noise every February that had convinced two separate patrons the building was haunted, and that he had never corrected them because it improved attendance at the winter reading club.

"You're funnier than you look," Laurel said.

"How do I look?"

"Like a man who irons his shirts on Sunday."

"I iron them on Saturday."

"See," she said, "that's what I mean. You said that with a completely straight face."

At a quarter after four, she went out to the main room to check the sight line from the front door and stopped.

Nico came around the corner and found her standing at the reading nook with her hand flat on the back of the oak bench.

It was seven feet long, with a low back and turned spindles and a seat scooped just enough that a person sank in without sliding. The arms curved out and down and had been rubbed smooth by eight years of hands. Nico had made it out of quartersawn white oak, and the joints were mortise and tenon, pegged, no screws anywhere, and the grain of the back rail flared in a pattern like water moving over stone.

"Who made this?" Laurel asked.

"Why?"

"Because there's no hardware in it." She crouched and looked at the underside, the way you'd check a horse's foot. "That's a drawbored tenon. Somebody knew what they were doing and then didn't sign it."

Nico said, "I made it."

Laurel stood up. She looked at him differently. Not dramatically — she didn't gasp or put a hand to her chest — but her eyes went over him once, reassessing, filing something new.

"Where?"

"My grandmother's garage. She's got a barn heater and a table saw my great-grandfather bought in 1948."

"How long did it take you?"

"Four months of Saturdays."

"And you gave it to the library."

"I put it where the light is best," Nico said, and shrugged, embarrassed now. "You want somebody to sit and read, you put the seat in the light. That's the whole trick."

Laurel didn't say anything for a second. Outside, the maple was catching the low sun and throwing gold onto the floorboards, right across the bench, exactly as he'd planned it eight years ago when he'd stood in this spot in April with a tape measure and a pencil behind his ear.

"Huh," she said, softly.

"What?"

"Nothing." She picked up her clipboard. "I'm going to need an extension cord."

She left at five, driving the empty van to the motel out on M-24, and Nico locked up alone as he had done thirteen hundred times. He turned off the lights in the order he always did, right to left. He stood for a moment at the front door with his hand on the switch, looking back at the dark main room, at the pale rectangle of streetlight on the floor, at the shape of the bench in the corner.

Then he went home to check on his grandmother, and the day, which had started with a gold tree, turned into an ordinary evening, and he did not yet know that it was the last ordinary evening he was going to have for quite a while.