135 lines
9.0 KiB
Plaintext
135 lines
9.0 KiB
Plaintext
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
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\f0\fs24 The dishes were still being rinsed when Emma announced she had things to do and disappeared upstairs, her revised list tucked under her arm. Lizzie watched her go, then carried her own bowl to the sink.\par
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\par
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"Library this morning?" her mother asked.\par
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\par
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"Please."\par
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\par
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Elikapeka was already looking at her with that particular expression she wore when she'd decided something and was waiting for the other person to catch up. "Grocery store after. I need to get ahead of the week."\par
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\par
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"Okay." Lizzie dried her hands on the dish towel. "I'll get my bag."\par
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\par
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Emma, called down from the top of the stairs, declined both invitations in a single syllable. Lizzie had not expected otherwise. Emma's relationship with the library was cordial but distant, the relationship of someone who respected an institution without requiring anything from it personally.\par
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\par
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---\par
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\par
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The Lighthouse Point library was small and smelled the way all libraries smelled, which was to say it smelled like the best possible version of being indoors. Lizzie walked in ahead of her mother and felt, as she always did, some internal mechanism ease open. She went straight to the stacks without needing to think about where her feet were going.\par
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\par
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She found it by accident, really. She'd been moving along the F-G shelf, not looking for anything specific, when the cover stopped her. It was a painting, pale and strange and old-fashioned, a young man and a young woman against a sky that had the quality of a dream half-remembered. *Stardust*, it said. *Neil Gaiman*.\par
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\par
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She didn't know the name. She turned the book over and read the back, and then she read it again, more slowly, and then she walked back to her mother, who was examining a display of new arrivals near the door with the focused, skeptical attention she brought to most things.\par
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\par
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"Mom. Look at this one."\par
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\par
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Elikapeka took the book and read the back. She opened it somewhere in the middle and read for a moment, her expression unreadable. Then she turned to the front matter, and then to a page somewhere in the first chapter, and Lizzie watched her mother's face and tried to interpret what she saw there.\par
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\par
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"No," her mother said, and handed it back.\par
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\par
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Lizzie took the book and looked at it again, as though it might have changed. "Why not?"\par
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\par
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"It's not right for you yet."\par
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\par
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"I'm fifteen."\par
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\par
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"I know how old you are." Her mother's voice was pleasant and entirely final. She was already looking back at the display table. "Put it back and find something else."\par
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\par
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"But I read the back and it sounds\u8212?"\par
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\par
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"Lizzie." Her mother looked at her, and the look was not unkind, which somehow made it harder. "I've said no. Let's not make this into something."\par
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\par
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Lizzie knew the weight of those words. She knew what the something could become, and she knew that the something could become, if it grew large enough, a week without new books, which was a punishment so precisely calibrated to her specific architecture that it still struck her, every time her mother deployed the possibility of it, as almost admirable. She turned and walked back to the stacks.\par
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\par
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She stood in front of the F-G shelf for a moment, the rejected book in her hand, looking at it. Then she reshelved it carefully, spine out, exactly as she'd found it.\par
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\par
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She went to the S shelf and found *Dragonflight*. The library's copy was older than her own, the cover different, a dragon curving against an orange sky. She stood there running her thumb along the edge of the pages, feeling the familiar texture of something she had read\u8212?she counted, roughly\u8212?seven times. The way Lessa moved through the world. The way F'lar didn't understand her at first and then did. The Weyrs. Thread falling silver and deadly through the cold air. She already knew what happened on every page and she was already, faintly, beginning to feel better.\par
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\par
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She collected *Dragonflight* and then *Dragonquest* and then *The White Dragon*, tucked them against her chest, and carried them back to her mother.\par
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\par
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Her mother looked at the stack without expression, then picked up each book and looked at the cover, which Lizzie had always found slightly puzzling since the covers told you nothing useful, and then set them aside.\par
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\par
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"You've read these," her mother said.\par
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\par
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"Yes."\par
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\par
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"Several times."\par
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\par
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"Yes."\par
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\par
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Her mother waited, which was a thing her mother did that Emma had never learned to withstand and that Lizzie had developed a partial immunity to. The silence sat between them and Lizzie looked at the middle distance and said nothing.\par
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\par
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"It seems like it might be a good opportunity," her mother said, "to find something you haven't read before."\par
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\par
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"I tried to." Lizzie kept her voice even and respectful, which was the right register for this kind of thing. "You didn't want me to read it."\par
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\par
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Her mother looked at her. Lizzie looked back. Something passed between them that was not quite amusement and not quite exasperation, and belonged, she thought, to both of them equally.\par
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\par
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"Fair enough," her mother said, and picked up the three McCaffrey novels and handed them back. "These are fine."\par
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\par
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---\par
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\par
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The grocery store was bright and cold the way grocery stores always were in Florida, air conditioning cranked against the June heat building outside. Elikapeka took a cart and unfolded her list.\par
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\par
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"All right." She scanned it. "I need to go slowly in produce. You could do the dry goods if you want."\par
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\par
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Lizzie was already looking at the list. She knew the store well enough that she could map it in her head\u8212?the aisles, the shelves, the approximate location of every category her mother bought with any regularity. If she moved efficiently she could cut the total trip time by a third.\par
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\par
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"Give me the list," she said.\par
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\par
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Her mother looked at her. "You're in a hurry."\par
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\par
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"I want to get home."\par
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\par
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"To read."\par
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\par
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"Yes."\par
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\par
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Her mother smiled, just slightly, the way she did when she found something genuinely amusing rather than merely note-worthy. She detached the bottom portion of the list and handed it over. "Dry goods, canned goods, dairy. I'll do produce and meat and we'll meet at the front."\par
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\par
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Lizzie took the list and went.\par
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\par
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She moved through the aisles at a pace that was not quite running but was faster than browsing, reading the list and reading the shelf labels with the same eyes, making decisions in advance so she didn't slow down at any single point. Two cans of black beans. Pasta, the kind her mother liked, not the store brand. Olive oil, which was on the top shelf, so she had to stand on the cart rail to reach it, which she did without breaking stride. Chicken broth. The particular cereal her father liked which was embarrassing to buy but was on the list. Bread crumbs. Parmesan.\par
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\par
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She was at the dairy case, examining cream cheese, when her mother appeared at the end of the aisle with the cart.\par
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\par
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"Already?" her mother said.\par
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\par
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Lizzie held up the list. Everything on it had a small check mark beside it. Her mother took it and looked it over with the same focused attention she'd given the library books.\par
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\par
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"The olive oil?"\par
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\par
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"Top shelf. I used the cart."\par
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\par
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"The parmesan is the block, not the green container?"\par
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\par
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"Block. Yes."\par
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\par
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Her mother was quiet for a moment, looking at the list, and Lizzie waited. Then Elikapeka folded it and tucked it into her purse and began loading Lizzie's items from the basket into the cart.\par
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\par
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"You know," her mother said, arranging cans with the label-forward precision she applied to everything, "you could slow down occasionally."\par
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\par
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"I know."\par
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\par
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"There's no emergency."\par
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\par
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"I know."\par
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\par
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Her mother set the olive oil in the cart and looked at her. Outside the dairy case, the store moved around them with its ordinary weekend noise\u8212?carts, children, the overhead system playing something Lizzie didn't recognize.\par
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\par
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"The Gaiman book," her mother said.\par
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\par
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Lizzie kept her face neutral. "Yes."\par
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\par
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"Maybe in a year."\par
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\par
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"You don't know that."\par
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\par
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"No," her mother agreed. "I don't. But probably in a year." She pushed the cart forward. "Get the cream cheese. The Neufch\u226?tel, not the regular."\par
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\par
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Lizzie got the Neufch\u226?tel. She put it in the cart and fell into step beside her mother, and they moved together toward the front of the store, and Lizzie thought about Pern\u8212?about Thread, and the old weyrs, and the particular sound of a dragon's voice in a rider's head\u8212?and how she could be home and on the couch within thirty minutes if the checkout line was reasonable.\par
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\par
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She thought, also, briefly, about a pale cover and a sky that looked like a half-remembered dream, and a name she hadn't known an hour ago.\par
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\par
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*Neil Gaiman.* She said it to herself silently, once, the way she sometimes catalogued things she wanted to return to.\par
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\par
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Then she helped her mother unload the cart.
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