I nodded. “Will do.”
She left, and for a moment I just sat there, watching her as she wound her way through the reading room, picking up discarded books from a few tables along the way. There was a fireplace—a real one—crackling in the next room, and it was only as I looked at it that I realized, suddenly, how chilly it was where I was sitting. I pulled my coat closer around me, zipping it up again, and bent over the town history, beginning to turn pages.
In the two weeks since Deb’s first day of involvement on the model, it was more on track to actually being finished than I’d ever imagined possible. And that was despite the fact that, even though she’d made several phone calls, Opal couldn’t rally any more delinquents to help us. Luckily, Deb had a plan. Or several plans.
First, she had incorporated multiple systems to increase our overall working efficiency. Besides CAA, there was STOW (Same Time Owed Weekly, a written schedule that insured one of us was at the model every afternoon), PROM (Progress Recap Overview Meeting, held every Friday), and my personal favorite, SORTA (Schedule of Remaining Time and Actual). This last one was a large piece of poster board detailing all the work we still had to do alongside the days that were left before May 1, the councilwoman’s deadline.
Deb had also created a Listserv for the model project, as well as a blog that documented the progress as we put it together. Her e-mails were just like Deb herself: cheerful, concise, and sort of relentless, landing in my inbox on an almost daily basis. There was one thing about the model, though, that I wanted to do on my own.
“Mclean? ”
I blinked, then looked over at the table beside me. Sitting there, in his parka with a book in his hands, was Jason, the prep cook from Luna Blu. “Hey,” I said, surprised. “When did you get here?”
“Actually, I’ve been here.” He smiled. “I was just being antisocial. I didn’t realize that was you who was talking to Lauren until I turned around a minute ago.”
“Lauren? ”
He nodded at the reference desk, where the librarian who’d helped me was now typing away at a computer, her eyes focused on the screen. “She’s the best when it comes to hunting down information. If she can’t help you find what you’re looking for, no one can.”
I onsidered this as he picked up his own book—a worn paperback of something called A Prayer for Owen Meany—opening it again to his place. “So you hang out here a lot?”
“I guess,” he replied. “I worked here for a while when I was in high school. You know, summers and after school.”
“Wow,” I said. “That must have been different from the kitchen at Luna Blu.”
“Nothing is like working at Luna Blu,” he agreed. “It’s like contained chaos. Probably why I like it so much.”
“Dave said you went to Harvard,” I said.
“Yep.” He coughed. “But it didn’t really work out, so I came back here and took up cooking for a living. Natural career progression, of course.”
“It sounds like it was a lot of pressure,” I said. He raised his eyebrows, not sure what I meant. “The school you and Dave went to, and the college courses you took, being so driven academically.”
“It wasn’t all bad,” he replied. “Just not what I wanted, eventually.”
I nodded. Then he went back to his book, and I turned my attention to the one open in front of me. After looking through some tiny-typefaced documents and a few sketches, I turned a page and there it was: a map from twenty years earlier of the area of downtown that included Luna Blu. I leaned in closer, scanning the pages until I found my street, and my own house, identified only by a parcel number and the label SS DOM: single-story domicile. I ran my finger over it, then over Dave’s next door, before moving back across the page to the square behind it. There it was, the shape familiar, and also listed with a parcel number. Above it, it said only HOTEL.
Weird. I’d been expecting something other than a house, but for some reason this was a surprise to me. I grabbed a pen and an old receipt from my purse and wrote the parcel number of the hotel on it, as well as the official address, then folded it away and stuffed it in my pocket. I was just stacking the books into a pile when my phone beeped. It was a text from Deb.
STOW REMINDER: YOU’RE SCHEDULED 4 TO 6 TODAY! ?
I looked at my watch. It was 3:50. Right on schedule. I picked up my bag, sliding the phone into it. As I got to my feet, Jason turned around again.
“You going to the restaurant?” I nodded. “Mind if I walk with you?”
“Not at all.”
We left through the reading room, passing Lauren, who was helping an older woman in a baseball cap at the computers. “Thanks for your help with the catalog system earlier,” she said. “You’re a genius!”