Chapter 1

I’ve been told that there are more people with birthdays in September, October, and November than in all the other months combined, and that the reason for this is ... weather.

I suppose it makes sense. In December, January, and February, it’s cold outside, so people don’t go out as often. I guess the argument is, if you stay in, then staying in, in bed, just seems logical.

But that’s not the reason my niece, Emma, gave birth in October. At least not because she stayed in bed with a man when it was cold outside.

I’d have to admit that the weather did play a major role in her pregnancy.

I must back, up, however, and start again, because this is a story, and all stories have a beginning, middle, and end. I know this because I’m a librarian. I am the head librarian at the Twin Oaks Public Library, in Twin Oaks, Idaho.

Books are my life, but that does not mean I have the skills to be an author, as can already be seen by how this story has been written thus far. I’m not a professional, and my beginning is a little non-standard. I could not ask a professional author to write this, though. If I did that, I’d end up in jail, and we don’t want that. It’s a good story, though, at least according to my niece, and should be told.

So, I’ll change the names to protect the guilty, and tell the story and you can be the judge as to whether or not it needed to be written.

Since I said a story needs a beginning, I’ll start by introducing the characters in this story. I’m Bob Andrews, thirty-two, single, and have a bachelor’s in library science. I have an older brother, Charles, who was my mother’s pride and joy. He was the sportsman, and the valedictorian. He was the handsome one, who juggled three girlfriends who wanted to be with him so much that they didn’t mind that there were two other girlfriends.

He went to college, intent on becoming a doctor, and (no doubt while cramming for a biology exam) knocked up a classmate. My mother was ambivalent about this. She wanted to be ecstatic that now she’d have two doctors in the family but she said she was much too young to be a grandmother.

I had been unable to compete with my brother my entire juvenile life, so when I went to college, I decided, “Fuck them all. I love books. I’m going to make books my career.” My mother was horrified. Nobody in her circle of friends would be impressed that one of her sons was a librarian.

Nobody came to my graduation ceremony, but that was fine with me. I found a town that had a library, but no librarian, and became gainfully employed. Unfortunately, the town also had no unmarried women who appealed to my tastes, but you can’t have everything. This town was far away from things that were far away. It was quiet, and books love quiet.

Meanwhile, my brother and his wife decided marriage wasn’t for them, and both wanted to join Doctors Without Borders and go off and save the world. Emma, their daughter, became an impediment to that goal, and suddenly everybody loved me again. They asked me to take her “just for a few years” until they were back in the country, and I inherited a five year old girl.

That was the beginning.

I suppose the middle of the story is about how “just for a few years” turned into ten years. During the first two of those years, Emma asked about her parents regularly. I didn’t have much to tell her, because they never contacted me after they delivered a girl and three suitcases to my door and drove off in a hail of gravel.

And I mean never contacted me.

I had a power of attorney, including for medical decisions, so that was fine. My mother couldn’t visit because she was “too nervous about how Chuck and Judy were doing off in Nigeria” or wherever she thought they were. Her, they contacted, apparently.

My mother was still too young to be a grandmother, so she pretended she wasn’t. Emma and I were left to our own devices, which was fine. We had a rocky start, because I was a complete stranger, and she missed her parents. When I tried to enroll her in school, they wanted her old school records, which I didn’t have. I had no contact information for her parents, so I called my mother, who said her parents were much too busy to spend time dealing with schools. Emma had gone to child care every day, and had never been enrolled in school.

I found out she was smart as a whip and ahead of all her early childhood development markers. She was already reading second grade books when she came to live with me. Obviously, the child care center had done some preschool kinds of things.

She was also sweet, if painfully shy. I suppose that was normal. Her entire world, up to that point, was her child care center, and the little time she had with her parents each day. I’m just guessing, really, but she probably knew her child care workers better than she knew her parents.

After two years of having no contact with her parents, she stopped asking about them. Two years later she sat me down and, with serious eyes, said, “Uncle Bob, I know you get birthday and Christmas cards for me, and pretend they come from my parents. You don’t have to do that anymore.”

When she was ten, she started playing soccer, and at twelve was on a softball team. Of course all kids in town played soccer and were on softball teams. There wasn’t a plethora of things for kids to do in Twin Oaks. She was petite, but she held her own with the bigger kids.

I expected the onset of puberty to be tumultuous, but it wasn’t. She came to me one day and said, “I think I started my first period. We need supplies.” She had studied up on it, and told me what to go get.

By the time she was fourteen, we were the best of friends. We liked the same foods, music, and movies. She cooked better than I did, and to be honest, when it came to home repairs, I was wise to let her take the lead on those, too.

I saw more of her in the winter, of course. Winters in Northern Idaho are like winters in southern Canada, which is, after all, only sixty miles north of us. You can’t play either soccer or softball in the winter, either, and she said she didn’t have the legs for basketball.

So she was my assistant librarian for most of the winter.

We both had a love for books, and read voraciously. I had about ten thousand volumes on the library shelves, and it’s possible I’d read two-thirds of them. We also had a section of shelves dedicated to a paperback swap. Patrons brought in a few paperbacks, and could take a few with them. I was quite sure that, by the time she went off to college, she’d already have studied whatever they were going to teach her.

This would have stayed the middle of the story, except that, one night in January, while we were still at the library, it snowed.

The library, being one of the primary venues of entertainment in town, stayed open until ten at night in the winter time. We didn’t open until ten in the morning, so I could still get my eight hours. Emma had come in after school, and had been shelving returned books when she stopped and came to the circulation desk, where I was updating computer records.

“It’s a really slow night,” she said.

I looked up. The program I was using kept erroring out and I was frustrated. I’d been at it for hours and was getting nowhere.

“I don’t think anybody has come in for hours,” she said.

I looked around. I didn’t see anybody besides her.

“Maybe we should close early,” I said.

“We could watch a movie,” she suggested. “There’s a new one on Amazon that looks interesting.”

“Go check the stacks and make sure nobody fell asleep back there,” I said.

“There’s nobody here, Uncle Bob,” she said. “I’ve been shelving books, and like I said, I haven’t seen anybody in hours.”

“Okay,” I said. “Get your coat. I’m taking my best girl for hot chocolate!”

She grinned.

We got our coats and I flipped the breakers that darkened the interior of the building.

Then we opened the front door, and found out why nobody had come to the library for hours.

They couldn’t.

There was a blizzard outside. And it had been blizzarding long enough that we couldn’t get out. The snow was already five feet deep.

The wind was howling and blew a pile of snow into the room. I had to go get a broom and sweep a bunch of snow inside, to get the door closed again.

“Maybe it’s just a drift,” I said.

Emma went to the back door. The snow was even higher, there. She ran upstairs and looked out the big leaded glass windows in the front of our hundred year old stone building.

“We got problems,” she yelled. “The whole town is buried.”

This was unusual. When you live in a place where it snows a lot, they’re usually ready for snow and handle it well. This blizzard had blown down from Canada, though, instead of going east, like it had been forecast to do.

We were snowed in. And from the looks of it, we weren’t going anywhere for at least a day or two. If the snow plows were buried, it might take three or four days for someone to get to us. We were a good fifty feet from the road, and that meant they were going to have to move tons of snow to get to us.

And we wouldn’t be one of their top priorities.

We wouldn’t starve. From days gone by, when the librarian lived in the library, there was a small apartment in the back, behind the circulation desk. It still had a refrigerator and stove in it, though the stove was covered with a counter top where, in the past, books had been repaired. There was also a small microwave oven there, which we used to heat things up in. And anyone who lives in “snow country” knows to have a cache of food for times just like these. Mine, at least in the library, consisted mostly of containers of Dinty Moore beef stew, cans of chicken noodle soup, and a box of Bisquick. You can make lots of things with Bisquick. I had read an autobiography of a soldier who used Bisquick to make biscuits, pancakes, dumplings, and even a birthday cake, and all in an oven he made out of cast off metal containers. We had an actual oven, assuming I could get the thing lit.

We didn’t have extra clothes, nor was there a shower in the library. The tub that had been in the bathroom was removed when it was turned into a public restroom for patrons. We could take whore’s baths, which I had read of in more than one book. I knew there was a Murphy bed in one wall, too, though I had never pulled it down. Clutter had accumulated over the years and would have to be cleared away before the bed could be lowered. Hopefully, we wouldn’t need it for long.