Page 12 of Milk & Cookie

He blushes sweetly. “I’m not too big to be pretty?”

“You can be big and pretty,” Morrissey says from near his elbow.

Vince lifts his arm out of the way, to look at her. “Hello, small person. You must be Morrissey.”

He knows her name? That sort of thing would be a red flag in a lot of circumstances, but I can detect zero malicious vibes from this man. He’s obviously been asking around, though. Goodness knows what he’s heard about me, but I can only assume it’s why he hasn’t approached me yet. I like small towns, but they have their down sides.

Vince holds one giant hand out to Morrissey, and she leans around him to look at me.

I give her a nod, and she takes one of his giant fingers in her fist and gives it a shake. “Hello, friend.”

He grins. “Hi. I’m Vince.”

“That’s Lulu,” Morrissey informs him, pointing at her sister, who has crawled under his seat, to get close enough to inspect his giant boots.

Vince lifts his leg out of the way and waves at her. “Hi Lulu.”

She ducks her head and holds her hair out of her eyes to study him a moment, before she says, “Yup.” Then she goes back to tugging on his bootlaces.

Morrissey comes to stand next to me. “And this is Ravee,” she says, lightly stroking Raven’s foot and watching her toes curl.

“Your mama’s very lucky to have three beautiful girls to love.” Vince’s voice sounds strained. Is he getting emotional? He does seem very sensitive. He clears his throat softly and looks back to where they came from. “Are you here for some books?”

“And to play with the puzzles.” Morrissey rises to her tiptoes and looks at his books. “Do you like reading stories?”

He nods. “I love reading stories.”

“Will you read us one?”

He glances at me, as if asking permission.

“If you’d like to,” I say. “No pressure.”

He turns back to Morrissey. “I would love to read you a story.”

Morrissey grins and reaches for the top book from his stack of mystery novels. She holds it up and looks at the cover. “Is this a good book?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t read it yet,” he says. “Should I tell you after?”

She looks thoughtful a moment, and then puts it back down. “No, thank you. It’s not very colorful. Would you like me to find you a better one?”

Vince nods. “I would like that very much. Thank you.”

She scampers off, and he presses a hand to his chest when he turns back to me. “She’s a delight, Fred. Good job.”

The praise makes me feel warm all over, and I catch myself swaying a little. “Thanks. We like her.” I lean back and spot Cadence behind the issue desk at the end of the rows of shelves, but nobody else seems to be around. When Luna goes after Morrissey, I step forward to study the books on his desk and recognize the dates on two sets of classifieds — for births and deaths — not quite covered by his notebook. “I see you’ve been studying up on us.” I nod toward his pile of yearbooks and newspapers.

“I had questions,” he says quietly.

“And I would have answered them, if you’d asked me.” I move my high-school yearbook to cover Paul’s obituary. “I could’ve saved you the trouble of hunting through someone else’s scraps of history for anything relevant.”

Vince has the decency to look ashamed of himself as he tidies the rest of the documents into a straighter pile. “I’m a mystery buff,” he says, putting his book selection on top, as if to prove it. “When I hear wild stories, I like to thoroughly validate them with facts, and then look at things from every angle, before I decide how to feel about them. Which has been very hard in your case, because you basically don’t exist online, the locals at the bar all tell me the only story they enjoy telling, and there have apparently been enough record-storage facility fires since your birth, that there’s very little hard-copy information left about you.”

The hollow gnawing in my stomach makes me ease backward, and I fold my arms over the unsettling sensation. What’s he looking for? And why does he need to look so hard? “Your research is that thorough?”

He opens his mouth, but then shuts it tight. He runs a hand over his beard and exhales through his fingers before showing me his empty palms. “That sounds bad. I promise I’m not being creepy. I scrape people’s historical information from all sorts of databases for work, and sometimes I forget that’s not a normal thing to do. It’s just… I’m that interested in you,” he says quietly, as if he didn’t want to admit it.

It’s almost endearing, but I’m not exactly happy he went digging in my past instead of asking me directly. Goodness knows what he thinks of me after hearing how other people see me. Judgmental fools.

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