Page 101 of Years in the Making

I watch as she looks back at her plate and begins to worry her bottom lip. She’s blinking rapidly and I am about to slide over to her when she looks up at me. “I was upset when they told me. It felt like they were abandoning me. I kept expecting to cry or lash out in some way. Spoiled, remember?” She laughs, pointing at herself. “But I just kept reminding myself that they’re just a plane ride or phone call away.” She looks at me, and I see it in her expression. They’re still here, physically still here.

When Nellie wants to call Marley after dinner, I take our plates back to the house. Midge is snuggled next to George onthe well-worn couch reading from the same book. It’s ridiculously cute.

“I heard you had a job offer today,” she says the second she sees me.

“Well, a temporary job offer,” I amend, sliding the plates into the dishwasher. “It’s just until Joshua is better. Mind if I?” I say, pointing at the armchair next to them.

“Please do.” Midge smiles up at me. “What’s your story?” she asks as George closes the book and pulls her in closer.

Only two people outside of my family know everything, and now that I’ve told Nellie, I don’t feel the same anxiety about telling anyone else. Everything pours out of me in one long stream of consciousness, and when I’m done, Midge and George are looking at me with eyes full of tears.

“She’s the reason for every breath you take,” George says softly.

“Such a romantic,” Midge scoffs, although her expression softens further making her tone carry less weight.

“I would doubt that, but it sure felt like I took my first real breath in years back in December.”

“How did you end up here together?”

“That would be Bennett and Marley’s scheming. They claimed to not like the idea of Nellie coming all this way alone, and then Bennett mentioned Betty and Joshua’s rescue.”

“So everyone around you sees it?”

“What?”

“That you’re in love with each other,” Midge says plainly. “Head over heels, only have eyes for the other, dumbstruck, truly, madly, deeply.”

“Take it from two olds—” George begins.

“Olds?” Midge sputters, looking highly offended. “Speak foryourself, sir.”

“That’s what the kids call us when they think we can’t hear them, on the account of being old.”

“What kids?”

“Your blood relations, Magpie. All the wee Midges running around this place.”

“They would never.”

“They do,” George and I say at the same time.

Midge leans forward and glares out the window to see her grandkids are up to various activities in the yard. “Those rude little buggers.”

George shrugs. “I’ve earned the stamp of old. I don’t take it as an insult, and I don’t think they mean it as one.” His words don’t seem to do anything as Midge remains in her current position, wearing the look of someone planning revenge. “Embrace the feeling, Teddy,” he says to me, ignoring what Midge is doing. “You more than just about anyone know how fleeting time can be. This thing between you and Nellie is years in the making. It has been challenged, and at the end of the day, it has triumphed.”

I lean back and look out the window just in time to see Nellie jump back from the snake Devon is carrying. He grins and then he’s chasing her with it, the other kids joining in. I can’t help laughing at a memory that starts to play. We had just finished a picnic and were walking back to the car when a garter snake slithered across the path. Nellie said a very loud “Nope,” threw the basket she was carrying to the side, and took off at a run. I’d stood still, watching her disappear as the damn thing made its way to the forest floor, totally unbothered.

“This was her dream,” I say, watching as Nellie runs toward the truck.

“What? To be chased with a snake?” George asks, confused.

What a weird dream that would be. “No, to have a mobile library.”

“I believe it,” Midge says, finally done with her death stare. “She’s got a wanderer’s spirit. I have a hard time imagining her now stuck in one place.”

I look over at Midge. “How long have you known about the library being approved?”

She looks at me with a guilty little smile. “It was approved before you arrived. Nellie’s boss had suggested that she might put Nellie’s name forward for the position.”

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