Page 7 of A Mountain Man Walks into a Library

Ilike to think I’mpretty good at keeping secrets, but when I walk into the staff room this morning, I am visually accosted by a ruckus of streamers, balloons, and beaming, meddling coworkers.

There is also a pinata suspended from the ceiling, shaped like a moose which just seems needlessly grim. I refuse to take a swing at it, but a teen volunteer grabs the bat, and within minutes, we have a messy heap of candy in the middle of the break room floor. The volunteers then mount the moose head on top of the filing cabinet where it spends the rest of the day, surveying the librarians who wronged it.

By the time I slip out at the end of the day, I almost don’t hate that it’s my birthday.

I’ve only worked at this library for six months. My coworkers didn’t have to throw me a party. They didn’t have to welcome me like they did back in November, either. They added me to the text chain, invited me to dinner, and sent long, rambling emails with recommendations for everything from pizza parlors to plow services. It was like every myth about small-town life—with zero dark underbelly. Which just made everything even more bizarre.

As I blinker onto the two-track that leads up the side of Harlow Mountain, I think I might kind of like it here.

But then I pull through the trees and into my driveway, and my buoyant mood sinks.

A car is parked in front of my house. A familiar car. A car that took me on summer vacations, to debate team practice, to prom. A car that should be parked practically a state away from here—not in my driveway.

And on my porch sit my parents.

They rise when they see my car. They smile and wave, and I wave back. I’m happy to see them. I am. Ilovemy parents, love the way they support me and only have my best interests at heart.

But I was kind of hoping to spend my birthday weekend, moping alone. Is that so much to ask?

“Hi, baby,” my mom says when I get out of the car. She pulls me into a crushing hug.

“Rem,” my dad says, squeezing my shoulder. He looks mildly rumpled and bleary-eyed behind his glasses, like he spent the entire drive up to Granite-Glacier, sitting in the passenger seat and grading student papers. He probably did. It is finals week, after all.

And that only makes it all the more strange that they’re even here.

“We couldn’t let you celebrate your birthday by yourself,” my mom says, as if she read my thoughts. Can she do that? I’ve always feared.

“Your mom said you got dumped,” Dad chimes in, like it’s not a humiliating thing to say to someone, point-blank like that. Even if it’s not true.

“It’s okay,” I assure them, “it wasn’t serious. I’m fine. You didn’t...” I gesture around to them and their car and—is that a cooler?Oh my God. “You didn’t have to do this.”

“It’s your birthday,” my mom stresses again. “We brought food and board games and your dad wants to see the brewery, of course, and on the way up, we saw a map at the gas station that shows you where all the best waterfall hikes are!”

I feel my lips disappear. I know I’m making that strained expression I always make when I’m trying to bite my tongue. Because board games? Brewery tours?Waterfall hikes, plural? That doesn’t sound like a simple overnight trip. That sounds like a whole—

“We thought we’d spend the whole weekend,” Mom says, but she’s grinning so brightly as she says it, that I can’t do anything besides smile back.

“Of course,” I say, finding my footing. I can do this. It’s just a weekend. I can mope later. “Let’s get your stuff inside. The place is small—”

“We’ll sleep on the couch,” my dad says, “it’s a pull-out, right?”

“Yeah. But, Dad, your back. You guys take my bed.”

My dad waves a dismissive hand at me. “My back will be just fine for a weekend. It’s just two nights.”

Just two nights, I repeat. Just two nights, and I’ll have fun with my parents. I always do. And then I’ll go back to my new life, up here all alone.

I don’t know why I’m so reluctant to have them see it. No—that’s not it. I’m not worried about them seeing my life. It’s something about mixing my two lives together and seeing the combination come out muddy and wrong. My life back in Ann Arbor had been full of books and talks by guest lecturers. I spent long nights in coffee shops that were open for long nights, working and writing and reading. I’d call Dad whenever I had a question about a particularly thorny MLA citation, and he would pontificate for long, soothing minutes about not only the question I had asked him but also about why MLA was the superior citation system over ALA, and why Chicago style should go sit in a corner and think about what it had done.

Up here, though. Up here, my life is still full of books and reading. But it’s different. It’s different in a way that I can’t quite articulate. While Ann Arbor had been all about the speed of assimilating new information, Granite-Glacier is, well,glacial. Up here, I feel like I have time to really take in each new thing, to examine it and absorb it into the core of me. The combination of the two makes me feel dizzy.

But, like my dad said, it’s just a weekend. Just two nights. I can be dizzy for two nights.

So I toss him my keys so he can unlock the door while I take up their suitcases from my porch. Mom grabs the rolling cooler.

“We couldn’t remember if you had electricity way up here,” she whispers conspiratorially, as if it thrills her to be visiting somewhere so rustic, “so we brought the cooler.”

“I have electricity, Mom,” I say. I sound like a petulant teenager, and I try to rein in my tone. “But my fridge is small, so it’s nice to have the cooler for extra space.”

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