Fullepub 
Fern
FERN
Rose gets me to work on time (just). After all the excitement of her surprise return, it is a relief that my morning at the library is uneventful. The afternoon, however, is another story.
I am in the children’s corner reading to a child who has refused to take part in the school holiday singing and dancing group (Too loud, she’d said, and I quite agreed) when I hear a shout from the other side of the library.
“Get. Out. Of. My. Face.”
The little girl looks up at me worriedly. I share her concern. The voice is deep and guttural and doesn’t sound friendly. It’s most unusual to hear a voice like this in the library.
“Stand back! Get the fuck away from me!”
I get to my feet to try to locate its owner. I see a large man towering over Carmel. Carmel looks uncharacteristically unsure of herself. She holds out both palms toward him in a surrender gesture, but he doesn’t appear to be backing off.
I scan the area around them. A few people quietly vacate their computers, gathering in small groups closer to the door. Gayle watches from the front desk, her ear pressed to the phone. I cross the floor quickly to stand beside Carmel. Up close, I can see the man is shaking and sweating. He appears to be in quite the state.
“Excuse me,” I say. “Are you requiring some assistance?”
He looks at me. “Who the fuck are you?”
“I’m a librarian,” I say. The children, I notice, have stopped singing and dancing. The whole library is silent, which is unusual for this time of the day.
“A librarian?”
He seems surprised by this; I take it as evidence that he’s found himself in the wrong place. “Yes. You’re in the Bayside Public Library. Where were you hoping to be?”
“I need my money!” His eyes look bizarre, large and black like a cartoon character’s. He grinds his jaw and picks at his fingers. He is clearly agitated. In his right hand, he holds a pocketknife, the small sharp blade pointing outward.
“I’m sorry, but weapons aren’t permitted in the library,” I say. “I’m going to have to take that.” At first, he doesn’t protest, but at the last moment he shifts, extending his arm with the blade. It narrowly misses my shoulder.
“Fern,” Carmel says quietly.
“Hey!” I cry. “You almost got me.”
“Where’s my money?” he says. “Do you have it?”
“We don’t keep money on the premises,” Carmel tells him. Her tone is sharp and authoritative, but he mustn’t take well to it, because he lunges forward, jabbing the knife at her. I pull her backward by her shirt and frown at the man.
“Careful! You could hurt someone with that.”
The man looks right at me for the first time. “Where’s. My. Money.”
The man is sweating, panicky. He must be really worried about his money.
“It must be frustrating, not knowing where your money is,” I say. “It ruins my entire day if I lose something, believe me. Most likely, it will turn up. In the meantime, why don’t you sit down on this beanbag and I’ll read you a book?”
He doesn’t sit, but I walk to the nearby cart anyway. A copy of Michelle Obama’s new book is waiting to be reshelved. “How about this one? You’re lucky it’s here, this one has a lot of reserves on it.”
He doesn’t appear to be listening, but it’s amazing what people pick up, even while distracted. People with ADHD, for example, retain information better if they read while walking or engaging in simple play. I open the book. “‘When I was a kid, my aspirations were simple,’” I read. “‘I wanted a dog. I wanted a house that had stairs in it, two floors for one family.’”
The library has cleared out, I notice, as I read. Carmel is still beside me, a little too close if I’m honest. The man continues to pick at his fingers. I notice they are red raw and make a mental note to recommend aloe vera once I finish reading.
After five minutes, he finally slides into the beanbag. He rests the pocketknife on the floor beside him. I pull up a second beanbag. We are sitting like that when the police arrive. As they handcuff him, he says loudly, “But we were reading a book!”
I shove it between his handcuffed hands. “Keep it.”
When I turn around, Carmel is standing there.
“I’ll pay for the book—” I start, but before I have finished talking Carmel has enveloped me in a suffocating hug.
“That was very brave,” Carmel says later, as we sit side by side in the stationary ambulance. Both of us are unharmed, but the ambulance officers have wrapped blankets around us in case of shock. I’d feel far more comfortable if I could get back to work in the library, but the ambulance officers—and Carmel—have been quite insistent.
“Do you think that man was on drugs?” I ask Carmel.
“Yes, I do. The police think it was methamphetamines.”
Janet once told me that, in her previous job, due to the location of the library, she had come across a lot of drug addicts. The library, being free and cool in summer and warm in winter, became a sort of refuge for them. People complained about it, apparently, but Janet was their biggest supporter. The library is for everyone, she used to say, but some people need it more than others. She told me about a young woman—barely a teenager—who died of an overdose inside that library. The girl was a regular, apparently. Janet said she was sad that the girl was gone, but happy that the library had been a safe place for her for so many months. She had attended the girl’s funeral and erected a little statue in the garden for her. That was the kind of person Janet was.
“I wish you’d had a chance to meet Janet,” I say to Carmel.
Carmel smiles. “I heard you and Janet were close.”
“I learned so much from her,” I say. “Not just about books. She taught me about people. How to help them, respect them, and how to enrich their lives through books.”
Carmel looks at me. Her eyes, I notice, are a marbled blue with yellow edges. “Perhaps you can share some of Janet’s wisdom with me sometime? And your own, for that matter. It’s clear that you are very good at what you do. Not to mention beloved in this library.”
Beloved. I’ve never thought of myself as beloved before.
“Maybe I could even shadow you as you work, to see what I can learn?”
I frown. “Shadow me?”
“Follow you.”
“Oh,” I say. “With your cart?”
She smiles. “No. No cart.”
I think about this for a moment. And then, it might be because of the kindly way Carmel is looking at me, I nod.
Carmel looks pleased. “Wonderful. And then, maybe you could shadow me? I could even show you how to use the printers and the photocopiers?”
I sigh. “I understand that you are making an effort, Carmel. And you have shown interest in Janet, which I appreciate. But I cannot and will not learn the printers and the photocopiers.”
Carmel laughs. “All right, I accept that,” she says. “For now.”
After work, I stand at my living room window waving at Wally. He is sitting in the driver’s seat of the van, reading a novel, and it takes him a moment to notice me. When he does, he waves back. He doesn’t come up and I’m glad. I’m already overwhelmed by the day and I know further interaction would push me over the proverbial edge. But I enjoy him being within sight, where I can wave to him whenever I want. It makes me feel content, this little interaction.
My phone rings and I look away from the window. Rose’s name is on the screen.
“I knew the name Rocco Ryan sounded familiar.” Her voice is high-pitched and excited. “I googled him. He is the Rocco Ryan who founded Shout!”
“I know,” I say.
“Fern, it is a huge app. Huge!”
“I know,” I repeat.
“You know?” Rose sounds disbelieving. This irritates me. To think she would know more about my friend than I do.
“Of course I know. Wally told me.”
A pause. “Fern, do you know what Shout! is?”
I roll my eyes. “An app,” I say. “Something to do with ordering drinks.”
“According to the article I read, Rocco and his partner sold it in 2016 for a hundred million dollars. A hundred million dollars, Fern! The article also said that Rocco is one of the most promising computer programmers the world has ever seen. He was in Silicon Valley before he came to Australia. He’s been compared to Linus Torvalds and Steve Wozniak! Apparently, people were lining up to work with him when they sold Shout!, but then he just went off the grid. It was quite mysterious. People assumed he was living it up on a private island or something.…”
I glance around the room, noticing a spiderweb in the corner that I really must take care of.
“Fern, your friend is a gazillionaire. Does that interest you even a little bit?”
I sigh, considering her question. Does that interest me? I suppose it does. At the same time, of all the things I know about Wally, the fact that he is a gazillionaire (not technically an actual word) is the very least interesting.
“Not especially,” I say, waving again at Wally through the window. As Rose starts to reiterate all the reasons I should be interested, Wally waves back.
On Monday morning, Wally comes to my door to ask if I’d like to have dinner with him.
“It’s Monday,” I explain. “I have dinner with Rose on Mondays.”
Wally leans against the doorframe, his gaze resting lazily over my shoulder. “Tomorrow, then?”
“I have dinner with Rose Tuesday nights too.”
Wally narrows his gaze. “Do you dine with Rose on any other evenings?”
“Thursdays. I told you, remember?”
Wally doesn’t seem to remember. He laughs. Then he stops. “Seriously?”
“Yes.”
“Every week?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Wow.”
I frown. “Why wow?”
“I don’t know. That’s just a lot of dinners with one person.”
“Is it?” Given the fact that married couples presumably have dinner together seven nights a week, it doesn’t seem like such a lot. Then again, Rose and I aren’t married.
“I guess I could cancel,” I say on a whim. But even as I say it, I get a funny feeling. I don’t think Rose would like to be canceled on. “It’s just one night. She’s probably jet-lagged after her long flight, anyway.”
I expect Wally to smile at this, but instead he gives me a funny look. “Who are you trying to convince, Fern?”
Wally leaves and I text Rose. Bizarrely, I feel nervous as I thumb the words onto the screen.
Do you mind if I cancel dinner tonight?
In a matter of seconds, my phone begins to ring.
“Why are you canceling?” Rose demands the instant I answer.
“Well … it’s just … Wally asked if I wanted to have dinner with him.”
“Oh.” Rose is silent for a few seconds. “It’s just that I’d already defrosted the chicken.”
“Couldn’t we have it tomorrow?”
A sigh. “But I’ve been looking forward to it all day.”
Rose’s voice has a different sound to it, slightly juvenile and whiny. A gnawing sense of unease tugs at me. At the same time, the idea of canceling on Wally, and having to explain this to him, is enough to make me dig my heels in. “I’m sorry, Rose. I need to cancel.”
This time the silence on the other end lasts so long, I wonder if Rose has hung up.
“Rose?”
“Have dinner with Wally,” she says abruptly. Her voice sounds funny. I open my mouth to ask if everything is all right but before I can, she has ended the call.
I forget about the Rose situation the moment Wally walks into my flat (fifteen minutes early) that night. I’m anxious about the fact that all I have in the fridge is sausages, yogurt, and puff pastry, but Wally quickly puts me at ease by ordering pizza, which we eat at my round table. It is most strange, seeing my second chair hosting a guest. Normally, it is simply a storage space for my unread books.
“Rose googled you,” I say as we settle onto the couch afterward. “She read an article that said you sold your app for a hundred million dollars.”
Wally cocks his head thoughtfully. “The article was accurate. That isn’t always the case.”
“Wow,” I say. “You live economically for someone with a hundred million dollars.”
He laughs. “I don’t have a hundred million dollars. I got my share of it. But I had a business partner and we had a number of investors who all got their cut. And a good chunk went to tax and our charitable organization for underprivileged children … But you’re right, I do live frugally, considering my means.”
“Why do you work at all?”
He appears to consider this. After a moment, he shrugs. “What else would I do? Sit around counting my gold? Besides, working is important to a person’s mental health.”
I agree wholeheartedly with this. I can’t think of anything more important to my mental health than my work at the library. “How is your mental health?” I ask. “I mean … the last time you were working on an app, things didn’t go so well for you.…”
“This time it’s better,” he says, smiling. His gaze is still over my shoulder, but closer these days, almost touching my face.
We remain like that for a moment, Wally smiling at me; then, Wally sits up straight. “Oh, I almost forgot. I’ve been meaning to ask you…” He reaches into his pocket and retrieves a folded-up piece of paper, which he unfolds onto his lap. It appears to be for a private health fund.
“What’s this?” I ask.
“Changing health insurance,” he says, rolling his eyes. “I’ve had to do a mountain of paperwork. And it appears I need an emergency contact person in the country.”
He holds out the page to me, and I know what he’s going to say before he says it. It’s rare that this happens to me. Under the circumstances, I should feel pleased.
“Would you consider … being my person?” Wally asks, holding out a pen.
I clear my throat. “I would be delighted to be your person, Wally. Truly delighted. But I feel there’s something you should know first. Something important.”
Wally looks surprised. But he nods and sits back in his chair. “All right. What is it?”
I close my eyes, take a breath.
“When I was a kid,” I say, “I did something terrible.”
