Page 3 of The Lonely Hearts Book Club

I’d always liked Mateo. Everyone did. His voice made him seem like he should be seven feet tall, but he was as slight of build and limb as I was. Add to that a boy-band swoop of inky-black hair and a willingness to laugh at everything—including himself—and it was impossiblenotto enjoy his company.

“You know who that guy is, right?” Mateo asked.

“No,” I said, my brow furrowed as I watched the gold-tipped cane and elbow patches disappear into the German Philosophy section. “Should I? I’ve never seen him here before.”

“That’s because he comes first thing in the morning and only lets Octavia help him. He says everyone else here drains his brain cells by proximity.” Mateo clucked his tongue. “You never open, so you’ve never seen him reduce the staff to terrified goo. We usually have to keep a mop handy.”

I thought about that spark in the old man’s eyes that only intensified when I started to push back, and shook my head. “He’s not that bad. A little curmudgeonly, maybe, but—”

“Yeah, right,” Mateo interrupted. “Mark Twain was a curmudgeon. Ebenezer Scrooge is a curmudgeon. Arthur McLachlan is Satan’s grandfather. One time, he even managed to eke a tear or two out of Octavia. He’s that bad.”

“Really?”

This was a more sinister warning than Mateo realized. Of all of us on staff at the Coeur d’Alene Public Library, Octavia was the best—and the fiercest. Mateo found himself here because this was as far from working in a hospital as he could physically get, and I was here because reading was my only real life skill, but Octavia was hard-core. She’d been a librarian for more years than I’d been on this earth, and I was pretty sure she had the Dewey decimal system memorized. As inallof it.

You know that thing when people come into a library and ask for a blue book with weird writing on the cover? She always knew the exact book they were talking about. Without fail. Someday, I was going to grow up andbeher.

“Take it from me, Sloane,” Mateo said. He eyed me up and down, sympathy in every sweep of that gaze. “If you want to keep this job, you’ll stay far away from him. He’ll tear you to pieces…and worse, he’ll enjoy every second of it.”

***

Mateo’s words turned out to be truer than he knew.

Not the part about me keeping my job—my post as a librarian meanteverything to me—but about Arthur’s single-handed determination to reducemeto a puddle of goo. For the next few weeks, he waged a campaign that Caesar himself would have been proud to call his own.

“Good morning, Sloane,” he said the day after our first meeting. I was so surprised to see him again—and in that same elbow-patched tweed jacket—that I almost dropped all five pounds of theCryptonomiconI was shelving. “Any more painfully obvious historians you’d like to suggest I read today?”

Mateo squeaked and hid himself behind the nearest computer kiosk, but I wasn’t about to let Arthur win so easily. Especially since I had the Neal Stephenson to protect me.

“No, but they just put out a new list of Reese Witherspoon’s summer book club picks. I’d be happy to put a hold on anything that catches your fancy.”

Arthur’s eyes goggled so hard that I was afraid he might have popped a blood vessel. “Never say those words to me again, young lady.”

“What?” I returned brightly. My second-rate Pollyanna charm was on high, but only because I felt sure he’d be disappointed in anything less. “Reese Witherspoon? Or book club? I hope it’s not the latter. I’ve always wanted to start a reading group for the library, but I’ve never been able to convince Octavia to allocate the resources.”

“Good for her. I knew there was a reason I liked that woman.”

I tilted my head and pretended to consider him. “If I grabbed you a volunteer application, do you think you might like to help me get one going? We could meet over cups of hot cocoa and explore John Green’s backlist together.”

“Balderdash!”

From then on, Arthur showed up to the library every day at the same time. Ten thirty on the dot, an exact half hour after I clocked in for the day. The precision of it wasn’t lost on me—or on Mateo, who always scurried away the moment he caught sight of his nemesis.

“I talked to that boss of yours, by the way,” Arthur said as he thumped past me, his cane making pointed jabs at the blue-carpeted floor. “I warned her that if you try to start a book club, I’ll write a letter to the mayor and have this whole place shut down. I can, you know.”

“For shame, Mr. McLachlan,” I said. I set down the pile of recycled paper I’d been sorting through and smiled sweetly at him. “Banning books from the public? What’s next? Shutting down food pantries? Painting the rainbows out of the sky?”

“Harrumph!”

By the time two months had passed, Arthur McLachlan had all but lost his power over me. When Mateo saw him coming, he still ran for cover—or, in this particular instance, ducked behind me—but not me. I was made of sterner stuff…and more to the point, I actuallylikedhim.

“If you sacrifice me to that old goat, so help me, I’ll be out of commission for the rest of the day,” Mateo warned on this particular day. He clutched at me with his hot, ink-stained hands. They were likely to leave marks on my favorite yellow skirt, but that wasn’t anything new.

“I’m pretty sure goats are historically the ones who get sacrificed.”

“You know what I mean,” he said. “I don’t know how you can stand the way he talks to you. You usually cry every time Octavia calls you to her office. Sometimes more than once.”

That was true, but only because Octavia rarely had anything good to tell me. Today’s meeting had been a rough one in particular, and my eyes were still stinging with the tears I’d only just managed to keep in check.