Free Road Ends by Mary Lawson

the waitress asked and Megan jumped and opened her eyes.
    “Um, yes, thank you,” she said. “I wonder … do you know if there’s anywhere that I could go and just … sit for the day? Anywhere warm and sort of … public?”
    “Public?” the waitress asked, her eyebrows approaching her hairline.
    “Yes,” Megan said. “I’ve … I’ve been locked out of my house and I need to find someplace where I can wait until someone gets home. So I wondered if there was somewhere around here where they wouldn’t mind if I waited.”
    The waitress pursed her lips in thought.
    “There’s the library,” one of the women at the next table said, leaning towards them across the aisle. “That’s where the vagrants go, this weather.”
    “Not
just
vagrants,” her companion said. “People who read books go there too.” She smiled brightly at Megan. “You couldpretend to be reading a book, then they wouldn’t mind if you sat there.”
    “It’s just around the corner,” the first woman said. “Out the door, turn left, turn left again, there it is.”
    The library had a vaulted ceiling and stained glass windows and a stone floor decorated with pictures made up of tiny tiles the like of which Megan had never seen. Better still, under one of the windows there were two comfortable-looking upholstered chairs with a small table between them.
    There was a woman sitting behind a desk near the door. She glanced up as Megan came in and then went on stamping books. Megan looked around. Over to the left there was an area marked FICTION. She headed for it and began walking up and down the rows, searching for something that would help pass the time. She’d never been much of a reader. Tom was the one who always had his head in a book.
    And there, suddenly, sitting right at eye level as if Fate had been listening in to her thoughts, was
The Catcher in the Rye
. Back when they were both still in high school Tom had raved about it. He’d said it was the one book she
had
to read if she never read anything else in her life. She remembered snapping at him, saying, “Fine, you get supper and do the dishes and that way I’ll have time to sit and read books!”
    But she would read it now. It would help to pass the time, and then in a day or two she would write to Tom and tell him how much she’d enjoyed it, thus demonstrating that it genuinely had been only lack of time that prevented her from reading it—or anything else—before.
    She settled herself in one of the comfortable-looking chairs and began reading. Holden Caulfield, the hero’s name was. She didn’t like him very much. He went on and on about everyonebeing phony. He was a wallower, she decided. Like Gary, the younger twin; Gary harped on about things too. She had no patience with either of them.
    But maybe she wasn’t giving Holden Caulfield a fair chance because the truth was she wasn’t concentrating. Despite her best efforts the image of her suitcase—or rather, the doorstep of number 31 without her suitcase—kept pushing its way to the front of her mind. She closed the book and put it on the small table beside the chair.
    It’s only clothes, she said to herself, studying the mosaic on the floor. But it wasn’t only clothes. The photos of her family were in the suitcase.
    After a while the librarian came over to her. Megan thought she was going to tell her to leave, but she didn’t. She merely asked if Megan needed any help.
    Megan said, “I’ve been locked out of my house. Is it okay if I sit here?”
    The librarian looked her up and down and then said she didn’t see why not and went back to her desk. Megan sat.
    At one o’clock she braved the rain and went back to the bakery and ordered a cup of tea and something called a ham salad bap, which she ate without tasting it. She returned to the library and her comfortable chair, dizzy with fatigue, and tried to ward off the feeling of dread that seemed to have overtaken her. You’re just tired, she