The Dewey Decimal Debacle

Pam had been married to Shannon for over fifteen years, and in that time she had given her a series of memorable gifts, including one taxidermied squirrel. She was forty-three years old, a police detective, and she could reconstruct a crime scene down to the brand of cigarette ash on a fence post, but she could not, for the life of her, buy a present.

The squirrel had been their fifth anniversary. Pam had found it at an estate sale, glass eyes and all, posed mid-leap on a piece of fake driftwood, and she had genuinely believed it was charming. Shannon had made a sound like a kettle and put it in the garage, where it remained to this day, leaping eternally toward nothing. The self-defense keychain had been year eight, which Pam still maintained was practical, thoughtful even, a little kubotan shaped like a cat with pointy ears. Shannon had pointed out, not unreasonably, that they lived in a quiet college town and Shannon's primary daily threat was a paper cut from a paperback.

There had also been the year of the power washer, the year of the fingerprinting kit for kids ("it's a hobby we could share," Pam had said, and Shannon had laughed until she cried, which Pam chose to count as a win), and the year of the coupon book Pam made herself, redeemable for things like "one (1) oil change" and "I will not argue about the thermostat for one week." That one Shannon had actually liked. It set a dangerous precedent.

This year, though. This year Pam was going to get it right.

She had been planning it for two months, which for Pam was practically a pregnancy. The idea had come to her during a stakeout, of all things, watching some smug embezzler eat a sandwich in a parked car while Pam sat there with cold coffee and a radio playing old soft hits. "I Will Always Love You" had come on, Whitney Houston at full operatic throttle, and Pam had looked at the embezzler and thought, no, buddy, you don't know what longing is. Longing is being married to a woman who runs a bookstore and having never once done anything grand for her.

So: a dance. A fully choreographed, crowd-participation dance routine, right there in the middle of The Nest, Shannon's store, with the regulars joining in on cue. Pam had watched a video online eleven times. She had practiced in the garage, next to the squirrel, who had witnessed her more vulnerable moments. She had made a playlist, printed cue cards, and bought a small portable speaker that cost more than the power washer. Fifteen years. She was going to nail it.

What Pam did not know, could not have known, was that Shannon had also been planning something, and that Shannon's plan was built entirely on the assumption that Pam was going to do something terrible.

* * *

The Nest sat on a side street in Ann Arbor, wedged between a bicycle shop and a place that sold only tea, and it was, in Pam's biased opinion, the best building in town. Creaky hardwood floors, overstuffed reading chairs you could sink into and lose an afternoon, shelves stacked so high and packed so tight that the layout resembled less a store than a labyrinth with a cash register somewhere in its heart. Early autumn light came slanting through the front windows in long golden bars, and the air smelled the way Shannon smelled, sort of, old paper and coffee, and Pam loved it.

She arrived at eight in the morning, an hour before opening, with the speaker, the cue cards, and a roll of brightly colored masking tape she had stolen from the evidence room, which she supposed was technically a crime.

Francis was already there. Francis Flynn was twenty-nine, the store's only employee, a lanky, anxious young man who had once told Pam that working at The Nest was the only job he'd ever had where he didn't cry in the bathroom, and Pam liked him fine but had never quite forgiven him for referring to her wife as "the boss lady" in a text message.

"Pam! Hey. You're early," Francis said, looking up from a cart of books with the wariness of a man who knew that detective visits to the store were never good news.

"I need to set up a surprise," Pam said.

This was, in hindsight, the single worst sentence she could have said to Francis Flynn. His face did something complicated. His hand drifted toward his phone the way a person reaches for a fire alarm.

"A surprise," he repeated.

"A good one. A fun one. I need the floor space clear by noon and I need you to not tell Shannon, obviously, it's her anniversary surprise, our anniversary, well, the anniversary of our wedding, fifteen years, which is the crystal anniversary, did you know that? I didn't either. I looked it up. We never got crystal. I'm fixing that."

Francis had stopped listening somewhere around "not tell Shannon" and had already begun typing. Pam watched him do it. She watched him text his boss, the woman he was specifically not supposed to tell, the words she could see forming on his screen: *pam is here doing something?? she said surprise??*

"Francis."

"Sorry. Habit. Reflex. You're kind of intense," he said, pocketing the phone with a guilty shrug. "You have a voice you use for interrogating suspects and you just used it on me."

"I did not."

"You said 'I need to set up a surprise' like you were reading me my rights."

Pam let it go, mostly because he wasn't wrong. She unpacked the speaker and the tape and began laying down colored markers on the hardwood, a grid of them, a starting square for herself in green, a fan of orange triangles for the regulars, a little blue X where she imagined Lawrence Carr would stand, because Lawrence would stand somewhere regardless and it might as well be choreographed.

It took Shannon nineteen minutes to arrive, which Pam later learned was a record for the morning commute, and Shannon came through the back door with her coat half off and her hair pinned up with a pencil, forty-one years old and still, after fifteen years, the sight of her did something to Pam's chest that no case file ever had.

Shannon stopped. She stared at the tape grid on her floor. Then she stared at her wife, kneeling on that floor with a roll of masking tape in her teeth like a burglar, and Shannon's expression traveled from confusion to dread with remarkable speed.

"Oh no," Shannon said quietly.

"Morning, honey!" Pam said brightly, tape muffling her words. "Don't mind me. Don't look at any of this. It's nothing. Go do store things."

"Francis texted me," Shannon said. "He said you were 'doing something' with a question mark. Two question marks, actually." She looked at the grid, the speaker, the cue cards fanned out on the register counter, and Pam watched her wife arrive at a conclusion, and it was the wrong one, and there was nothing Pam could do about it because explaining would ruin the surprise.

"Is that a speaker," Shannon said. "Pam. Is that a microphone. Are there cue cards." She pressed a hand to her forehead. "Oh my god. She's going to propose again."

Pam, who could hear every word and pretended she couldn't, kept taping.

"Again" was a sore subject. Pam had proposed the first time in a bowling alley, which was fine, and then, for no reason either of them could later explain, Pam had proposed a second time on their tenth anniversary, on one knee, in the backyard, with a ring pop, as a joke, except Shannon had cried and it had become A Thing, and now any kneeling or small box in Pam's vicinity triggered a memory Shannon claimed to find sweet and clearly did not.

Shannon found Lawrence Carr in the poetry section. Lawrence was fifty-two, a retired librarian, a regular so regular he had his own chair, a lanky man with reading glasses pushed up on his forehead at all times whether or not he needed them, and opinions on the Dewey Decimal System that he defended with the fervor other men reserved for religion or football.

"Lawrence," Shannon whispered, gripping his sleeve. "I need a favor."

"A Dewey favor?" Lawrence said, brightening.

"A disruption favor. Listen. Pam is up to something romantic. I can feel it. And I cannot survive another romantic gesture, the squirrel, Lawrence, remember the squirrel." Lawrence nodded gravely; everyone remembered the squirrel. "So if anything starts to feel like a moment, any music, any kneeling, any declarations, you disrupt it. Interrupt. Ask a question. Start a debate. You're good at that."

"I am excellent at that," Lawrence said, with dignity. "Consider me armed."

And that, God help them all, is how it began.

* * *

Pam's next mistake was recruiting Lawrence to help test the sound system.

It had seemed smart at the time. Lawrence was always there, Lawrence was reliably free, and Lawrence could be trusted to press play on the speaker, a task requiring one finger. Pam approached him at ten o'clock, cue card in hand, and asked, casually, if he