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Show Woodworth/Jj-the "t" section. This has always been her home-town library, and she knows it by heart. There haven't been any changes, even in the smell, in the years since she used to come here. "I found it, I found it," the boy yells. "You did not," his sister screams. You have to touch it." She is pulling a step ladder towards the book shelves while her brother jumps up and down and points up at a shelf above his head. "Hold on, I'll help you get it," Marty says, just as a woman enters the aisle from the other direction. "My goodness! You two sound like banshees!" the woman proclaims. Dressed in a summer floral print that skirts her figure and hangs to just below her knees, she reminds Marty of a pillow. "I thought you two were old enough to come to the adult section on your own, but I can see that I was wrong. You are obviously not adults." Boy and girl cringe againse opposite sides of the aisle, looking from their mother to Marty- "You'll just have to find a book in the children's section, then," the woman tells the children. She shoots Marty a look down the length • of the aisle. Marty can almost hear her thinking, "Why couldn't you have kept them quiet?" She feels like she should shrink back against the books herself, can't stand being directly opposite this mother, as if they might become mirror reflections. "All right, let's go," the woman says to her children. She grabs the boy by the back of his shirt. The girl turns and looks at ^arty before she follows, and Marty shurgs her shoulders. "Who can tell with mothers?" she wants to ask, feeling a tug that she should trudge off, too. Cowed, obedient. But a part of their unquestioning unity. |