Read Stork for Free Online Page B

way better at crowbarring information out of the old guy or that was as much as you got. Period.
    “Would they really level all of Main Street?”
    “Oh, that’s just one of about twenty different plans floating around. I’ve been to enough of the city council meetings now to understand that the whole thing is a mess. All I know is that this old building and little scrap of land is mine, and I can sell it to whomever I darn well please.”
    Another long oration from Afi. Quite the occasion. He yawned and stretched his legs. I knew I wasn’t going to get anything else out of him for the night. “You want me to close up again for you, Afi?”
    He looked up at me with milky blue eyes. “You wouldn’t mind?”
    “No.”
    “You OK driving in the dark?”
    So far the only good thing about Minnesota was that I got a car. A little used VW Bug, but I wasn’t complaining. Now that I had my license, the real thing, not some bozo learner’s permit, I had a newfound sense of freedom. “I’m a good driver. Besides, it’s not far.”
    My mom had rented a house from a colleague who was on sabbatical. It was about a mile out of town and close to the highway my mom took to work. The house was nice enough. I could still hear my mom trying to sell it to me: two floors, three bedrooms, kitchen with granite countertops, formal dining room, hardwood floors, and a yard that backed onto a city park. And trees. She’d been over the moon about bushy, leaf-dropping, color-changing trees. I was just glad it wasn’t old and smelly. The agreement was that we’d give Minnesota a year, see how we liked it. And then talk about where I’d do my senior year. I wished I’d gotten that one in writing. Two weeks in a row I’d caught my mom with a highlighter and the Sunday real-estate section of the paper.
    “Why don’t you go ahead and walk home, Afi?”
    He yanked on his thick lopi sweater with the patterned circular yoke. With his tufts of white hair, ruddy cheeks, and wiry build, he looked like an old fisherman. All he needed was a net thrown over his shoulder. Afi came from a long line of seafarers — mariners, as he liked to call them. Fishermen, whalers, boatbuilders, merchant traders, and explorers with a lineage going back to the Vikings.
    He left, and I took my usual spot up at the front register. I pulled out my sketchbook, envisioning a costume for Kay, the boy character in
The Snow Queen
. At Hulda’s, I’d seen a bolt of russet brown suede which would be perfect for a field jacket. I instinctively looked across the street to where the material was shelved, and a flicker of light caught my eye. It wasn’t the overhead lights, the way it had been yesterday. It was more like a lantern or flashlight moving through the store.
    I froze, a confusion of emotions. My logical side had told me to ignore the store entirely and had talked myself, deeper and deeper, into an illness theory, possibly stress-induced and with very strange symptoms. This logical side, I discovered, to a combination of dismay and thrill, had a counterpart that was highly curious about all things mystical. What if I hadn’t been dreaming? What did “Icelandic Stork Society” mean, exactly? How had I been chosen? How on earth could they possibly influence who a baby was placed with — and not
with
really, more like
in
!
    There it was again, a flash of light moving slowly. I sat paralyzed with fear. I finally wrenched my eyes away, covering my face with my forearm and taking big gulping breaths of air. After a few minutes, I lowered my arm by a mere fraction of an inch. I’d take one last look and then close early, exiting through the rear. Afi wouldn’t want me to go crazy all for the sale of a dozen eggs and a gallon of milk.
    Holy cow! Hulda was pressed against the front window staring right at me and waving a lantern back and forth.
    I tried to swallow, but my mouth was dry as chalk, and tasted like it, too. At least in LA you knew the basic shape of