At the end of the last bookmobile stop the next day, Julia, in spite of the facts that she was wearing all black and that Eddie had a propensity to shed his white hairs in the presence of that color, plopped him on her lap and snuggled him tight. “Oooff!” she said, burrowing her face into his fur. “You are just the sweetest thing ever.”

Eddie looked at me over the top of Julia’s arm with an expression of boredom combined with forbearance. I nodded in sympathy and sent him a telepathic promise that he’d be getting extra treats.

“You do realize,” I said, “that you’re calling him that simply because he slept through the visit of the Kolb triplets, which means you’re calling him sweet because he spent half the night keeping me awake chasing a penny across the floor.” “Half” might have been an exaggeration, but not by much.

“Sad for you,” Julia said, smiling, “but it worked out, didn’t it? Usually he hides from those kids and they pester the living daylights out of us trying to find the bookmobile kitty. This time they got to pet him as much as they wanted.”

True enough, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t sleep deprived. “Silver lining.” I yawned.

Julia gave Eddie one last squeeze and encouraged him into his carrier. “You know,” she said, “what this bookmobile could use is a couch for napping. I’m sure some of that money you’re socking away for a new vehicle could go to install one of those sliding bump-out things.”

“What?” My eyes went wide in not-so-mock horror. “We’d lose shelf space!”

“Oh, right.” Julia brushed a third of the Eddie hair off her lap and got up, walking the length of the vehicle with a thoughtful expression. “There’s got to be a way to make this place more comfy.”

I smiled. “Beanbag chairs?”

“Throw pillows?”

“Inflatable mattresses?”

We tossed out increasingly ridiculous ideas as we battened the hatches and got ready to roll back to Chilson. The final idea was cots fastened to the ceiling that from below looked like sound-absorption devices and could be lowered by solar-powered motors.

“Excellent plan,” I said. “Unfortunately, I’m too busy right now to bring it to the library board. How about you do it instead?”

Julia slid into the passenger’s seat and reached for the seat-belt buckle. “If you write me a script, sure. Without words for me to say I get all knock-kneed with stage fright and can’t say a thing.”

“Right,” I said, starting the engine. “No matter what all those Broadway reviews and Tony Awards say.”

“What they say is I can act, not that I can speak in public extemporaneously.”

I glanced at her, then pressed on the gas pedal. “There’s a difference?”