Sharon gazed at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. Who was this girl with the blank expression? And was that another blackhead? Dang!

She had just spent hours on a bus, then a ferry to arrive at this backwoods town. Now, all she could think of was a hot shower.

As grotty as she felt, she suspected that the young fellow who had sat next to her on the bus and the ferry felt worse. He had look terrible, wane. “Headache,” he had told her. It must have been nasty. He looked so wrecked, she had given him her iced tea before they got on the ferry. She hoped he was feeling better.

She found her phone and opened the music app. She started up her Shower Tunes playlist. She had taken care to download enough music to last four weeks. There would be no streaming here. She had been forwarned before coming to Bent Fork not to expect WiFi hotspots everywhere. Her aunts had this thing called dial-up, whatever that was.

A pop-up window appeared on the screen of her phone.

INTERNET CONNECTION REQUIRED

No, no, no, no, no! she thought. It’s on my phone. I downloaded it.

She hit RELOAD. And waited.

INTERNET CONNECTION REQUIRED

“Aunt Phyllis!” Sharon flung open the bathroom door. Aunt Doraleen was in the hallway, folding laundry.

“How was your shower, honey?” she said, unmoved by the expression of anguish on her niece’s face.

“Does anyone in this town have WiFi?” Sharon asked. “Internet,” she added when she saw the puzzlement on her aunt’s face.

Doraleen turned and bellowed over the railing, toward the floor below. “Phyllis! What did you do with the Internet?”

“It’s in a box in the closet,” came the reply from downstairs.

Doraleen turned to Sharon. “I know you young people like your Internet. You can set it up if you like.” Doraleen hobbled toward a door at the end of the hall. She pulled it open to reveal a narrow linen closet. On the floor of the closet was a cardboard box. Sharon could see that the box overflowed with cords and other electronic paraphranalia.

Doraleen must have noticed the semblance of abject horror on Sharon’s face.

“I think Julia might have an Internet.” She squeezed Sharon’s arm. “Phyllis, does Julia have one?”

“I don’t know. She sells everything. If anyone has an Internet, she does.”

Doraleen peered up towarad her niece’s eyes and smiled. Then she whispered, “We’ll find you some Internet, dear.”

Julia was Miss Cantone, who ran the General Store on Broadway and Main. “That’s Miss Cantone,” Doraleen had warned her. “None of this Mizz nonsense. She won’t have it.”

Sharon had a quick, tuneless shower, and found a complete change of clothes in her luggage. She then left the house and started across the schoolyard toward downtown Bent Fork.

The walk from the house gave Sharon time to think. She began to question her whole decision to come to Bent Fork.

Doraleen and Phyllis were cousins of some variety to Sharon. Sharon couldn’t keep track of it. They were seconds or thirds with some number of removals involved. Sharon addressed them both as Aunt because first-name-only seemed wrong. Cousin Phyllis and Cousin Doraleen sounded pretentious.

The two sisters ran the only bed and breakfast in Bent Fork. “People go there?” she had sad when she first heard of the place. “On purpose?”

But then, the idea of a few weeks out of the way began to appeal to her. She had been studying Linguistics and had begun to feel that her thesis advisor hated her. (“There’s no pleasing her! Everything I do is wrong!” Sharon had complained to a friend.) Phyllis and Doraleen often suggested she spend the summer with them. Sharon could work at the bed and breakfast in exchange for room and board and a small allowance.

At first, Sharon had been horrified by the suggestion. She had been to Bent Fork once before, when she was ten. She remembered that everyone was old and that there was no cell phone service. But this last semester at school had been a disaster. Her grades had been less than stellar, and her thesis was going nowhere. She couldn’t even remember why she had decided on such a course of study in the first place. How many little girls dream of growing up to be linguists?

She was tiring of family asking her about school. Friends she had known since kindergarten were either graduating, getting work or getting married. Sharon couldn’t imagine any of this happening to her. And would she even want any of it?

The idea of escape appealed to Sharon. She needed to be somewhere that didn’t remind her that she had become an abject failure at the age of twenty-three. Bent Fork didn’t have two universities. The buses weren’t filled with students chattering about midterms. She could walk down the street without running into Suzie Kavanaugh’s mother. That was the worst. Suzie Kavanaugh’s mother could speak with authority about anything, yet somehow always managed to steer any conversation to the subject of her Suzie’s scholarship. “And how you doing, Sherrie? How’s school?”

“Don’t call me Sherrie,” Sharon grimaced, as she relived the conversation in her mind. By now, she had reached Main Street. She gazed down the street. No signs of human activity were to be found. And which way was Broadway?

“What have I done to myself?” she said, aloud.

That’s when she noticed the grey and blue building. Outside one of the entrances to the building, a sidewalk placard caught her attention.

If there’s any Internet connection, it’ll be here, she thought. Sharon checked her phone. Still no WiFi signal. Perhaps she’d have more success inside.

Sharon heaved open the metal door and entered a narrow hallway. There was only one way to turn, but a sign on the wall directed her to the left. It bore a solitary word:

LIBRARY.