One Degree of Separation Read Online Free PDF Page A

books, get some dinner out for a change. Then come home and settle in to read something useful.
    The rest of the day no longer seemed so bleak. At least she would get some work done toward claiming that first paycheck. She was here to work.
    She’d had her doubts that the in-window air conditioning unit had any effect at all until she stepped outside just after seven. The humidity descended on her shoulders like a blanket and sweat instantly prickled the length of her back.
    She stood in the shade of the house for minute, glaring at the Hummer. It had been fun to drive across country. She’d slept in it three nights in Wal-Mart parking lots. She’d cruised past big rigs and RVs on steep grades.
    It barely fit in the narrow two-track cement driveway, and there was no street parking. And it got thirteen miles to the gallon, if she was lucky.
    Leave it to her absentee biological father to make a gesture like this: lavish, conspicuous, yet undeniably fun. He wanted her to love the outdoors the way he did, routinely ignoring the fact that she was a city girl down to the tips of her pink-tinted toenails. The insurance was astronomical and there were times when she couldn’t afford to fill the thirty-two gallon tank. It was not the vehicle of a Master in History with no firm job prospects.
    Her mother, when she’d seen it, had simply said, “How typical of Jim.” Liddy heard every bounced child-support check in her mother’s sigh.
    Daddy, her mother’s second husband, had helped her explore all its little gadgets, then advised her to sell it and pay off her student loans.
    She steeled herself for the tight squeeze through the fence posts at the base of the driveway. A scratch would probably cost a thousand bucks to repair. Her biological father was there at the major birth-days and events like college graduation, but not around for the little things. He never had been. Jason and Jeanine, being older, were long used to asking him for stuff, but she had never felt enough like his daughter to do that. She’d been two months old when her mother had filed for divorce.
    She had the behemoth halfway out of the driveway when the next spate of traffic reached her. Aware she was holding up the busy street, she continued inching out and told herself she could do this every day. She would not sell her car just because it was too big for Iowa fucking City. She was only here for the summer.
    Nobody honked, but she felt as if gun sights were focused on her California license plates.
    Free at last, she headed toward campus, narrowly avoiding a head-on with a bus. The streets were too narrow.
    She managed to find two adjacent parking spaces in the lot next to the university’s main library. She jammed a Cal Bears cap over her hair, pulled her ponytail through the back and welcomed the cool interior.
    Her reserved books were located and checked out to her with alacrity. Scanning the bibliography of the first book she saw several items she ought to look for. Wandering through the musty stacks she felt calm again. Libraries had that effect on her.
    She was startled when the lights flickered. A glance at her watch told her it was nearly eight. She took her new list of needed texts to the research desk. At least the lines were short. She’d be spoiled when she got home to Cal again. Stop that, she thought. You’re not a Cal student any longer, remember?
    “This one I can’t help you with. It’s out to a professor and they can keep a book indefinitely.” The slightly swishy reference librarian seemed genuinely regretful. “Technically they have to bring it back, but short of us sending a security guard to their office, we can’t really force the issue.”
    “Oh, well, dang. I saw in the catalog it’s the only copy.”
    “Try the P.L. They have a lot of general medical reference.”
    “P.L.?”
    “Public library. It’s just off the Ped Mall.”
    “Oh, really? Yeah, I guess it’s worth stopping in.” She remembered now Marian the