Sonia closed her eyes and slouched against the wall. Lenny moved to her quickly and put his arm around her.
“So we’re going to create a bigger problem for him,” Beverly explained. “He needs to know that if he takes the library from residents, he’ll lose their votes. And he needs their votes two years from now, less than two years, actually, if he wants to stay mayor, so we’ll force him to reconsider.” Beverly nodded once. “It’ll work.”
Beverly didn’t leave the meeting with the answer she wanted, but she still got something out of it—she figured out exactly who she was dealing with. And if you knew who you were dealing with, you’d know how to deal. You’d know how to play the game. Beverly was betting the mayor would do the right thing if it meant saving himself.
“Yes!” Lenny pumped his fist, like the challenge had energized him. “I am so all over this!”
Sonia still looked unsteady.
“Use your library hours today to go door to door, Lenny. I have to follow up on a few things in my office and then I’ll join you,” she said. “Sonia, Jamie, can you hold down the fort?”
Sonia nodded yes, pushed her hair behind her shoulders, and walked slowly back to the circ desk.
“It’s pretty much the only thing I can do,” I heard her mumble under her breath.
And I definitely saw her blink back tears.
Sonia
When I pushed through the library door the next morning, I found Sonia practically doing a tap dance behind the circ desk. She was bustling with energy, arms flying and hair bouncing.
Lenny stood to the side watching her, shaking his head and grinning his face off.
“Umm, Lenny, how much coffee has she had?” I asked worriedly.
“This is not the work of coffee,” Sonia answered for him. “It is what happens after a good night’s sleep and an adjustment of attitude!”
“She’s had a mug full of optimism, I think, with her usual six mugs of coffee,” Lenny said to me.
“Optimism, schmoptimism,” Sonia tacked back. “There’s nothing a new day can’t fix. You see”—and she pointed dramatically to Black Hat Guy’s chair—“it’s right there in black and white, clear as crystal.” Sonia read it out loud, enunciating every word, “‘Wait for the common sense of the morning.’”
“Which writer said that?” I asked.
“I have no idea, and it doesn’t matter,” Sonia answered immediately. “Yesterday the world was falling apart, but that was yesterday. I’ve turned the page. We are going to be fine. Better than fine. No one is going to take this library away!”
Lenny crossed his arms in front of his chest and leaned against the wall, never taking his eyes off Sonia. He was loving every second of her giddy performance.
“If you would be so kind,” Sonia started, searching through a stack of today’s newspapers piled on the counter, “I have something I’d like you to read. In the Biweekly.”
Sonia found the paper and flipped to the Letters to the Editor section.
“Take a good long look at this!” She flapped the paper open and held it in front of my face like a mirror. “First column, on the bottom.”
And there it was, under the heading A Letter of Gratitude:
Dear Foxfield Residents,
A community is only as strong as its members and services. I am writing this letter to express my deepest appreciation for the community of Foxfield, and in particular, Foxfield’s exemplary public library.
Just a few days ago, an unexpected and tragic event unfolded in the library. My daughter witnessed an emergency medical situation that thoroughly shocked and frightened her, but because of the truly heroic individuals at the library, she was never in any danger of her own. One person in particular, Miss Jamie Bunn, took it upon herself to ensure my daughter’s well-being. Miss Bunn located our contact information, called us to explain the situation, and stayed by my daughter’s side until help arrived. I cannot thank Miss Bunn and the library staff enough for their genuine concern, attentive care, and timely response when faced with such a challenging and unprecedented event.
The professionalism and exceptional service provided by our library makes me proud to be a Foxfield resident. Our library is a town treasure and will always hold a special place in my heart.
With my deepest gratitude,
Gabrielle Evans
When I finished reading it, my eyes shot right back to the beginning and I read it again. Lenny grabbed his own copy from the stack and read it, too.
“Oh my God,” he said.
“This is amazing,” I whispered to myself.
“This is AMAZING!” Lenny shouted.
“Shh,” Sonia scolded him. “We’re in a library.”
“Can you believe this? I can’t believe this,” Lenny said, again with too much volume. “The timing couldn’t be more perfect!”
“Lenny, hush down. You’re in a library. You are in the exemplary Foxfield Library, which provides very professional and . . .” Sonia paused, trying to remember. “Let me see that, Jamie. What did it say again?”
I turned the paper for her.
“Oh yes,” she continued, pointing with her finger at the print, “very professional and exceptional service. I think we should send Trippley a personal copy.” Sonia took scissors out of the desk drawer and cut the letter out of the paper, making sure to keep the printed date at the bottom of the page attached. Then she pulled out some glue and construction paper and mounted the letter onto a bright red sheet so the article was framed.
“I’m using our largest mailer so I won’t have to fold it,” Sonia said.
“It looks good,” I said when she held it up for us to see.
“Why’d you mount it on red, though?” Lenny wanted to know. “I would have gone with blue, to use Foxfield town colors.”
“Red’s a fighting color, querido,” she said with a devilish grin. “And this is war.”
Then she hunched over the envelope and wrote out the address to Mayor Trippley at town hall.
I raised my eyebrows at Lenny and he raised his right back at me.
“I wouldn’t mess with her when she’s in a fighting mood,” Lenny told me.
“I wouldn’t either,” I agreed.
And then he leaned in close to me and whispered, “She called me querido.”
“Yes, Lenny,” I whispered back. “I heard her.”
Lenny glowed.
Wally
It was Tuesday, August 15, and in just a couple more weeks I’d be back at school. Eighth grade was pulling me closer with each passing day, promising all new teachers and new classes and the huge safety net of summer separating me from my big mistake at the end of seventh grade. I could start fresh, focus on my classwork, reunite with Vic, even rejoin the Art Club, although I knew it would be different without Trey. He would be joining a new art club, the one at the high school, the one you had to apply and be accepted to, which he had.
I realized right then how much I missed Art Club. I missed sitting still and looking at something so long and hard that it eventually became something else to my eyes. I missed making lines on paper—dark, light, thick, thin—until what pushed out of my pencil matched what I saw in my mind and felt in my chest. Because that’s what drawing was for me—a feeling that came from the inside out. That feeling was either tight and stiff and frustrated when it wasn’t going well, or loose and cool and smooth as icing on cake when it was.
I missed drawing on Fridays.
And then I had an idea.
Maybe once school started again, I could come to the library each week to draw Wally’s flower. I could make it a yearlong study to submit as part of my portfolio for the high school Art Club. I could buy a special journal, and each page would be a flower portrait. It would show my commitment to the work, and my growth in skill, and it would reveal the color pattern, if there was one, of the flowers Wally chose for his special vase each Tues—
Wait.
What was I thinking?
Wally was gone. He couldn’t bring flowers anymore for the jar on the circ desk. In fact, the last one he brought, that bright red carnation, was two weeks old and way overdue to be changed. The only reason it was still in the vase, the petals curled at the edges and shriveled up, was because none of us had the heart to pull it.
I didn’t want to think about that jar being empty.
As I approached the library, I saw Lenny and Black Hat Guy standing by the book drops, talking under a cloudless sky. I couldn’t see if Shady was there in his usual spot, and I didn’t want to interrupt my errand to check. I walked quickly past the building, then up the side street that led to Foxfield’s only grocery store.
A small display of cut flowers greeted me as I stepped through the automatic doors. There weren’t a ton to pick from, but it didn’t matter. I just wanted something cheerful and bright to help fill the void Wally had left.
A clerk from one of the registers eyed me suspiciously. There had been a lot of shoplifting recently at the store, all covered in the Biweekly. She didn’t need to look at me like that, though. After what I had been through, I knew I would never steal anything again for the rest of my life.
The clerk approached me.
“Are you going to buy something?” she asked, not bothering to keep the snark out of her voice.
“I need a flower,” I replied, still scanning my choices. “Just one.”
“One stem?”
“Yes.”
“Well, if it’s just one you want, then you have to go with the roses. Everything else we sell as a bouquet.” Her voice lost some edge as she settled into her regular sales pitch.
“The roses are here.” She pointed to the three pots at the top of the display, each holding a different color. “Today we got yellow, that’s for friendship; red, that’s for love, of course; and orange, which we don’t see here too often.”
“What’s orange stand for?”
“It says on the card orange is for enthusiasm and passion.” She huffed a little then, as if maybe she thought the whole color symbolism thing was nonsense. “So they say.”
Wally had passion for the library. Wally showed enthusiasm every single time he came in, even with his deteriorating health closing in on him from all sides. He had enthusiasm and passion for the movies he checked out every week and always returned on time. Orange was a good match for Wally.
“Okay, I’ll take an orange one, please.”
“One orange it is,” she said, and lifted a stem out of the bucket.
After she rang me up, she handed over the rose and said, “Now, don’t forget this stem’s got thorns on it. You got to watch where you hold it or you’ll prick your skin and bleed like the dickens.”
Another way to use the word dickens. I smiled to myself and decided I would mention it to Beverly later.
“Thanks,” I told the salesclerk. I turned to leave, then stopped and looked back at her. She was standing over the open till, fighting with the wrapper on a roll of pennies she needed to add to the drawer.
I cleared my throat to get her attention. “You always have roses on Tuesdays?”
“Usually, yeah. Unless something’s wonky with delivery,” she answered.
“Okay, thanks.” As long as the flowers were there, and as long as I could get to the store before school on Tuesdays, I would keep it going. I would do my best to keep Wally’s vase full, and I would draw each flower like a weekly diary entry. Flowers for Wally could be the title of my project.
I hurried to the library. Wally’s vase needed to be cleaned. It needed some fresh water and one sunshiny-orange, passionate rose.
It was going to be a beautiful Tuesday.
Beverly
Later that day, I was seated in Beverly’s office, a pile of oatmeal-cranberry-carob cookies in a tin on the desk in front of me. Her day calendar was completely full, with names and times and abbreviations for all the things she had to do. A very neat stack of papers sat on Beverly’s chair, and everything else on her desk was lined up as tidily as usual, all edges perfectly parallel or perpendicular as if arranged with a ruler.
Beverly had asked me to wait for her while she finished up with Lenny in the reading room. She was helping him put together a flyer outlining why the library was so important. The mayor was pushing the argument that libraries were irrelevant in the “age of technology” because everyone had access to the whole world from their home computers. But his argument didn’t include all the people who were not tech savvy and all the people who didn’t have personal computers, not to mention the people who didn’t have homes! He wanted to send Foxfield residents to Waverly, which was five miles away, and pay a fee—“a very reasonable fee,” he claimed—to use their services. But what if you couldn’t drive or didn’t have a car or didn’t have the money to pay for a service that used to be free?
Mayor Trippley had to be stopped, and Lenny’s petition was our best shot. It turned out people listened to Lenny, too. He knew everyone and was collecting signatures left and right, whether they were regular library patrons or not.
Today’s oatmeal cookies were lumpy and chunky and looked a bit like those other nest cookies, but the smell of sugary cinnamon wafting off them alone was enough to make my mouth water. I didn’t know what carob was—it looked like chocolate but it wasn’t chocolate—but those cookies were seriously good.
“Sorry to keep you waiting, Jamie.” Beverly swept in, rubbing her hands together before her and nodding at me. She had come to work with a new hairstyle that morning. It was still fire-engine red but was cropped closer to her scalp than before and stood out in all directions in thick tufts around her head. Her hair made me think of punk rock and medieval weaponry at the same time. And it definitely wasn’t what you’d expect to see with her yellow polka-dotted blouse and beige loafers, but that was Beverly.
She moved the papers on her chair to the floor, took a seat behind the desk, and, noting the tin of cookies, said, “Oh, how lovely.” She looked out her door toward Lenny and nodded at his back, then turned back to me and offered me one.
“I’ve had two already,” I admitted. “They’re really good.”
“Well then.” She opened a drawer at her side, pulled out a sheet of paper, and got right to it. “This is the form I’m supposed to submit to your principal confirming your community service hours.”
I shifted in my seat.
“You have worked well beyond the hours assigned to you”—she nodded at me as she said this—“and have provided immeasurable service here. In short, you have far exceeded the requirements of your community service, and I am going to make sure your principal knows that.”
A wave of relief swept through my body. It was officially over: the crime, the humiliation, the punishment, even the self-loathing. Officially over and done with for good.
A line from the quotes chair popped in my head: It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then. I knew this one—it was from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Alice survived her long fall down the rabbit hole and the mysteries she faced once she landed. I had survived my long fall and had turned it into something else altogether. I was a different person now.
Beverly smiled and signed the bottom of the time sheet in front of me.
“I will be mailing this back before school begins, in the next week or two, with a letter I will compose describing how you have exceeded all our expectations and became an essential member of staff this summer.”
“Thank you, Beverly,” I said, blushing at her praise.
“You’re very welcome.” She answered, then continued in her professional library director voice, “Please know I would like to extend your position here as a permanent volunteer and, if we are able to keep the library up and running, would love to offer you a legitimate part-time position once you are old enough. You can get working papers at fifteen or sixteen, I believe. And I will, somehow, find a way to obtain funding for your pay.”
My eyes lit up.
“Really? I would love to stay here, and then to have an actual real job here, like Sonia and Lenny—that would be amazing!”
“It would be amazing for all of us.” Beverly smiled once but then quickly dropped her grin to say, “But, as you know, first we have to deal with—”
“The mayor,” we said at the same time.
“How can he do this?” I pleaded. “Doesn’t he know how many people rely on us, how much they need us? Doesn’t he know how much we do for the whole town?”
“I think there are a lot of things the mayor knows and a lot of things he doesn’t. I don’t think he has any idea what kind of opposition he’s about to face, for one thing,” Beverly said with a smooth cool in her voice. “The letter from Mrs. Evans and the petition are strong arguments for our side. If he goes against residents’ wishes, he won’t be reelected. He knows that.”
“So we just have to let him know what residents want,” I finished.
“Exactly. And Lenny has been working tirelessly on that. I think he’s surprised himself with how many names he’s collected already.”
I smiled in triumph and folded my arms across my chest as if it were all settled and done. But Beverly didn’t look ready to celebrate. We hadn’t won anything yet.
“There’s one more thing,” Beverly said, bending down to reach into the bottom drawer of her desk. She came back up with a book in her hand. It was an old paperback, the edges faded from sun, the binding fragile as a baby bird. She passed it to me. “I wanted to give you this. It was my very first copy. My sister Dorothy and I”—she swallowed, then relaxed her lips into a gentle smile—“we shared it, passed it back and forth like a bag of candy. Only better, because when we finished it, we could just begin again.”
It was a copy of Jane Eyre.
And it was beautiful.
The cover illustration showed Jane in a long black cloak fastened at her neck over a heavy burgundy dress, her white-gloved hands resting on her bustled skirt in front of her. Thornfield Hall stood in the gray distance, surrounded by bare, scraggly trees, and several windows of the house were lit in an ominous shade of red. Approaching Jane on horseback was Mr. Rochester, his face in shadow, his mood unknowable. I had never seen this cover illustration before.
A Kind of Paradise Page 15
