Plotting at the PTA

by Laura Alden

  With any luck, I’d be around to see it.

  * * *

  I’d been making deliveries for as long as I’d owned the store, but things had changed a few months ago. I’d accidentally put a copy of Brian Jacques’s Redwall in a box for a mother who was homeschooling her three preadolescent boys and she’d fallen on it like manna from heaven.

  Even marketing-challenged Beth could recognize a brilliant idea when it dropped on her head. Since that day I’d brought along a handpicked selection of books for customers to browse through. At first I’d been surprised at how many of the parents and teachers started ordering middle grade and young adult books for their own reading, but after thinking it through, I realized I shouldn’t have been surprised at all. A good book was a good book, no matter who the intended audience may be. The experiment was not only building an extremely loyal customer base, it was also building my muscles. Carrying boxes of books was almost as much work as toting around a toddler.

  I dropped off two boxes at Tarver Elementary’s front office; one full of books ordered by various teachers, the other full of books for browsing that I’d pick up later. Then I did what I often did when dropping books at the school—I tiptoed around to peer into my children’s classrooms.

  Seeing the top of Oliver’s head as he busily worked on a math assignment and glimpsing a bit of Jenna as she and two other children were doing something with cardboard and wood dowels gave me a warm fuzzy of the fuzziest sort. I drove out of the school parking lot, smiling.

  My last stop, however, always troubled me. Every time I delivered a box to Amy Jacobson, I came away with the impression that I should be doing something more. And every time, I had no idea what that something might be.

  I bumped up the long drive, parked, and went around to the trunk to get Amy’s books. My feet didn’t make any noise on the driveway, gravel once upon a time, but now grown over with grass and weeds. Amy cut everything back in October, but since she didn’t drive, she didn’t see the need for much in the way of weekly maintenance. Like, none.

  Shutting the trunk with my elbow, I walked up the path that led to the house. Here, with trees growing close and birds singing overhead, it was hard to believe that Amy lived in the heart of Rynwood.

  Her house sat perched on a small hill and her bushy backyard tucked up against the largest park in town. There were neighbors on both sides, but far enough away that the sound of voices rarely reached into Amy’s tangle of a garden.

  As I approached the house, I once again fell in love. With its diamond-paned windows, ivy growing at the corners, a pert chimney of faded red brick, and a front door arched at the top, it looked like something out of a fairy tale. Its only nod to reality was the asphalt shingle roof. I’d once jokingly told Amy that when she had to reshingle, she should turn it into a thatch roof, and hadn’t known what to say when she’d unsmilingly told me it had been thatch, but her parents couldn’t afford to have it fixed and had had to replace it with something cheaper.

  I cast a longing look at the front porch with its friendly set of two facing benches and went around to the back. Amy wouldn’t answer the front door, a fact I’d learned the hard way.

  The long grass brushed against my pant legs as I walked around the house. Soon the lilacs that surrounded Amy’s backyard would burst into bloom. Smiling at a scent that hadn’t yet arrived, I rounded the corner of the house and stopped dead. The bird feeders. They were mostly empty and Amy was a stickler for keeping them filled.

  I shifted the box in my arms. Maybe she was sick. If she’d fallen sick, she might be out of other things, too. Milk, food, medicine. I knew that Flossie, owner of the local grocery store, sent her great-nephew on weekly delivery runs, so Amy wouldn’t starve to death, but if she was really sick, she might not be able to call in an order.

  The back door looked as it always did—in need of paint and new weather stripping. I pulled open the wooden-framed screen door and knocked on the door’s glass window. “Amy?” I called loudly. “It’s Beth.”

  There was no answering call, but that was normal. It usually took three sets of knocking and calling to convince Amy to come to the door.

  Knock, knock. “Amy?”

  Knock, knock. “Hello? Amy?”

  It wasn’t until the fifth set that I realized what any rational person would have figured out some time ago: She wasn’t home. Which didn’t make any sense, because Amy was always home.

  Always.

  As a child, I’d pictured people who hid away from the world as men with long gray hair and beards down to their belly buttons, but Amy was female and she wasn’t much older than I was.

  I didn’t know if she suffered from agoraphobia or if she was just the hermit type. I had the occasional tendency toward reclusiveness myself, but Amy’s version was extreme. The one time I’d tried to coax her outside—“The park is just the other side of your bushes. Let’s go for a walk. We’ll be careful about bees and we’ll stay out of sun, what do you think?”—tears had started to trickle down her cheeks and she’d covered her face with her hands.

  Horrified at what I’d done, I put my arms around her. It was the first time I’d ever touched her. She flinched, then grabbed on to me as if I were the last person on Earth.

  I’d murmured nonsense words and stroked her hair, wondering how long it had been since she’d felt the imprint of another person’s skin. Eventually, her crying slowed to a stop. She’d pulled back, blown her nose, and the incident was closed. But ever since, I’d allowed enough time in my schedule to stay with her for at least an hour.

  My knuckles were getting sore from knocking. “Amy? Amy!”

  She had to be here. Any second now she’d scurry to the door and apologize for making me wait. She’d . . . been in the attic. Sure, that was it. She’d been looking for—

  “Looking for Amy?”

  I whirled around.

  A man stood in front of a long row of lilac bushes; their waving branches on this breezeless morning solid evidence of his passage. Which was a good thing, because in this fairy-tale-ish setting, his small stature and thick white hair gave him a very elfin look.

  “Yes,” I said. “She’s not sick, is she?”

  He walked to the porch and trotted up the stairs. Somehow the fact that he carried a pair of pruning shears didn’t bother me a bit. Elves just aren’t threatening creatures.

  “Thurman Schroeder is the name,” he said. “Selling cars is the game. Or it was, until I retired. Now I clip shrubs and try to pretend I’m useful. My wife says she’ll keep me around as long as I can take out the garbage, but I don’t want to push my luck.”

  He grinned and I grinned back.

  “You’re not selling anything,” he said. “Not dressed city enough. And you’re not one of those church ladies; not old enough. You’re . . . say, I know.” He snapped his fingers. “The book lady. That’s who you are. Amy liked you, you know.”

  “Today’s book delivery day.” I nodded at the box I’d set next to the door. “I can’t believe she’s not here.”

  The elf’s cheerful smile turned upside down. “Oh, dear. You haven’t heard.”

  “Heard what?”

  His next words explained everything; why he felt free to stand on Amy’s back porch, and worst of all, explained his use of past tense.

  “She’s dead.”

  Chapter 3

  When I returned to the store, Lois took one look at my face and sat me in a chair. Two mugs of hot tea later, I was able to talk.

  “Thurman said one of the reasons she hardly ever went outside was she was allergic to bee and wasp stings.” Which I’d known, but what I hadn’t realized was the severity of her allergies. To be so allergic that you could die . . . I swallowed and wanted to take back all the thoughts I’d had when Amy said she never went outside without a can of Raid in each hand. Not that I’d ever said anything, but I’d certainly thought that Amy had been overreacting.

  Lois handed over the third round of tea and I set
it down on my desk. “But for some reason,” I said, “she went out. Thurman and his wife took their dog out for an evening walk and the dog kept whining and tugging on the leash. They found her and called 911, but it was too late.” I stopped.

  Lois pushed the mug toward me. I picked it up, wrapped my hands around the heat, and kept going. “She had one of those EpiPens in her hand. You know, those injection things people with bad allergies have? But she hadn’t used it. No one knows why. Too scared, they’re guessing.”

  “Poor girl,” Lois said softly.

  I felt Amy’s panic rising in my throat. What a dreadful way to die, not being able to breathe, not being able to pull that life-giving air into your lungs, seeing dark spots in front of your eyes, seeing the dark spots grow larger and larger. . . .

  “Drink,” Lois commanded.

  Obediently, I took a swallow. It felt so good going down that I took another. “I keep thinking that if it hadn’t been for Thurman’s dog, she might have laid there for hours. Days, even.”

  I started to lower the mug, but Lois tapped its bottom. “Drink up,” she said. “It didn’t happen, so quit making things worse than they are.”

  She was right, but that didn’t make the pictures in my head go away.

  “The trick,” she said, “is to keep busy.”

  “Trick?” I repeated vaguely. Amy, terrified of bees, swatting them away, trying to run to the safety of her house, trying to—

  “Here.” Lois took away the mug. “You’ve had enough. Now it’s time to get to work. Did I tell you we got that new software upgrade? I tried to install it this morning up front, but it made a bunch of weird beeping noises so I just turned the dang thing off.”

  “You did what?” I sprang out of my chair. If she’d halted the installation partway, it could have corrupted the store’s book inventory. Worse things could happen to a bookstore, but I couldn’t think of one.

  “Oh, it’s fine,” she said airily. Then she frowned. “At least I think so. I suppose there’s a chance that the blue screen it gets every once in a while means I did something wrong.” Her face cleared. “But I’m sure it’s nothing. Computers are pretty tough, right?”

  I pushed past her. “Where are the new disks? And the documentation? Don’t put any more sales into the computer until I make sure everything is working.”

  “Paper and pencil,” she said. “Nothing wrong with paper and pencil.”

  In the middle of my rush to the front counter, I paused. Lois sounded a little too cheerful for what could be a medium-sized disaster. Could she be making up this whole event, just to take my mind off Amy’s death?

  I glanced over my shoulder. Lois was frowning at me, her arms crossed and her fingers pulling at her lips.

  No, Lois might make up a story for Paoze, but she wouldn’t do that to me.

  I put the possibility out of my head and got to work.

  * * *

  Sitting in a Tarver classroom on Wednesday night, waiting for the PTA meeting to start, I was still trying to absorb the fact that Amy was gone. Bad enough when someone who had lived a long life passed away, so much worse when it was someone relatively young. So wrong for her to be dead, so wrong for all her chances at living to be gone.

  Marina was sitting in the half-full room and she raised an eyebrow at my glum face. “How now the down-turned brow?”

  “Still thinking about Amy,” I said.

  “Yeah.” Marina sighed. “That stinks. I didn’t know her, but what a shame. And what a nasty way to go.”

  She started putting her hands to her throat. I knew she was going to start fake-choking herself. “Don’t you dare,” I said. “It would be inappropriate, unkind, and disrespectful to Amy’s memory.”

  There may, just may, have been a slight blush that appeared on her cheeks. She dropped her hands to her lap. “You’re such a mom,” she muttered, ignoring the fact that she’d been one for twenty-odd years. Her youngest, Zach, still attended Tarver, but the rest were in or out of college.

  Marina brightened. “Say, have you worked out what you’re going to do about losing weight?”

  Of course I hadn’t. What I’d done was what I’d done for the last ten years—poke myself in the lumpy thighs, watch my index finger sink deep, and immediately put on some clothes.

  “Well, what are you going to do? After all that moaning and groaning last summer when we were trying on bathing suits, don’t tell me you’re not going to do anything, okay? Just don’t.”

  Our illustrious PTA president banged the gavel. I’d never been so glad in my life for a meeting to start.

  “This meeting of the Tarver Elementary PTA will come to order.”

  Erica Hale, a silver-haired woman who could be the definition of chic, was a grandmother of two Tarver students. Her slim elegance always made me feel like an ugly duckling with zero chance of turning into a swan, and she had the enviable ability to say the right thing at the right time. After she’d retired, instead of taking life easy, she’d taken the helm of a floundering PTA and transformed it into a project-oriented powerhouse. She’d also transformed her yard into a gardening showpiece. And she’d started painting in watercolors. If I hadn’t liked her so much, I would have found all sorts of reasons to dislike her intensely.

  “Beth?” she asked. “Will you please take the roll?”

  I called her name, then the vice president’s name. “Wolff?”

  “Present,” Claudia said.

  I didn’t look at Claudia and she didn’t look at me. It was best that way. Claudia was efficient and hardworking, but she also spent a lot of time telling people how efficient and hardworking she was. I could have dealt with that particular personality quirk if it hadn’t been for, one, her constant campaign to ruin my reputation, and two, her vocal insistence that I wanted to be the next president of the PTA.

  PTA president? I couldn’t think of anything I wanted less. Secretary was more than enough for me.

  I made a tick mark next to Claudia’s name and moved on. “Jarvis?”

  “Umm-hmm.”

  I wasn’t exactly sure what he said, since he’d tried to talk through a mouthful of potato chips, but I marked him down as present. Randy, owner of the downtown gas station and convenience store, had been the PTA’s treasurer for so long that no one remembered why he’d become treasurer in the first place. There must have been a reason, once upon a time, but I’d never heard an explanation and I didn’t want to ask because Randy would be happy to tell me the reason. With footnotes. And graphic aids.

  The older Randy got, the longer his stories got, and the bigger his waistline grew. He was in his mid-fifties and if he kept up the trend, by the time he turned seventy he’d have a hard time fitting behind the wheel of his car and his stories would last longer than a four-act play.

  “Kennedy,” I said. “Present. We have a quorum.”

  “Thank you, Beth.” Erica put on her reading glasses and picked up the agenda. Our PTA president was a big believer in agendas and parliamentary procedure. No point in having a meeting, she said, unless there are decisions to make. No doubt she was right, but going through multiple agenda points while surrounded by construction paper tulips and posters of handwriting examples gave me the silent giggles at least once a meeting.

  After we dispensed with the few invoices that needed to be paid, Erica turned to me. “Old business item number one. The senior story project. Beth?”

  I bounced a little in my chair. This project was my idea. Now that it was about to start, it was hard to believe I’d been dry-mouthed nervous when I’d proposed it last fall. Silly Beth.

  “Okay,” I said. “We’re going to be working with Sunny Rest Assisted Living. Each resident who wants to participate will be paired with a Tarver student who has signed up for the project. The students will meet their matches for the first time next week and start a series of interviews.”

  I bounced a little more. This was going to be so very cool. “The kids,” I said, “have a list of questi
ons to help them get started, and they’ll have to take notes. By the middle of May, they’ve promised to turn in a first draft. What we want is the life story of each resident as seen through the eyes of the children. I’ll do the editing, take the stories to Hoefler Publishing, and before the end of school we’ll have softcover books to sell as a moneymaker. Sunny Rest has already asked for two hundred copies.”

  Marina let out a low whistle. I grinned at her. Judy, the activities director at Sunny Rest, had given me that number half an hour ago, and I was still a little light-headed.

  “Good work,” Erica said.

  Glowing, I spun out the details of carting kids to Sunny Rest after school, arranging to have the visits supervised by PTA parents, carting kids home, all the essential things that go into a project of this size. Fifteen minutes later, I crossed the last item off my list and looked up. “That’s it. The matches will be finalized early next week and the first interviews will be Thursday after school.”

  “One question,” Erica said. “What’s our profit per book?”

  Rats. The one question for which I didn’t have an answer. “It depends on the preorders,” I said. “Until they come in, I just don’t know.”

  “What quantity is required to get the deepest discount?” Erica asked.

  “A thousand.”

  Marina whistled again, long and low. “That’s a lot of books.”

  I gave her a look. “If we order a thousand, we stand to make a profit of three dollars a book. Sell them all and we make three thousand dollars.”

  The number echoed around the room a few times before it drifted into people’s ears and sifted down into their brains.

  “That’s a lot of money,” Summer Lang said. She was new in town and despite our ten-year age gap, we’d become friends.

  “Only if we can sell that many.” Claudia tapped her long fingernails on the table. “I say we order the minimum number of books so we can keep the losses small. That’s if we’re actually going through with this, that is. I’m not so sure it’s a good idea.”