by Jess Lourey
“I’ve known him since high school. He worshipped the ground I walked on.”
The liquor I was drinking like Kool-Aid made me generous. “Well, of course he does.”
“Did. He did. Now he’s all godly.”
“Bastard.”
She clinked my glass. “I suppose you don’t have to worry about none of this, being a lesbian and all.”
I coughed, sending burning tequila through my nose. “Huh?”
“Oh, is it supposed to be a secret? Then you really should start wearing makeup, honey. And curling that fieldworker hair of yours. Else, you might as well wear a sign that says you don’t want a man.”
I ran my fingers through my hair and self-consciously wound it into a bun at the nape of my neck. Holding my hands up that high made me feel dizzy. “I don’t want a man, but not for the reason you think. They’re unreliable. The whole lot of them.”
Kennie nodded sympathetically. “Like your dad? The murderer?”
Christ. No wonder Kennie didn’t have any girlfriends. She didn’t know how to hang. For the record, my dad was guilty of manslaughter and not murder, but it hurt everyone involved just the same. When he was alive, he nearly drank himself to death, and when that proved too slow, he’d drink and drive. One night, he crashed into another car, killing himself and the mother and baby boy in the other vehicle. I was sixteen when it happened and people started calling me Manslaughter Mark’s girl. Not to my face, of course, but I had heard the whispers and sometimes thought I still did. Suddenly, the tequila tasted sour in my mouth, and my stomach felt oily.
“I’m tired, Kennie. I think I wanna go to bed.”
“That’s fine, honey chile. I’ll just crash on your couch.” She made the “sh” on “crash” long and snaky.
“What?”
“Oh, don’t mind me. I’m as quiet as a dead man.”
Oof. That hit too close to home. “Can’t you sleep in your car?”
“No can do, sugar. I biked here. I’m going to look so hot by the end of this month that Gary Wohnt will forget all about God.”
“Biking home right now would be great exercise.”
But Kennie wasn’t listening. She pingponged over to the sectional couch with the rust-colored, cabin-in-the-woods pattern, where she fell face down into the nappy cloth. She twitched and wriggled a little before she began snoring so vociferously that it came out her ears. I sighed, stumbled over, and lifted her head to the side so she wouldn’t suffocate. My hands were sticky blue with her eye shadow when I pulled them away. I capped the tequila, returned it to its hiding place in the bathroom, and shoved the empty vodka bottle to the bottom of the garbage so it couldn’t judge me in the morning.
Soft tears slid down my face as I cleaned. Without Kennie to distract me, I was left with my dark and slippery thoughts, which came surfing back on the tequila and vodka. Johnny hadn’t shown up, and he wasn’t ever going to. I had been an idiot to get my hopes up, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to make that mistake again. It was long past time that I realized I wasn’t going to find love here, or anywhere. I was an independent woman, á la Kate Jackson, circa Charlie’s Angels. I didn’t need anybody, and for sure nobody needed me in this lousy, dead-end, murder-drenched town. In that instant, my mind was made up. I was going back to the Twin Cities as soon as I could find a real librarian to take over my job.
___
I woke up Friday morning with a hangover so familiar I considered it a friend. Feeling a little sad, a little relieved, and a lot empty, I chewed four bitter aspirin and took a shower. I was quiet as a clam so as not to wake Kennie, who had flipped herself over in the night. Her melted makeup had attracted some tufts of couch lint as well as a healthy dose of calico cat hair, thanks to Tiger Pop. He lay benevolently on her chest, a Cheshire grin on his pink kitty lips. Every now and again his tail would twitch over her nose, causing her to honk and sniffle in her sleep. I grabbed him off her, as much to save him from getting any more lipstick on his fur as to do her any favors.
I pinched an apple and a bottle of juice and opened the front door to herd out Luna and Tiger Pop. Outside, the sun’s rays tattooed my hungover head, piercing my eyes like hot needles. The July morning was humid and pushing eighty degrees, even though it was not yet nine a.m. This summer had been tropical, and my vegetable garden looked like something from Land of the Lost, with monstrous green tomatoes dripping off the staked stems and orange squash blossoms as big as dinner plates opening up to the sun. I rinsed out Luna and Tiger Pop’s water bowls and filled them to the top before hiding them in the shade under the house. Part of the apron had come off the double-wide, creating a cool retreat for my animals as well as a wayward skunk or two. I slid a couple bowls of food under there and promised them that I’d be home before dark.
“Stay out of Kennie’s way,” I warned them. T. P. rolled his eyes at me, but Luna was eager to please, as usual. Dogs are such sluts.
Kennie’s bike, an ancient no-speed with big black handlebars and a banana seat, lay flush on my blooming roses. I had planted the peach and white climbers against a wooden trellis on the sunny south side of the house this spring, and they had been doing great right up until the bike had flattened them. When I disentangled her two-wheeler, the salty-sweet smell of crushed roses drifted up. I rolled the bike to the front porch so Kennie would be sure to see it first thing and be on her way.
The last part of my morning ritual was feeding the birds. I am not a fan of the winged population, and they don’t exactly wait in line to beg my autograph, either. I get pooped on at least three times a year, but I keep the birdbath and feeders full in hopes of an uneasy truce. They still like to play chicken with me, lunging at my head at opportune moments and then veering away after I make some embarrassing spastic gesture to protect myself, but at least they don’t charge en masse, and I figured that was because of the food I put out every morning.
I curled into my two-door Toyota Corolla, slapped on the seat belt, and donned sunglasses against the bright, blazing ball rising behind me. I’m sure it looked gorgeous reflecting its lavender and tangerine rays off Whiskey Lake outside my front door, but I wasn’t in the mood for beauty. I was all business, intent on heading directly to the library to write a help-wanted ad. By the time I opened at ten a.m., that ad would be in all the regional newspapers, every college in the five-state area with a Library Sciences program, and on all the major Internet job search sites.
I noticed my hands gripping the steering wheel tight enough to leave marks, and I forced myself to relax. Any life change was sure to create stress, I reasoned, and that’s why I was so uptight about last night’s decision to move. The thing about change is at the outset a good change felt as scary as a bad change, and sometimes you just needed to jump and hope you landed right.
That’s what I was telling myself as I drove into Battle Lake, already bustling as tourists drove their boats and RVs into town. I nodded at Harold Penderly, the owner of the Hardware Hank, out front washing his own windows, and pulled into the library parking lot, cruising into the spot marked “Reserved for Librarian.” I stared at the yellow brick building that I had come to know so well, and shook my head to clear out any sentimentality.
The phone greeted me shrilly as I unlocked the front door. I jogged over to it, my keys jingling in my hand. “Hello?”
“Mira! I was hoping I’d get you.”
My heart leapt to kiss the phone and then dropped like a bag of kittens tossed in a river. “Johnny?”
“Yeah! How are you? I just called your house, but you weren’t home. Did you know Kennie Rogers is there?”
Anger, disappointment, and a third, unrecognizable emotion fought for my attention. “Yes. What can I do for you?”
He sighed. “You sound mad, Mira. I don’t blame you. I should have called last night, and I’m sorry I didn’t. You know when I left you to go check in with my mom? When I got to her place, there was a call from the University of Wisconsin. At Madison.” There was a pau
se as he waited for me to respond. “Mira? Are you there?”
“Yup.”
“It’s amazing, but it was one of my old professors! She said she has a six-week project she needs a research assistant for, and it might lead to a full ride for fall semester. She said she needed me out here immediately.”
“Here? You mean you’re in Madison right now?” My old friend, the hangover, suddenly felt like a hangman’s noose.
“Yeah!”
“I thought you were taking a year off to help your mom.” It was a spiteful thing to say, and I immediately regretted it after I heard the guilt in Johnny’s voice.
“I was, but she said she’s fine and would never forgive herself if I didn’t go.”
“Well, I guess there’s nothing holding you back. Good luck.”
He was quiet on the other end of the line, so quiet that I almost apologized for my chirpy, dismissive words. “I’ll be visiting a lot. There are some people in Battle Lake who I care a lot about.”
“Yeah, there’s some nice people here.” I squished my eyes shut. I hated being a crybaby.
“I mean you, Mira. I think we have something.”
“I guess we’ll never know, huh? You’re in Madison, and I’m moving back to the Cities.”
“What?”
“Yeah, there’s not much for me in Battle Lake, you know?” I liked myself a little less with every word that cracked out of my mouth, but I couldn’t stop. “You’re a good friend, and we should keep it that way. Hey, maybe we can be pen pals!”
A pause. “That’s what you want?”
“It is. I’ll be sure to check in on your mom for you when you’re gone, okay? Until I move, that is.”
“Okay. Fine. Bye.”
“Bye, Jeff!”
“What?”
“Johnny, I meant! Sorry. I was just putting away a book by some Jeff guy. It’s still early, for me. Bye, Johnny.” The name of my murdered ex-lover dangled heavy in the air between us, and I couldn’t for the life of me decide if I had thrown it out there on purpose.
He hung up without another word. I went into the back room to splash water on my face. On the way, I gathered all my feelings around me like a billowing parachute, carefully folding and tucking until they fit into a neat knapsack, which I put off to the side. It was the last time in my life I’d be able to compartmentalize so easily.
August lumbered in, the weather grew impossibly hotter, and farmers muttered about drought as their crops turned crispy and their irrigation systems taxed the water supply. The tourists loved the hot, clear weather, and the beaches and local shops were packed like seeds in a pomegranate. The out-of-towners seemed not to notice the lawns turning brown or the watering bans, and happily packed themselves into Stub’s every night to enjoy live music and juicy, butter-knife steaks. In this way, the dance between the needs of an agricultural community and the requirements of a tourist-based economy played out against each other as they had since rich East Coasters discovered the beauty, solitude, and plentiful fish in Battle Lake back in the early 1900s.
As the resumés for the job as new Battle Lake head librarian began trickling in, I studied each one, reminding myself it was a ticket out of here, away from memories of Johnny, and Jeff, and crazy people too numerous to count. I was too far into feeling sorry for myself to even be embarrassed by how wildly under-qualified for this job the incoming applicants proved me to be. When a little downtime in the library presented itself, I created a banned books display to feed my low-burning but constant anger and frustration. The display featured some of my favorite books of all time. Of Mice and Men, The Catcher in the Rye, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, A Wrinkle in Time, The Color Purple, pretty much anything by Judy Blume and Stephen King, the Harry Potter series, and The Handmaid’s Tale. I took grim pleasure in the fact that books flew off the display and I needed to continually dig for more censored literature to add.
I also sent Sunny a postcard to let her know I was moving. It would have been braver to call, but her hours were unpredictable, I reasoned, so mail would be the best way to let her know that in a couple weeks, a very nice couple from town would be moving from their apartment to Sunny’s vast and beautiful farm to care for her house and dog until her return.
Before I knew it, it was Friday, August 13, and it was time to interview the crop of hopefuls to find my worthy replacement. Mrs. Berns had agreed to come in early with me to get the library spick and span before the interviews. Not surprisingly, I found myself alone in the yellow brick building at eight a.m. on this scorched but cloudy day. The weather, a colicky mix of heat and shade, set my teeth on edge as I unlocked the library door. The air had a hint of smoke, despite the burning ban, which created a mental image of the prairies surrounding us going up like a Kleenex. There’d be no white knight to save me, I thought petulantly, missing Johnny so much in that moment that my skin felt swollen. I hadn’t heard from him since our unpleasant July phone conversation. When a rap came on the door behind me and pulled me out of my self-pity, I was grateful. Mrs. Berns, I figured. Now I’ll have someone around to be mad at.
I turned and was surprised to see a young and pretty woman instead of a geriatric and libidinous one. For a moment I thought it was Lucy, the peppy high school girl who had been helping me out on the busy weekends, but the woman shifted her face and I saw she was a stranger. I made the universal, point-at-your-watch-and-shake-your-head gesture for “we’re closed, come back later,” but the woman shrugged her shoulders and smiled like she didn’t understand.
I pulled the door open. “The library doesn’t open up until ten o’clock. You’ll have to come back in a coupla hours.”
“Oh no! I’ve got a super-long shift, and I don’t have a thing to read. I was supposed to be at work five minutes ago, but I can’t bear the thought of another day without any books! I love those romances. I’m Alicia, by the way.” She held out her manicured hand.
I knew Alicia, or at least her type. It was her brunette-Barbie beauty, youthful arrogance, and overfamiliar, “you’ll give me whatever I want, won’t you?” smile that tipped me off. She was that girl, the one who, in middle school, got all the other desperate follower girls to wear their Guess jeans and turtle necks on Monday, and then showed up in a completely different outfit herself and made fun of them for being uncool. On Tuesday, she’d coach those same lonely girls to be mean to a randomly chosen chick in their group. When Wednesday rolled around, she’d make them all drink some nasty concoction to show their loyalty to her, and then ignore them when the popular kids strolled past. And so it went, until no girl in Alicia’s orbit knew who she could trust and either got smart and started hanging out with the nerds or the druggies, or morphed into a miniature, poorly dressed Alicia. Be sure and ask me how I know so much about what the lonely, follower girls went through in public school.
Yes, I knew Alicia’s type—the ones who were pretty, popular, confident, and entitled in elementary, middle, and high school— and thought they could coast on that for the rest of their life. Too bad no one bothered to tell them you could only cash those checks until you were eighteen. After that, the playing field evened out. A little. “Sorry. You’ll have to come back later. Maybe over your lunch break?”
“Is that a mouse behind you?”
I turned toward where she was pointing. “I don’t see anything.”
“I swear I just saw something run under that desk over there. Maybe it was a rat. I’m gonna go peek, and we can herd it outside together.” Alicia sailed past me, flashing a conspiratorial grin on the way. We were going to hunt rodents together. No scaredy cats, us.
She crouched on all fours. “Mind turning on the lights?”
I flipped the switch and went to fire up the front computer. There was no mouse, but she was going to entertain me in exchange for letting her in early. Crafty, that one, I thought as I appraised her. She was an inch or two taller than my 5'6", maybe ten pounds lighter but two cup sizes larger, and her long brown hair was curled a
nd sprayed into place. She wore a fair amount of makeup, but it was expertly applied to look natural.
She was cute and she wanted to play Power Ball, but I wasn’t in the mood. That was more telling than any other sad sack thing I had done in the last four weeks since Johnny had ditched town and me. If I wasn’t willing to outwit an obvious control freak in my own territory, I was seriously depressed. “If there was a mouse, it’s long gone. You might as well grab a book or two, since you’re in here already.”
“You sure you don’t want me to get the mouse?”
“We both know there’s no mouse. You need a library card, too?”
“If you don’t mind.”
I slid the form toward her. “Fill this out.”
Alicia attempted to catch my eye and make nice, but I kept my gaze fixed on my computer screen. When she grabbed a pencil out of the cup in front of me and filled out the form, though, her necklace caught my eye. It was a delicate golden cross hugged tight around her neck, like a choker, and splayed on the cross was a tiny, crucified Jesus in all his scrawny glory.
She caught me staring. “It was a gift from my mom.”
“Hmm. Where’d you say you work?”
“I didn’t.” She slid the card back toward me. Alicia Meale, and an address in Clitherall, the two-bars-and-a-post-office town just up the road from Battle Lake. Ms. Meale looked like she had neither done an honest day’s work in her life nor eaten venison, pheasant, or snapping turtle, which would make her stand out like a purple pig in that town.
“You’re new around here?”
“Not exactly. We’ve been here a few months. Anyhow, I better be going, or my boss is going to get crazy angry. It took longer to get a card than I thought it would. Maybe I’ll come back over my lunch hour?”
“We’re open until five o’clock.”
“Great! This is an awesome library.” She trailed her fingers over the front counter as she left, and stopped at the banned book display on her way out. “Unbelievable!” She laughed. “You’ve got a display of banned books! Too cool for school. Aren’t you worried you’re going to get in trouble?”
