The Overdue Life of Amy Byler

by Kelly Harms

  “Aha!” she says upon seeing me. “At last, the woman of the hour!”

  “Hmm?” I ask.

  “We need to talk about the Flexthology. I can’t stop thinking about it,” she tells me. “I love it.”

  “You were at my presentation?” I ask. I don’t remember seeing her.

  “I was not. I told you how I was planning to sleep through this entire conference, didn’t I? Remember, two kids in diapers? Mommy’s big weekend off?”

  I nod. “I remember. So how do you—”

  She cuts me off. “My lunch table were all talking about it. They thought it had a lot of promise. I got a copy of the handout and chewed the whole thing over. I’m afraid it might be dead in the water.”

  My face falls. “Oh. Well, I suppose—”

  “But damned if I don’t want to do it in my own classroom.”

  “Um . . .” I’m not sure where I fit in for this conversation.

  “Did you ever think about begging?” she asks me. This time I know not to answer and just wait calmly. It is the right call. “On a small scale. I’m thinking I set aside the e-readers and just try to beg for funding for the variety of books. I know the e-reader is one of the best aspects of it, but I’m never going to get two grand for twenty devices I send home with kids and just hope they bring back. They keep talking about getting our students some tablets, but talking is the key word. Speaking of which, guess what! My one-year-old met all his milestones! While I was gone, too; can you believe that bullshit? I leave those kids with my husband for three days—that’s all!—and the minute I turn my back, he’s all, ‘Cognitive delay? What cognitive delay?’” Kathryn assumes a baby voice: “‘Matter can neither be created nor destroyed . . . ’”

  I shake my head. “The e-readers are important. It’s what makes the reading-level choices invisible.”

  “But they’ll talk to each other anyway, right?”

  “If they want to, after they choose,” I say. “But they won’t have the obvious book covers, and they won’t be looking around the room seeing what the cool kids or the smart kids pick when they make their own choices. They won’t have the gendered nonsense that covers bring or preconceived notions about the subjects. They’ll just pick the book they want to read based on the actual story. I mean, if it works.”

  Kathryn sighs. “I can’t see the funding,” she says heavily. “I could find money for the e-readers or the book copyrights, but not both.”

  I nod. “And I’ve realized the books I picked for my school aren’t representative enough of a diverse student body.”

  Kathryn breathes deeply. “Not dead in the water. But not swimming either. Let’s look for some good public domain diversity.” She pulls out her phone and starts tapping away. “What have you got so far?”

  “Not much. I’ve got a few women authors, and something from Du Bois,” I tell her.

  “Right, I saw that,” she says. “Maybe a travelogue?”

  I shrug. She nods. “You’re right, kind of a lame solution. What else?”

  I start racking my brain for age-appropriate and diverse reading material that might be in the public domain. “Twelve Years a Slave?”

  Kathryn frowns. “It’s a challenging book, though, if I remember right. AP level.”

  “Oh!” I announce. “My Bondage and My Freedom!”

  “Never read! Would it work on reading level?”

  “I think so! Let me download it,” I say. “It’s been years.”

  It is while I am updating my Gutenberg app that Daniel approaches us.

  “My Bondage and My Freedom!” I blurt to him.

  “Hello to you too,” he says. “What an enthusiastic greeting. Confusing, but enthusiastic.”

  I exhale and smile at myself. And him. He is awfully good looking. “The Frederick Douglass autobiography. For the Flexthology. It’s in the public domain.” His eyes are very pretty. My stomach starts to hurt.

  “Ah,” he says approvingly. “Good thinking. I had some ideas about this too.”

  “Excellent,” says Kathryn, who I had momentarily forgotten to be alive. “Would you like to be on our planning committee? We have a lot of room on this committee at the moment.”

  I laugh. Then worry that my laugh sounds forced. Get it together, Amy. “Daniel, this is Kathryn. She’s from Chicago Public Schools.”

  Daniel smiles and extends a hand. “You’re a long way from home,” he says warmly. He doesn’t look nervous or awkward. I need to just calm down.

  “I’m hiding from my children,” she tells him conspiratorially. “I’m not changing any diapers.”

  Daniel nods. “Understood. I will be sure not to ask.” He gives her a wink. Seriously, he could be the Hot Librarian of the Year.

  “And on that note,” Kathryn says, after sending a meaningful look to me and then tilting her head toward Daniel, “I am en route to my hotel right now to get a nap. Second one of the day. So I must bid you goodbye.”

  “Carpe somnum!” calls Daniel. “Seize the naps!” It is such a dorky thing to say that I start to feel more at ease. I feel even better when, as Kathryn disappears from view, he holds up a notebook where he’s made notes about my presentation. “Shall we?” he asks. “I’ve got some books to run by you.”

  I nod, relieved at the thought that we might spend this meeting talking books. Books I can do. If this were some kind of date . . . that would be upsetting. “We shall.”

  “Great. Before we start shouting more titles at each other, though, perhaps we should get some libations. Is this a coffee date or a drinks date?” he asks, and all my progress calming down is immediately erased.

  “It’s not a date,” I say, too loudly.

  “Right,” says Daniel quickly, looking down. “Of course. Sorry.”

  I’m about to apologize, too, just out of habit, when I take a beat. Daniel thought this might be a date. This very handsome and bookish guy asked me out on a date. I’m single, mostly. This is a good thing. This is not a bad thing. What am I doing?

  “I mean, is it a date?” I ask. “It could be a date.”

  He just laughs. “How about it’s coffee.”

  “Yes!” I agree manically. “Let’s get some coffee.”

  “Maybe decaf?” he says with a smile.

  We get in line at the cart. Daniel, though he seems awfully fit from where I’m standing, orders two pastries and a black-and-white cookie with his coffee. I order a decaf with milk, because he’s right—any more caffeine might give me a stroke at this point. He tucks his paper bag of pastries under his arm and walks me west, to a pretty green space by the river that I didn’t know existed. Of course, that’s true of 90 percent of New York. As we walk, we chat over the titles in my e-reader and in his. He reads widely, but I detect a leaning toward speculative fiction.

  “Oh yes,” he admits freely when I ask him about it. “My daughter got me started on the young-adult postapocalyptic stuff, and then it was like sliding down a hill.”

  “A slippery slope,” I say with a smile. “You have a daughter?”

  “I do. She’ll be a senior this year. Let’s grab this bench and have a scone.”

  We sit down on a surprisingly clean bench facing out over the Hudson, with a foot of space between us. He fishes out a scone. “Lemon basil?”

  I tilt my head to the side. “I feel like I remembered something about a cookie . . .”

  “Black-and-white cookie coming right up.”

  He provides me with a cookie with a piece of bakery waxed paper around it. I unfold and start working on it, one nibble from the black side, one from the white, and so forth. As I eat, I tell him about visiting New York with Talia in the good old days and eating black-and-white cookies from the bodega at four in the morning after a long night of dancing. I tell him about crashing in hotel lobbies and getting strangers to buy us breakfast in diners and coming home broke and doing it all again the next chance we got.

  “Your poor parents.”

  “Right? I have a te
enage daughter now,” I tell him between bites. “I feel their pain.”

  “Ah, you too? Does she love you or hate you right now?”

  “Hmm . . . let me check what time it is,” I say, glancing at an imaginary watch on my wrist. “She’s actually kind of a dream kid, roller-coaster moods aside. She isn’t a great scholar, but she likes the diving team, and she seems to be that nice kind of popular at school where she doesn’t make other girls give themselves eating disorders but does get asked to dances.”

  “That is nice,” he agrees. “That’s actually my daughter too. Except I think she doesn’t get asked to dances; I think she tells someone he’s taking her, and he obeys out of fear.”

  I laugh. “Seems smart to me. Just one kid?” I ask.

  He nods. “You?”

  “I have a son. He’s twelve. He’s the one I lie awake worrying about.”

  “A handful?” asks Daniel.

  “The opposite. He’s so . . . good hearted.” Before I know it, I tell Daniel about how Joe reacted to his father coming back, which requires me to explain the situation with John in the first place, which I am fairly sure is bad date form. Feeling self-conscious, I steer my rambling back to how Joe guided the whole family to giving John a chance to reconnect, and what an emotional risk that was. “The world is going to be hard on him.”

  Daniel chews his scone for a moment and then swallows. “Or he will change the world.”

  I smile. “What a wonderful thing to say.” I look at Daniel as he looks out toward New Jersey. Being handsome is one thing. Complimenting my child—that is a whole different ball game. And I feel something vaguely familiar when I look at the planes of his face. What is it?

  Oh. Yeah. Lust. I’d forgotten all about lust, but there it is, right where I left it way too many years ago.

  “What about your daughter?” I ask him, desperate to get back to small talk. “Hell-raiser? Angel? Somewhere in between?”

  Daniel looks back at me. “Ah. I think she is an angel, of course, because I am her dad. But I can see that she’s got sharp edges. A bit of trouble with authority and no tolerance for waiting her turn. Of course, that same sharpness is making the college-application process look very promising. She nailed her standardized testing, and her counselor says she may well have her choice of schools next year.”

  “Wow! Was it like that for you when you were her age?”

  He frowns slightly. “Not exactly. Even then I knew I wanted to work in a school, but back then I was thinking coaching. I was so obsessed with soccer.”

  “Soccer?”

  “Yeah,” he tells me. “My parents met, married, and conceived me within two years of my mom arriving in the States. She’s Korean, and he’s African American, so I grew up thinking I was a special snowflake. You know which sport has dudes that look like me?”

  I shrug. I have seen what seems like every possible shade of skin in pro sports. “Most of them, I would think.”

  He half laughs at me. “Fair enough. But back then, to my mind, some sports seemed white, some sports seemed Black, no sports seemed Korean. Except, of course, the world’s sport . . .”

  “Soccer,” I complete.

  “Soccer. I lived and breathed it. Academics felt like a second priority. Or maybe a third. Because let’s not forget: girls.”

  “Let’s absolutely not!” I agree. “Any tips on how to engage students with a similar attitude at my school?”

  He shrugs. “I think your choose-your-own-reading thing sounds like a pretty good prescription. The problem is with the books, not the concept.”

  I frown. “But the books kind of are the concept,” I tell him.

  “What if there were new YA releases in your anthologies? Not, you know, books with zero merit, but well-written titles with relatable themes from the last twenty-five years.”

  I shake my head. “The budget is a deal breaker.”

  Daniel bites his lip. “There’s got to be a workaround.”

  I nod. “There usually is. But not on the scale of one reference librarian at one small private school in one small town.”

  Daniel nods, too, and then we are both quiet. I am thinking about the anthologies, the sunny day, the cookie. The strangeness of being at a park in New York City on a date, or something like a date, with the soccer-mad jock turned librarian with skin the color of . . . well, the color of his skin. And I find that I want to somehow close the space that’s between us. It’s a blurry, confusing, heady mix.

  I can’t even imagine what he might be thinking. But after a long silence, Daniel hops up off the bench. “Let’s go to Barnes & Noble,” he says.

  I look up at him. “What? Right now?”

  “Yes, right now. Let’s go to Barnes & Noble in Union Square and make a monster list of all the dream titles we’d want in your Flexthology. Try to come up with a few units that would work in my school and a few that would work in yours. See if there’s overlap. Test our ideas out a little. Figure out what such a proposition would actually cost.”

  I look at him askance. “This is just a little idea I had back at my school. It’s a craft project, not a proposition. I’m not looking for global revolution.”

  “But why not? A lot of people in your class this morning thought it was much more than a craft project. I thought it was downright brilliant. And when you have a great idea, that idea should be tested out on a larger sample. Plus, it’s a bookstore. Bookstores are always good. Come with me.” Daniel reaches out his hand to help me up from the bench. I look down at my half-nibbled cookie. It is still exactly half-black and half-white.

  “You can bring your cookie on the subway,” he tells me. “I realize it could take you another half an hour to eat the rest.”

  I start. I’ve been nibbling for a half hour? “What time is it?”

  He pulls out his phone. “Quarter after three. Do you have somewhere to be this afternoon?”

  I blink. I thought the date had just started, but it’s been more than an hour since we met up. This guy melts time. And my brain.

  “Let’s do it,” I say suddenly. “Let’s make a list of dream books and then go plot global revolution over cocktails at this place I remember nearby.”

  Daniel grins. “I cannot think of anything more fun.”

  And the thing is neither can I.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Dear Mom,

  Really, Dickens? I think you’re trying to make a point to me about my sudden life as the Daughter of Privilege. I will ignore it.

  Instead, I downloaded a dating book from this girl who won America’s Next Top Model. So far it’s pretty dumb, and pretty funny. Unlike Brian, who is just dumb. Mom, I totally backed the wrong horse with that guy. He is so blind to the way I feel—or don’t feel—about him. Today in the maybe six minutes Dad actually left us alone, Brian was, like, trying to get me to take my shirt off. I’m thinking, “Kid, can’t you tell you are irritating the crap out of me?” What makes him think I want to do feelies above the waist? And if that’s not enough, I think he is honestly hoping I’m going to have sex with him before the summer is over. He keeps suggesting places we can be alone that have mattresses. Idiot. I am not going to have sex for the first time with anyone who is capable of playing ten straight hours of Call of Duty and then declaring himself “exhausted from a long day.” Frankly, I’m not going to have sex with anyone period until I get my full ride on a diving scholarship. But even then, never Brian.

  I hope you will have better luck in New York. I know you’re only there for a week, but I keep thinking maybe you’ll go out on a date like we talked about. Maybe you’ll even meet someone cool. I think you deserve it, after all this time. Dad was asking me if you’re dating, only instead of asking straight up, he was using all these dumb ways that make it clear he doesn’t have the first clue how to get information out of anyone under forty. Like, he said, “So does Mom take a lot of time to herself?” when I told him I wanted to be alone. And when I got ready to go out with everybody from dive,
he asked if I got the lipstick from you, and if you wore a lot of makeup. I was like, “Sometimes.” Which you know is a bald-faced lie. You never wear makeup, and you really should.

  I told Dad you went out to dinner once a week or so, and no, I didn’t know with whom, and then because he got so flustered about that, I said, like I was all confused, “I think she goes swimming sometimes at night because she has always showered before she comes home.” His head started spinning like the Tilt-A-Whirl. It was so funny. Joe wasn’t in on it, so he was like, “What are you talking about, Cori,” and then I said, “I could be wrong,” so now he’s totally mystified about your love life. In the dating book it tells you there are three rules to maintaining a man’s interest, and rule number two is always keep him guessing. Rule one is to floss, and rule three is to withhold sex, so I guess this is a pretty popular guide with parents of teen girls.

  Assuming that you are still treating flossing like it’s your patriotic duty and not somehow sleeping with Dad from three hours away, congrats on mastering the art of maintaining your ex-husband’s interest. It seems to really be working.

  Which leads me to kind of a weird question that I probably wouldn’t ask in real life, but a journal isn’t exactly real life, so here it is: If Dad is this interested in your sex activities, does that mean he wants to be with you again?

  If he does, do you?

  If you do, will you get back together?

  That would be weird.

  I don’t think there’s a celebrity dating book for that.

  Anyway, just in case, I hope you’re living it up in New York while you can. There. That’s good advice. Maybe I should write a dating book.

  Love,

  Your love and sex guru, Cori

  —

  The disorientation you feel when you wake up somewhere different from where you expected to wake up is really a sensation unlike any other.

  I feel that way when I wake up in the beautiful Manhattan boutique hotel with a thin line of city sun making its way through the heavy-duty curtains. The “Hey, this isn’t my bedroom” feeling. Then I come to and remember I’m in New York, and my kids are with John, and everything is different today than it was two days ago, and that’s really ok. Yesterday I gave a presentation, and I had a coffee date with a hot librarian, and I went to Barnes & Noble, and I . . .