The Cherry Cola Book Club

by Ashton Lee

  “Oh, I didn’t come to eat,” Maura Beth said. “Just some much-needed talking and listening.”

  Periwinkle laughed brightly and headed over to the table with a complimentary glass of sweet tea. “Aha! Deep-fried talking and braised listening—my house specials!”

  “And I’ve come for my fix. Sit with me until someone comes in.”

  Maura Beth had long ago concluded that the key to the success of The Twinkle, as many locals affectionately now called it, was Periwinkle’s willingness to stop at nothing to keep it going. Not just ordering the food and supplies, but doing a major share of the cooking and even helping her waitress serve when the place got overwhelmed. The woman remained lean and indefatigable but somehow never seemed to break a sweat. Her blond hair with its stubborn dark roots was always styled attractively, never disheveled, even if she was seldom without the unsophisticated touch of a wad of Juicy Fruit gum in her mouth.

  “So what’s on your mind?” Periwinkle said, settling into her chair. “I can tell you’re upset about something.”

  Maura Beth took a sip of her tea, breathed deeply, and then unloaded, covering every detail of the ordeal she had just endured at the hands of Cherico’s three heavy-handed councilmen.

  “Those . . . so-and-sos!” Periwinkle exclaimed, managing to restrain herself. “You mean you might lose your job? After all this time?”

  “It’s a distinct possibility.”

  Periwinkle put her elbows on the table, resting her fists under her chin as she contemplated. “Tell me true—do you think they would be taking you more seriously if you were a man?”

  Maura Beth managed an ironic little chuckle. “Maybe, maybe not. In this case, I just think they’re all about shuffling the budget around to suit themselves.”

  “I don’t doubt it. But I wonder if they’d be as willing to bulldoze you—using your words here, honey—if you had a pair. Listen, we women have to fight for everything we get. Do you think I would have gotten the seed money to start this restaurant if I’d pulled my punches in my divorce settlement with Harlan Lattimore? Hell, he wanted to ditch me high and dry, but I bowed up and said, ‘No, sir, you won’t! Not after thirteen years of marriage, and my salad days are in my rear-view mirror. I helped you make a success of The Marina Bar and Grill, working hard as your secretary day and night, and I’ll be damned if you’ll leave me out in the middle of the water without a paddle!’ ”

  There was a touch of envy in Maura Beth’s quiet little sigh. “You certainly know how to stand up for yourself. Of course I know I can’t let these men intimidate me. That’s exactly what they want. But I can’t force people to come to the library, either. I just don’t know if there’s a way out of this.”

  “You gotta have you a gimmick,” Periwinkle replied, leaning in while furiously working her gum. “Listen to this. When I was trying to come up with a name for my restaurant, I realized that it wouldn’t matter what I called it if my food was no good. I know how to put together a delicious meal, though, so that part didn’t worry me. But I thought to myself that a catchy name might just get ’em in the door the first time, and then they’d be hooked. Did I ever tell you that I originally wanted to call this place Twinkle, Twinkle, Periwinkle’s?”

  They both laughed heartily, and Maura Beth said, “No. So why didn’t you? I just love that!”

  “Well, I thought it might be a bit too cutesy. So I ran it past my mother over in Corinth, and she said, ‘Peri, honey, that sounds like you’re running one a’ those baby boutiques. You know—where they sell bassinets and cradles and that kinda stuff.’ And after I thought about it for a while, I knew she was right on the money. So I put the café part in there so people would know it was definitely a new place to eat. Since then, of course, everyone’s shortened it to The Twinkle. It’s all worked out, but you need to come up with something that’ll get people into your library pronto so you can fend off those fat cats.”

  Just then, a somewhat plump but still appealing middle-aged woman wearing big brunette hair and a busy floral muumuu flounced through the front door, waving and smiling expectantly all the way. “Periwinkle,” she said, slightly out of breath, “I finally found the time to pick up those tomato aspics I ordered this morning. I’ve been running behind all day with my errands.”

  Periwinkle stood up and offered her hand as the woman reached their table. “They’re in the fridge, cool as a cucumber. I’ll run go get ’em for ya.” She quickly made a half turn toward the kitchen, but stopped just as suddenly in her tracks. “Now, where are my manners? Let me introduce you two. Maura Beth Mayhew, this is one of my newest customers, Connie McShay. She and her husband just moved here from Nashville about a month ago.” Periwinkle paused for a quick breath. “Connie, I’m sure you’ll be interested to hear that Maura Beth runs our library. I don’t have much time for books myself since The Twinkle takes up every minute of my day, but I’m sure Maura Beth’ll welcome a new patron with open arms, won’tcha, honey?”

  “I most certainly will!” Maura Beth exclaimed, rising from her seat to shake hands and exchange further pleasantries while Periwinkle hurried off to retrieve the aspics.

  “I’ve been meaning to drop by your library, you know,” Connie continued with an authentic warmth in her voice. “My husband, Douglas, and I have been so busy settling into our lodge on the lake, though. We’ve popped in only a week or two every year, but now we’re here for good. We still have so many boxes to unpack. I could swear those cardboard creatures somehow managed to reproduce in that moving van on the way down. Anyway, I’m a huge reader, and I even belonged to a wonderful book club up in Nashville. We called ourselves The Music City Page Turners.”

  Maura Beth brightened considerably. “And that’s music to my ears. You simply must get your card soon and pick out a couple of the new best sellers we’ve just gotten in. I use every last cent the library has to keep up with all the popular reads. What’s your genre, by the way?”

  “I’m the ultimate mystery buff. But I only like the polite kind where they figure out everything over tea and buttered scones. No bloody, gory, true crime forensics for me. When Agatha Christie died, I went into literary mourning for months. No more Miss Marple padding around the village of St. Mary Mead stumbling onto murders committed by the landed gentry, what ho! Or Hercule Poirot waxing his mustache, for that matter.”

  Maura Beth laughed and was about to reply when Periwinkle reappeared with a small paper bag and handed it over to Connie. “Your aspics are just as snug as oysters in the shell in their little plastic containers in there. Just don’t brake for any squirrels on the way home, and they should hold their shape nicely.”

  “Here’s seven bucks, and keep the change as usual,” Connie said, chuckling while she proffered a bill she had just retrieved from her purse.

  “Much appreciated again, honey,” Periwinkle replied, tucking the money into her apron pocket.

  Then Connie leaned into Maura Beth as if they had been the best of friends for the longest time. “Don’t you just love these tomato aspics? I was hooked the first time I bit into one and got a mouthful of that sinful cream cheese that was hiding in the middle. Douglas makes me get them now practically every other night for our dinner. That’s all we seem to eat these days—aspic and whatever fish he catches that day out on the lake. That I end up cleaning, by the way. Some retirement—I’ve spent most of it so far with stringers and fish scalers. Maybe I need to put my foot down.”

  “I don’t know about that, but you’ve single-handedly turned tomato aspic into my biggest seller,” Periwinkle added. Suddenly, she began giggling and couldn’t seem to stop. “I’m sorry,” she continued finally, “but I just thought of what a difficult time I had selling my aspic when I first opened up. No one would ever order it, and I couldn’t figure out why. I knew there was nothing wrong with my recipe. It was my mother’s, and everybody in the family always raved about it. Then one day the mystery was solved when one of my customers, a very polite older man visiting do
wn here from somewhere in Ohio, complimented me on the food on the way out. But he also said, ‘Just to satisfy my curiosity, could you tell me what icepick salad is? Your waitress recommended it as an appetizer, but it sounded pretty dangerous to me, so I passed on it. I’ve just spent a fortune having most of my teeth capped.’ ”

  Both Maura Beth and Connie looked halfway between amused and bewildered as Periwinkle caught her breath once again.

  “I know, ladies. I had that same expression on my face when that dear little man asked me that question. The deal is, there’s a certain type of Southern accent where people pronounce words like nasty as ‘nicety,’ glass becomes ‘glice,’ cancer turns into ‘kindsuh,’ and, of course, aspic winds up as ‘icepick.’ Maybe you’ve run into somebody who does that. Anyway, my waitress at the time, Bonnie Lee Fentress, was the sweetest little thing, but that’s the way she spoke, and she had no idea she was scaring people to death when she mentioned that item on the menu and left it at that. So I sat down with her and straightened out her diction, and lo and behold, my aspic was reborn. The rest is delicious history.”

  “I most certainly agree with that,” Connie said while glancing at her watch. “Oh, I still have a million things to do, ladies. Let me run now. So nice visiting with you both.”

  “Don’t forget about your library card!” Maura Beth called out as Connie exited as quickly as she had entered, hurling a muffled, “Will do!” from out on the sidewalk.

  “I really like her,” Periwinkle said as she and Maura Beth resumed their seats. “She may be living high on the hog out on the lake, but she’s the salt of the earth—just my type.”

  Maura Beth was gazing at her tea in silence and let a few awkward moments go by. “Oh, yes, I know she’ll be a welcome addition to Cherico, particularly since she’s a reader,” she finally offered, coming to. “I must track her down if she doesn’t keep her word and come by for that card. She’s given me an idea that might help the library out. It came to me just this second.”

  “Shoot!”

  “That book club she said she belonged to,” Maura Beth explained. “I need to pick her brain about that. Maybe we could get something like that going here in Cherico. You know, get people into the library to review books and socialize with each other. Maybe that’s the type of gimmick you were talking about earlier that I could use to put the library back on the map.”

  Periwinkle looked particularly thoughtful and then nodded. “Couldn’t hurt. I think you need to get on it right away, though.”

  “I knew I did the right thing coming in here to talk things over with you,” Maura Beth added. “That shoulder of yours has come in handy quite a few times over the past several years.”

  Periwinkle reached across and patted her hand affectionately. “Hey, what are girlfriends for?”

  2

  Turn That Page

  The Cherico Library wasn’t much to look at, and it was even harder to find. Tucked away on a little-used side street at the sinister-sounding address of 12 Shadow Alley, it had originally been a corrugated iron, farm implement warehouse seventy-something years ago. A decade later, a few wealthy matrons who decided it was time to improve the town had come up with the idea of starting a library and had even donated some of their inherited money to get one going. The City Council back then had been as indifferent as the current one was, however, and had done as little as possible in converting the warehouse into a suitable facility. The unproven rumor was that the lion’s share of the funds had been cleverly pocketed by a couple of the politicians, including Durden Sparks’s father. It seemed that Cherico had never suffered from an excess of integrity.

  A few unimpressive improvements had followed over the years, consisting chiefly of tacking a couple of flimsy white columns onto a pedestrian portico and creating a cramped meeting room inside. There was no loading dock—just a back door—no off-street parking, and the building contained only a stingy 3,500 square feet of space for the librarian’s office and shelving the entire collection. Although the fiction was more current, the nonfiction needed weeding for the more topical issues—but Maura Beth barely had enough of a budget to keep the patrons in best sellers, newspapers, and periodicals. It even made her feel guilty to endorse her own paycheck, which was far from what anyone would have called generous.

  Oh, sure, it was enough for her to shop for groceries at The Cherico Market, pay the apartment rental, manage the note on her little Prius, and get her hair curled the way she liked at Cherico Tresses. But putting anything aside for the future—such as for a wedding, provided she could ever meet the right guy—was completely out of the question; and she was genuinely embarrassed by what was left in the coffers to pay the two circulation desk clerks that alternated workdays.

  “I feel like a missionary in a foreign land sometimes,” Maura Beth had confessed to Periwinkle shortly after they had first met. “I’m bound and determined to make everyone here in Cherico understand what a library is for and that they need to take advantage of it. Of course, I’m the first to admit that I got this job straight out of library school—right after my big booster shot of idealism that came with my diploma.”

  “Don’t ever lose that kind of dedication, honey,” Periwinkle had advised her back then. “No matter what happens. Because things’ll bear down on ya both sooner and later. I speak from experience.”

  One week after the latest disheartening session with the City Council—another bona-fide example of “things bearing down”—Maura Beth was leaning back in her office chair and reflecting upon that memorable conversation with Periwinkle nearly six years earlier. Momentarily, Renette Posey, her Monday, Wednesday, and Friday front desk clerk, knocked on her door and popped her head in.

  “There’s a Mrs. Connie McShay here to see you. I just finished fixing her up with a library card,” she said in the disarmingly sweet and girlish voice that had become her trademark. It was the main reason Maura Beth had hired the inexperienced eighteen-year-old permanently. She was, in fact, surprisingly good with the public—diplomatic beyond her years, even—and the library needed all the help it could get.

  Maura Beth was hardly able to restrain herself, snapping to attention. “Yes! Show her in!” She’d been anticipating this meeting for the last five days, hoping that it would turn out to be the kickoff for holding on to her job and keeping the library open.

  “Thanks so much for chatting with me over the phone and working this into your schedule,” Maura Beth continued, as the two women shook hands and took their seats across from each other.

  “Oh, it’s my pleasure,” Connie replied, quickly surveying Maura Beth’s tiny, windowless office cluttered with book carts, uncrated boxes from wholesalers, and stacks of review journals. “Well, you weren’t kidding about the lack of space here and the library being an afterthought with your politicians.”

  “Yes, I have to do practically everything around here. Order the books, process them, pay the invoices, even check things out when my clerks take their lunch break. I have no children’s librarian, and no one in reference or technical services. It’s a wonder that I even have this computer.” Then she leaned in and lowered her voice. “Not to mention the lengths I go to in order to keep the collection safe. For instance, there’s a supply of peanut butter crackers behind the front desk for Mr. Barnes Putzel. He’s getting on up there, and his younger sister takes care of him. When he first started coming in, he’d spend all his time in reference and would eventually end up banging volumes of the encyclopedia together like a pair of cymbals. We had no choice but to ask him to put them down and leave. Then, his sister came in one day and suggested we offer him a couple of peanut butter crackers on the sly before he headed over to reference. She said they always calmed him down at home. So, I followed her advice, and we’ve had no trouble with him ever since. He’s in heaven poring over the encyclopedias in blessed silence with no wear and tear on the bindings. The worst we have to deal with now is his peanut butter breath when he comes over to say go
od-bye.”

  “I have a thing for peanut butter crackers myself,” Connie remarked, nodding with an appreciative grin.

  “Yes, well, keeping the reference material safe with crackers is only a part of the reality of the small-town library with practically no funding. You have the patrons who don’t understand why we don’t have every best seller on the shelves yesterday, but don’t bother to bring their books back because ‘they’ve already paid for them with their taxes, so why not keep them?’ Would they take a jackhammer and remove a piece of Shadow Alley out in front of the library because they’d paid for the streets and sidewalks? Not to mention the ones that show up with several boxes of moldy books from the turn of the century—not the millennium, but 1900, or even earlier—that they’ve just found in the attic and want to donate to us. ‘If you’ll pay for the fumigation,’ is what I want to say to them, but instead we just end up having to smile politely and dispose of them as soon as they’ve left. You wouldn’t believe how many people there are who think libraries don’t take money to run and that everything gets on the shelves with the wave of a magic wand.”

  Connie was frowning and shaking her head now. “Is it really that bad here?”

  “I wish I could say I was exaggerating.”

  “I can tell you’re not,” Connie continued, “because I’m still shocked by that ultimatum those councilmen gave you. I nearly dropped the receiver on the floor when you told me that. Nobody could get away with that sort of thing in Nashville.”

  Maura Beth pounded her fist on the desk for emphasis. “But Nashville, this isn’t! That’s why we’ve got to put our heads together and see if we can get a book club going. We’ve got to get more warm bodies in here and boost our circulation figures. I need your input as to how The Music City Page Turners worked, and we’ll go from there.”