After a few minutes, she swallowed. “City council meeting was Thursday night.”
Oops. “Was I supposed to go?”
“No. I didn’t tell you about it.”
Was there an implication there? Should I have gone without being told? Navigating the change from being the kid working in the library to being the second-in-command librarian was still occasionally a mess.
“So, how was it?”
“The city would like very much to keep the library open.” She said it while looking out the window, past the beech tree’s yellowing leaves and arching branches.
“That’s good news.” I thought about celebrating with a gummy of my own, but she was clutching the package. Tightly. In both hands.
“Hm.”
The grunts were back. Not a great sign.
“Isn’t it? Good news, I mean?” I stared at the gummies, using mind powers to make her hand the bag back. No good.
When she spoke again, it sounded rehearsed, mechanical. “They would like to keep us open, but they don’t see how it’s possible without a tax increase.”
“So, let’s have a tax increase. How much could it really cost to spit shine this old house?”
She eyed me sideways, her silent way of calling me out. “There’s a proposed increase on the ballot for November. But the bond is for a lot of money—an entirely new facility—plus the school district’s bonding for a new elementary school and playground, and people don’t want to spend more money on anything. So it’s not looking good.”
That all sounded vaguely familiar, like it was information I should have known. And maybe I did, but I hadn’t planted any of it in my memory.
The baggie disappeared in her clutch, all the air pressed out from inside. I imagined she felt similarly squeezed. Something in me felt like taking her hand, or patting her back, or saying something sympathetic. But she never really seemed like someone to touch, so I didn’t.
I put on my master’s degree voice. “Libraries are an American institution. Every community needs one.”
She gestured out the window at Pearl Street in front of us. “Family farms used to be an American institution, too. Things change.” I knew she was thinking of the tract house developments that had replaced acres of fields only a few blocks away.
I nodded, like we’d come to an agreement about something. “We’ll be great. We’ll find the money to fix up this place. Or the bond will pass. People will stand with us.”
My mind shifted from the theoretical to the practical. “What about our monthly anonymous donor?”
During all the years I’d worked in the library, and probably for a hundred years before that, we got a money order in the mail at the beginning of every month. It didn’t have a name or return address on it, but it was always two hundred dollars, and it always arrived with a typed note. Typed. On a typewriter. Like the Cards. The note always said something about the privilege it was to have such a lovely library in town and then suggested one or two book buying possibilities. Whoever our donor was, he or she hadn’t adjusted for cost of living increases. Or publication cost increases. It was the same amount every month. Two hundred dollars may not seem like much, but every single month? For years? Decades? Someone in Franklin was sharing a whole lot of cash with us.
Julie looked confused. “What about our donor?” she asked.
Wasn’t it obvious? “We have a fan. Someone thinks we’re doing something great here. So chances are good that other people think so, too.”
“Okay,” she said, still sounding like she didn’t understand.
“Can’t we ask for more donors to come forward? The zoo does it. The community theater does it. People hustle donations all the time.”
Julie sat up straighter in her chair. “We will not hustle donations.” She frowned like the idea was unspeakable, or at least uncouth.
I shrugged. “Maybe we could put up a sign.”
She shook her head. “No sign.”
“A jar?”
She put herself between me and the counter. “I absolutely forbid you to put a donations jar in this library or anywhere else.” She almost made it to the end of the sentence before she started to laugh.
“Fine. No jars. I’ll think of something else.”
I stood and grabbed a rolling cart of picture books that needed to be reshelved. Parking the cart at the bottom of the staircase, I lifted a plastic crate of books into my arms and walked up the stairs to the children’s section.
Halfway up the narrow staircase, I felt my phone vibrate. It would be imprecise to say I’d been obsessively checking for messages from Mac since dinner on Sunday. Imprecise, but not incorrect. Knowing I should get the crate of books up the stairs before I pulled my phone from my pocket did not stop me from leaning the crate against the wall and checking my texts.
Him. It was him. Were those angels singing? (In fact, it was not. It was the ice cream man driving by on Pearl Street.)
Cheeks? Flushing. Heart rate? Elevated.
How should I reply? When should I reply? Wait—should I reply? He didn’t ask me a question. Don’t be eager, I told myself. I put the phone face up on top of the pile of books in the crate so I could keep reading the message over and over until the screen turned dark.
Focus, Greta. I took the last few stairs at a jog. Upstairs, the picture books lived on short shelves, theoretically so that any small person could reach any book. In reality, that translated to small people tossing books off every shelf at the least provocation. And strange as it sounds, I loved picking books up off the floor. I loved finding piles of books next to chairs. Knowing these books were getting loved up by kids made me glad.
A little boy in plaid shorts and an orange shirt sat on the floor looking at a book about soccer.
“Hi, buddy,” I said. “You like soccer?” Because they paid me to make conversation with four-year-olds.
He shrugged. “Soccer’s okay,” he said. “I like blue books.” Sure enough, several inches of blue-spined picture books were stacked beside him.
I sat on the floor near him. “I like blue books, too. Which one is your favorite?”
He looked at me for a second, possibly assessing my intentions. He must have found me harmless because he pushed a book toward me with a snoring dog on the cover. I picked it up and turned to the first page.
“I love this one. Have you read it?”
He looked at me like I had missed the obvious. “I just did.”
“Oh, but this one’s special. You really have to read it out loud.”
He rubbed his nose with his fist. “I only know how to read inside my imagination.”
“Lucky for you that I’m here, then,” I said, scooting a couple of inches closer. “Would you like to hear it?”
He nodded. I read.
After the first book, he handed me another.
“I’d love to read to you all day, buddy, but I have to work. How about this? I’ll put away these books, and then I’ll read you another story. My favorite from when I was a kid.”
“Okay. I’ll help you.” He clambered up off the floor and shoved his entire pile of blue books on the shelf in front of him.
Inside my head I rolled my eyes, but out loud I said thanks. And suggested a system.
He grabbed a book from the pile, I read the spine, and we shelved it together.
As I made space on a shelf for the next book on the pile, I started to realize the weight Julie was carrying. What if I was being naïve? What if the majority of people in this community actually didn’t care about the library? What if they weren’t willing to pay for it?
When we finished shelving the last of the pile, I tweeted: “Communities that read together succeed together. #KeepLibrariesOpen #GoToTheLibrary”
Then I led the kid to the R stack and pulled a battered copy of Eleanor Richtenberg
’s Grimsby the Grumpy Glowworm off the shelf.
“Do you know Grimsby?”
He wrinkled up his nose. “That looks like a baby book.”
“Yeah, it looks that way. But sometimes looks can fool you. This is my favorite funny book. There are seven Grimsby books, but the first one is the best.”
By the time his mom came to find him, we’d read the book through twice, and he asked to check it out and take it home. It wasn’t even blue.
Chapter 6
Saturday morning I watched the sunlight filter through my tiny bedroom window. My mother did not approve of such small windows in a bedroom; she thought it felt like a prison cell. I loved it because I didn’t have to think about buying things like curtains. Decorating with curtains was way above my pay grade. Blinds. The end. I put cool old film posters on walls and cool old books on shelves. Sometimes I found funky bookends in antique shops. I had read about half of the books that decorated my apartment. Three of the last five years, my birthday wishes had been for rare or interesting books, and Will had come through. Which, of course he had.
As I watched the sun patch move across the wall, I thought about how to spend the hour before work. I could go for a run, but then I remembered who I was. Running was excellent for people who liked pain. I liked lying in bed. Or yoga and rock climbing gyms.
Also, ponytails seemed to be required for running. I couldn’t grow hair long enough without it looking like a Dr. Seuss bush had sprouted from my head. I stayed in bed, pondering my hair situation and inspecting the job-hazard paper cuts in my fingers. I also thought about ways to make money for the library. Crazy ways and simple ways and likely ways and impossible ways. Just like that, I’d wasted all my extra morning time. Shower, food, and off to work.
I loved Saturday mornings at the library. Maybe it was because there was more action then. Maybe it was because Will was almost always there.
His job teaching at our alma mater, Central High, allowed him all kinds of weekend freedom, provided there wasn’t a debate tournament or he’d done something weird, like assign long papers he’d have to grade. Part of the reason he was Central’s favorite teacher was that he didn’t do anything too weird very often. Another part of the reason was that they don’t come any more awesome than Will Marshall.
He showed up on Saturdays to help me with my ongoing venture that had started as a summer project but kept growing in scope and depth. It was called Local History. Before I became the library’s resident expert on digitizing previously analog source materials, I knew exactly three things about the local history section: one, most of the collection got dropped off after someone’s grandparent died and no one knew what else to do with all the random papers left in desks; two, said papers were stored (i.e., shoved) in a closet behind the bathroom; and three, said closet was a mess.
Within the past four months, I’d commandeered a table in the periodicals room that—surprise!—nobody used, and set up shop. A month digging into the piles in the storage closet, and I’d made excellent progress. Then Julie unlocked the door to the basement, which was full of boxes, skittering critters, and impending doom.
As much as I loved organizing and scanning and rearranging all kinds of photos, newspapers, recipe books, and journals, the basement was enough to kill me, probably. I’d read Stephen King; I knew what could happen to me in that musty, dank place. I had a policy to never go down there alone. Enter Will, every Saturday morning.
Here is an illustrative difference between Will and me. When I went through a box, I dumped out the musty and mold-stained contents, spread out every paper and book and photograph, tossed the ones that looked too manky or unreadable, and stacked the rest in the queue for the scanner. But Will, the one of us who was not getting paid, picked up each photo and scrap like it was a treasure. It was exciting to him, like obscure Hungarian short films or articles about 3-D printing replacement body parts.
He went about his task like it was an archaeological dig. He’d pick up one tattered folder stuffed with pictures, papers, tax statements, handwritten family stories, and probably shopping lists and names of the farm animals. He’d carry the folder to his table in the corner of periodicals, then pull out one sheet of paper at a time, read every legible word on it, catalogue it in my nerdy spreadsheet file, and box it up.
Between the two of us, hundreds of hours had gone into this project since June, and now there were three big plastic bins full of hanging folders with what used to be someone’s garbage, carefully organized and labeled.
I watched him lean over a scrapbook full of blurry, damaged photos. I loved the way he focused on the details of a person he’d never meet. But, I thought, who knows? Maybe the woman in that fifties dress was the grandma of one of his students. I pulled out my phone and tweeted “Libraries—making connections through the generations with people both real and fictional. Make a friend. #GoToTheLibrary”
At hungry o’clock, I stretched my arms over my head and said, “I feel lunch. Are you feeling lunch?”
Will was literally up to his elbows in local history/garbage. His arms were both inside a ratty cardboard box. “Yes. I am feeling lunch. You choose a place while I put this treasure back in the closet.”
Ten minutes later, we walked down the sidewalk, me on the outside when we passed the Greenwood place. We didn’t even have to discuss it anymore. For years, he’d stood between me and my fear of that terrifying house.
A guy drove by in a beater car with the windows rolled down, and I could hear his music get higher and then lower in that moving-sound Doppler effect. The music settled in to my brain right next to the crazy thoughts I’d had lying in bed. I didn’t know I had even made a connection between the things until I said, “I’m going to hold a battle of the bands as a library fund-raiser. Tell me that is a brilliant idea now.”
Will rubbed the side of his nose. “That is a brilliant idea now.”
“Thank you.” I patted his arm. “But is it?”
He thought for a minute before he answered, which I hated, because it meant maybe not, but which I also loved, because it meant he was actually thinking it out.
He made a “hmm” noise. This could go either way.
“It’s a great idea. People love music. They love competition. They love you, obviously. And if they remember they love the library, all problems could be solved.” He looked around at the people wandering around downtown on a Saturday afternoon. “People of Franklin,” he said in a voice that was too loud to be ignored, “you see before you a brilliant tactician.” A few people smiled at Will. More people studied the sidewalk, the shop windows, or their phones. He was not deterred. “Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you—the library rescuer.” He started to slow clap.
I grabbed his hand and dragged him around the corner. “That was a lovely speech, but my lunch break is disappearing fast.”
He patted his stomach. “Mmm. Lunch break. One of my favorite breaks.”
“When I said lunch,” I said, “I meant cupcakes.”
He shrugged, as if cupcakes were a given. “Nutrition is overrated.”
“I want to try this new coffee shop I heard about.”
Will looked uncomfortable. “Coffee shop?”
“Coffee shops are not only for breakfast. They’re for all the time. And for pastry, obviously. Because pastry is delicious. So, speaking of neither coffee nor pastry, I really like your shirt. It’s a good color on you.” I didn’t let him respond before I went on. “Also, not speaking of coffee or pastry or shirts, how come Mac only texted me once this week?”
My random conversational leaps didn’t faze him. “Maybe he thinks it’s wise to keep it slow.” He kicked at a rock on the sidewalk.
“Huh.” I wondered if Will had told him it was wise. “Or maybe he’s not that interested.”
“I’d definitely go with the first option.”
I stopped him and m
ade him face me. “Why? Did he say something? What did he say? Did he tell you he was interested? Tell me. Tell me. Tell me tell me tell me.”
Will laughed and started to walk down the sidewalk again. “You’re cute when you’re overeager.”
“That is not an answer.”
He shook his head. “True. It’s not. And we’re not in seventh grade.”
I sighed a giant breath. “Fine. Turn right.”
We turned. “Where are we going exactly?” Will asked.
At almost the same time, I heard someone yell, “Hey, Greta the library girl!” I turned and saw Marigold. I waved. She glanced at Will and hurried over to me. “Hey. I already said that. Hi. What are you doing?” She stood close to me and did not look at Will. I knew that kind of studious avoidance, and I hated it. But I thought I’d give her a chance to overcome it.
“My very best friend in the world and I are going to get cupcakes for lunch.” I stepped back so she couldn’t ignore Will beside me. “Marigold, this is Will. He’s brilliant and funny and charming and a seriously great kisser.”
She stopped with a look of complete shock on her face.
“Want to join us for lunch?” I said.
“No kissing, though,” Will added. “Nothing personal, I just don’t know you that well yet.”
She didn’t seem to have any tools for dealing with us. “Um,” she said.
“Come on,” I said. “I promise we’re good company.”
When we resumed walking, she followed. I smiled, pleased. “So, how’s the library project?” I asked. Before she could answer, I pointed at Will. “He studied political science, among other things. I bet he has great thoughts on your assignment.”
Will laughed out a quiet breath. “Aggressive much?” He knew the drill. People were simply not allowed to discount Will in my presence because of the way he looked. The end.
“Okay, here we are. Beans. Isn’t it the cutest?” I opened the door to the narrow coffee shop. An old-school metal bell rang to announce us. Inside, round tables crowded together, surrounded by mismatched chairs. Coffee and sugar smells combined with all the baked goodness. The brick walls held art deco posters and blank chalkboards for people to write messages.
Check Me Out Page 4