“I have something I’d like to give you,” Will said, handing the frame across the counter. When Julie saw it, she made an O shape with her mouth, but no sound came out. She held the frame and stared for a long minute. Then she held it up for me to see.
Half of the large frame was filled with the photo of Joshua Silver and Dr. King standing outside the library. The other half held a copy of the old newspaper article about Dr. King’s visit to Franklin.
Julie wasn’t saying anything, so I said, “Wow. That looks great.”
Will smiled his thanks. “I thought it might look really nice hanging on the wall.”
Julie still didn’t say anything. I moved to take the frame out of her hands, but she pulled it toward her. “This is beautiful. Thank you for thinking of us.” She put out her right hand, and Will shook it. I could tell she was trying not to get emotional.
“I’m really glad you like it. But I brought brownies in case you didn’t.”
She looked where he pointed. “Those are beautiful, too.” She set the frame on the desk and stepped over to the wall. She pulled a painting off a nail and up went Dr. Silver and Dr. King.
“They look perfect there,” Julie said to Will. “This is lovely of you.” Then she turned to me. “You,” she said quietly, “are a lucky girl. Hold on to this one.”
My mouth might have flopped open trying to deny that I was holding on to Will. She sounded like she thought he was my boyfriend. And that was not even close to the case. But obviously I should keep him around. Ack. What? I had no idea what I was supposed to say. Or think.
I picked up the plate and held it out to Julie. “Brownie?”
When I walked up my porch steps that night, I almost ran into a box at the door. Not just a box. The box. I lifted the corner with my shoe so I could get my hands under it. It weighed a ton. Lurching and staggering, I managed to get the box into my arms and stand almost upright. Who would have thought that forty skinny metal signs and stakes and eighty magnet sheets could weigh so much? I guess everyone who thinks about mass and volume.
I am nobody who thinks about mass and volume.
Once I was standing nearly vertical, I balanced the box against the door and turned the knob.
Locked. Of course. Because I’m not an idiot. I lock my door when I leave my apartment.
I slid the box down the door and held it against my bent knee with one hand. The other hand fished around inside my bag for keys. I pulled out two packs of gum, a broken pencil, a pen with yellow ink that was practically invisible, and a bracelet I hadn’t seen in months. The box tipped dangerously to the left, and I dropped everything else to steady it. I reclaimed the bag from the ground, shook it, and totally heard the keys. They were in there somewhere; all I had to do was keep digging. Or dump.
I poured the contents of the bag onto the box that was cutting off my circulation. Aha! Keys.
All the other bag fodder slid onto the porch as I unlocked the door and pushed it open. The box nearly dropped to the floor, but I didn’t let it, because my toes were down there.
Upon inspection, I found what I expected to find.
They were magnetic signs, the kind people slap on the sides of their cars to advertise their business. Innocuous, simple: “Don’t Forget to Vote on November 6” in red, white, and blue. With stars. I’d ordered them in bulk from a sign vendor. I didn’t use library money. This was personal.
I stuck the magnetic signs on top of the other signs, lining up edges perfectly and hiding the message underneath. They looked seamless. Then I hauled a few at a time through the neighborhood, on the public access ways, and on busy corners surrounding the library.
I shoved the metal legs of the signs into the grass. I knew if I waited another week the lawns could freeze, and it might be too hard to slide the bars in. I didn’t need this project to have any elements that were too hard, so I took another breath and another “Don’t Forget to Vote” sign and planted it for everyone to see.
Chapter 28
A text rang in on my phone.
I looked around my apartment. I had straightened up enough that a casual visitor wouldn’t know how much I hated cleaning. There was a thriller I’d checked out from the library sitting open, upside down on the arm of a chair, waiting for me to come back and read it. My “Daisy Buchanan thinks you’re a beautiful little fool” mug sat on a coaster holding the cold dregs of last night’s cinnamon tea.
I thumbed in a message to Mac.
Not bad. Not bad at all.
Did he mean he didn’t want to work? Or what he was planning wasn’t work? Either way.
I spent the next ten minutes brushing my teeth and organizing my hair. I actually did have work for Mac and me to do, but it didn’t hurt to help things along. When he rang the bell, I opened the door to see him smiling, holding a bright yellow sunflower.
“Hi,” I said, smiling. “You didn’t have to bring me anything.”
He cleared his throat and, with a look of intense concentration, said, “Like a sunflower moves through the day following the sun’s light, I watch for you from sunrise to sunset.” Then he nodded to himself, stepped inside, and pulled me close to him. His kiss was sweet and tender, growing more intense as he moved us toward the couch.
“So I wasn’t kidding about making you work today,” I said as I leaned away from him.
He shifted closer and put his hands around my waist. “Play first,” he said, kissing me again. He broke away and whispered in my ear, “Work later.”
I laughed and kissed him back, but pulled back after a minute. “Okay, so here’s what I need.”
He made a gesture that seemed to tell me not to worry. “Pretty sure I know what you need.” He reached for me again.
“Mac, I’m serious,” I said, still smiling at him but moving up onto the side of the couch. I held my arms out straight in front of me like I would somehow try to push him away. Yeah, right. “Help me write some tweets for the library.”
He looked at me like I’d sprouted an alien head.
“For real?”
I nodded and picked up my phone. “Totally. Help me come up with some good tweets to remind the public that they love the library.”
He pointed from his face to my face and said, “Are you actually stopping this”—and then he pointed to my phone—“for that?”
“You’re a natural. Come on. Write a few tweets for me, and then we can watch a movie or something.”
“I vote for the Or Something.” He was awfully attractive when he was trying to convince me to kiss him.
“Focus, please.” I think I was talking to both of us.
He shoved over as far from where I was sitting as he could while still remaining on the couch. “Fine. Focused. What do you want?”
I explained that I needed to keep interest in our library going, and that most of my librarian account followers were people who worked in libraries in other communities. “So I just need a few tweets that I can send out over the next couple of weeks. Keep Franklin in people’s minds.”
“Why do you want my help? You’re a good writer.”
I slid over next to him. “But you’re the best. Please?” I grinned and batted my eyes. He leaned in and kissed me. I moved away again. “No. Wait. Words first.”
He let out an aggrieved sigh. “Okay. ‘Support your library.’ Now get over here.”
I laughed. “Try again, please.”
“I am trying. So, so much.” He was fake-whining.
I knew exactly what he was trying for. “Try to write me some good tweets.”
“Right. That. Um, ‘Books are good? Go read something?’”
I stared at him.
“No? How about ‘We need our library.’ Is that better?”
My head shook without my permission.
“Okay.” He nodded. “I know. Put y
our face on it. Tweet a picture of you and the words ‘Check me out at the library.’ People will pour into the place.”
My heart thudded in a decidedly nonromantic way. My jaw clenched and I moved away. “That is sweet of you,” I said as I stood up from the couch. “But not at all helpful. Can’t you come up with a few great one-liners? About the library? Please?” I wasn’t sure I could have explained why I was getting so upset. I told myself that it wasn’t his job to organize my social media presence. He’s here, I told myself. He was flirting like crazy. He was interested in me. And look at him, I kept telling myself.
He shrugged his shoulders and held out his hand to me. “Maybe I need some inspiration.”
We got all kinds of inspired over the next few minutes, but when I asked again for some ideas, he kept coming back with nothing. And I mean, really nothing. After a little while of total non-productivity, I told him I was going to my mom’s house for dinner.
I was not going to my mom’s house for dinner.
“Do you want me to drive you over?” he asked.
“That’s sweet, but I need to get a few things done first.”
He picked up his jacket and headed for the door. “Have fun with your mom,” he said, as if that were even a faint possibility.
“Thanks.” I managed a smile, even though what I was thinking was less smiley. As I kissed him again and closed the door, I let myself rage just a bit. Why wouldn’t he give me something for the library? Why wouldn’t he use his great one-liners to help me? Was it really asking so much for him to redirect his cleverness from wooing to saving?
I needed Will.
I called his cell. “Are you busy?”
“I am grading essays written by really nice kids who can’t remember to capitalize the first word of a sentence.”
“Don’t their computers do that for them?” I asked.
“See? It’s attitudes like that that cause all our society’s problems.”
“All of them?” I said, flopping down on the couch.
He laughed. “I stand by my emotional overstatement—all.” I heard him click shut his laptop. “What are you doing?”
“Coming up with clever tweets about the library.” Which obviously I’d been failing to do. I inspected my fingernails.
“Oh, like that Einstein quote? ‘The only thing you absolutely have to know is the location of the library.’ How’s that?”
“Did he really say that?”
Will made a psht noise. “If not, it’s the kind of thing you can research at the library.”
I pulled a pen and a notebook off the side table. “More please.”
“Hang on.” I heard him open his laptop again and start typing. “Okay. How about this? Doris Lessing. ‘A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. . . . If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.’ There’s more in there, and it’s really good, but you’d go over your characters.”
“That’s awesome. What else have you got?”
“Ray Bradbury said, ‘Libraries raised me.’ Ooh, listen. He also said, ‘You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.’ This guy’s quotes are on fire.” He did his over-the-top pun laugh. Because he was being so useful, I laughed too.
I heard him clicking some more on his keyboard. “Jorge Luis Borges said, ‘Paradise will be a kind of library.’ I don’t know who that is, but I like him.”
I sat up. “I do. He was from Argentina. He wrote magical realism and short stories. That’s a good one. Hang on.” I put his call on hold and opened my librarian Twitter account. “Borges: ‘Paradise will be a kind of library.’ Don’t wait for heaven! Go to the library. #SaveFranklinLibrary”
I patched back to the call. “Thank you for helping me with this. You’re a peach.”
“Mmm,” Will said. “Peaches. Of course I’ll help you. This is important to you, so it’s important to me.”
That stopped me. I couldn’t answer him. I couldn’t make the right words come out, and I was afraid of the wrong ones. It was important to me. Obviously. And so it was important to Will. Because Will loved me. So why wasn’t it important to Mac?
I listened and took notes as Will continued to research what cool people said about libraries.
“Did you tweet that Argentine guy?” Will asked.
“Yeah.”
“Save this one for tomorrow: ‘A library is not a luxury, but one of the necessities of life.’ Henry Ward Beecher. That’s timely.”
I scribbled it down.
Will shouted into the phone. “This! Ready? This is the one. Eleanor Crumblehulme. Hang on.” He spelled out her name to me and then typed some more on his keyboard. I loved hearing that sound come through the phone. “Okay, she’s a Canadian librarian. Ready? ‘Cutting libraries during a recession is like cutting hospitals during a plague.’ We have to get that on a shirt for you. And you need to follow this woman on Twitter. Her name alone should make you love her forever.”
I felt myself getting weepy. My throat went thick. “Totally. Will, thank you for doing this. This means a lot to me.”
“No big deal.”
I actually could not speak for a couple of seconds. My voice shook with emotion. “No. Really, really big deal. Thank you for caring about my thing.”
He paused before he said, “I care about all your things. You know that.”
“I do. I know that.” I needed to hang up, because I was getting teary. “Bye.”
“Bye.”
Chapter 29
I found Julie hunched over with her nose an inch from a computer monitor. I didn’t ask, but I walked really close to her chair so she’d notice me.
She did. But I didn’t hear any “glad you’re here” words. She was in grunting mode.
After I clocked in and stashed my bag, she pointed to the monitor so I could see what she was reading. It was an online version of the weekly paper. We had one of those? The site had a section where a reader could access all the letters to the editor by subject. Julie slid her cursor up and down pages and pages of text.
Apparently people had opinions about the library bond. After a few more minutes of reading and scrolling, Julie slid her chair out from the desk and rubbed her eyes.
I pointed to the screen. “Can I?”
She held the chair out for me and nodded. She didn’t leave, though. She leaned over my shoulder and read the letters again.
The citizens of this community work hard for their money. They support multiple programs, endeavors, and policies. But the funding for pet projects is not the job of the government. Basic needs are being met by the tax dollars we willingly pay. No one should ask us for more to support something that should be privatized. Bring your little library into the twenty-first century and get your own funding. Let our neighbors keep the money they work so hard to earn. Vote no on Bond Proposition 4.
Jerry Mandalay
Concerned Citizen
Dear Editor,
Mr. Mandalay clearly misunderstands the long and storied tradition of public libraries as a government institution.
There was a long paragraph that I skipped, even though the writer amused me with her “storied” pun, but I didn’t care at the moment for her take on the historical value of American library system and Benjamin Franklin. She ended with this:
We are happy to keep the library we have, but we don’t need to spend more money. What we have is enough. I’ll also vote No.
Stephanie Wilkins
Bonner’s Glade
The library has the same books that have been there since I was a child. We should be reading the classics. Everything new is smut and filth anyway. Let’s make do with what there is and be grateful that we have any books at all. Vote No. Keep it clean.
Julie’s eye roll was practically audible. I didn’t say anything.
>
As a member of the city council, I plan to listen carefully to all sides of the library bond issue. I have had opportunities to hear from citizens and library patrons and developers, and I refuse to come to a snap judgment. I hope all the voters in this town will do the same. Become educated. Inform yourself. Talk to people. Take into consideration what is best for this community that we love.
Ms. Marnie Blum, attorney
City Council Member
Julie shook her head. “You know when people try to be so fair that they say a lot while saying absolutely nothing? If I ever need a lawyer, remind me not to call Ms. Marnie Blum, attorney.”
Everyone needs a library! The soul of Franklin resides in that rickety old Victorian house. Walk inside. Breathe in the glow. Allow it to penetrate your barriers and move you to greatness.
Mary Elise Gold
University Student
I resisted saying a word. Any word. In fact, I held my breath well into the next letter. Because an ill-timed snort about souls and barrier penetration could ruin this day. But I bet Marigold would have loved that one.
I love that beautiful old building. If the library has to close, I hope the city will turn it into a gallery for the community artists to exhibit their work.
Mr. Henry Tran
Julie blew out a breath and popped two green gummy bears into her mouth. “Has Mr. Henry Tran ever come inside this beautiful old building? Did he manage not to see any of the local art we display every single day? Dear Mr. Tran, let’s add a new pair of glasses to the bond for you.” She swept a stack of waste paper into the recycle bin. “Why do we even write letters to newspapers anymore? Does anyone even read the paper? And who needs a newspaper when we can Google anything in the universe? And while we’re at it, who needs paper at all? Honestly, can you think of anything”—her sarcasm tuned to fake innocence—“anything at all that is better with paper than without it?” With a pointed look at the restroom and a shrug, she went back into her office, muttering.
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