She drank more coffee. “I’m going in to work. I want to spend every minute I can there on the last day that it will be a real library.”
She leaned down and kissed him. She looked at his purple-and-black eye that was almost swollen shut. “Sorry.”
“I’m thinking of calling it a fashion statement. No big deal.”
“You didn’t deserve it.”
“You couldn’t hit the people who did. You think you could give me one of your ‘MAD’ stickers to put over it? Maybe make it say ‘MAD Kicks Ass.’ I can walk around city hall and make sure the council gets the message.”
“I think MAD’s ass-kicking days were over before they really began.” She looked at his eye. “Maybe you could tell people you got it during a bust.”
She stood up. “Maybe I’ll come by the station later. Talk to you and the chief about a job down there.”
“That’s the thing about our having a good reputation for doing things the right way,” Joe said. “People know they can trust you with something like being a cop.” He laughed. “Good day for it, with me being a walking billboard for your punch.” He paused. “Ironic. In modern times, the library’s become the place where everything that falls through the cracks winds up. Folks who don’t have anywhere to go turn to the library. Without it, they’ll just crash and burn and become police problems. At the police station you might be doing the same things with the same people.”
“But with guns and prison sentences instead of books.”
“Well,” he said, “there’s that.”
thirteen
into the dark
THE LIBRARY WAS DARK and early-morning cool when Serenity unlocked the door. She went to her desk and poured herself a full cup of Myers’s. Faulkner climbed up on a stack of books and twitched his whiskers.
She took her first sip. “I don’t know what to tell you. Eviction day’s coming, for me and you both.” Another sip. “They’ll probably convert this place to another Walmart Mini-Mart. So watch out, they’ll probably douse the whole place in rat and insect poison—after they throw out the books.”
She stood up. “C’mon. I’m going to take you outside and set you free before they destroy this place. If I can’t save anything else, I’ll save one rat.”
She reached for his tail but he jumped a foot to the left. He didn’t run away, though. She reached for him again and he did the same little jump-and-stick thing.
“Suit yourself,” she said. “You want to stay and go down with the ship, I’ll admire your courage. More than I’ve got.”
She sat back down and he returned to the book he was sitting on. “What you got there?”
She stood up and Faulkner moved away. She picked up the book.
“To Kill a Mockingbird?”
She thumbed to the first page and sat down and read. One of the great things about being a librarian was being able to read tons of books. And one of the great things about reading tons of books was that they each lived in you long after you put the book down, until, finally, a librarian’s brain felt like a small city of characters wise and silly, evil and noble, all waiting to be called up at any moment.
One page in and she recalled the whole book. Closed it.
“Atticus Finch,” she said. “One of the greatest heroes ever. A whole town doing wrong and he still does the right thing.”
Faulkner stood up on his hind legs.
She looked at him.
“So what?”
But he kept standing.
fourteen
short ugly words
NINE A.M. Serenity had been wallowing in self-pity for hours. Time to go out and be a real librarian, if only for today. She put her hand on her office door and tried to prepare herself for anything.
She wasn’t prepared for the searing hot musty air that boiled from the stacks and slapped her back into her office. She forced herself to open the door again and pushed her way into the heat.
Joy was slouched behind the counter. She pointed at a man in a blue service uniform sitting at a table by the door. He looked up at Serenity and smiled.
“Compressor, ma’am. AC’s dead in all the public areas. Good news is that the offices are on a separate system, so your office should still be okay. I was just about to bring you your estimate.”
The sheet had a long column of numbers. A really long column of numbers.
“Looks like this baby hasn’t been maintained in years,” the man said. “Disaster waiting to happen. I already called the office to get the parts lined up because I figured you’d want us to get this done ASAP. These buildings weren’t made for occupation in Alabama in August without AC; you don’t even have any windows that open. It’ll be 120 degrees in here by noon. Office said they’ll need payment up front. They said you’d understand, but you can call them if you want.”
Serenity stomped off to her office with the estimate in her hand, swearing to herself and glaring at anyone who dared to make eye contact. She looked at the estimate and the spreadsheet on her computer. The number on the sheet was well into five figures. Her spreadsheet barely made it to the left of the decimal point.
Well, she wouldn’t have to worry about the internet bill. Her library was dead right now.
It was a relief, actually. She could call Janice and say, “I would have had your payment, but…” She could recover her honesty, and be blameless. Blameless when she called the mayor’s office. Blameless when she called the staff together and hung the sign on the door. Maybe she could even feel blameless when she looked at a book someday and thought of all the books mildewing in the oven that had once been a sanctuary that she swore to protect.
She had done her best. When she was a girl, hadn’t they told her that was all you could do? Do your best, then smile and shrug when the world went up in flames. She pulled Mockingbird off the shelf. “Atticus Finch,” she said, “you fought the good fight. You always did the right thing. And when it wasn’t enough, you told Scout that you had done your best and held your head high.”
She put the book back. “Here’s to all us noble losers.” Then she thought of a Sheryl Crow song and paraphrased it. “If it makes you proud, why the hell am I so damned sad?”
She uttered a short ugly word. Then a whole string of them.
fifteen
atticus finch was wrong
SERENITY FELT like she needed to cry or scream or apologize. Apologize to anybody, for anything. Anything but losing the library. She wasn’t ready to talk about that yet.
She avoided the AC man, sitting patiently with a hopeful smile, and went looking for Doom in the computer room.
“Children’s reading room,” corrected Doom when Serenity called it the computer room.
“At least it’s cool in here. This and a couple of other offices are the only places with AC today.”
“Bentley kept the air conditioning on for his precious computers,” said Doom.
“That’s just chance. Bentley didn’t cause this.”
“You don’t know that.”
Serenity pulled her hand up to take a big gulp and found that she had picked up Mockingbird instead of her coffee/rum cup. She’d probably had enough anyway. She looked at the tiny children’s desks and chairs, now piled like discarded toys in the corner to make room for the servers. She felt old and tired and beaten—and a little drunk, but not drunk enough to tell Doom what was going on yet. “Look, Doom I came here to—”
“Amanda. I want to be called Amanda if I’m just a computer jockey instead of the goddess of the books. Going to get me a button-down oxford shirt and a pair of nerd glasses and—”