Not going to work today. Not yet.
“Tell him six-thirty. Maybe seven.”
“You aren’t going to tell him yourself?”
“You tell him. I’ve got work to do.”
“But he’s standing there waiting with those kissable lips and—”
Well, that answered the question of whether “dreamy” was back in the teen lexicon, or whether this girl spent too much time in the romance stacks.
“You tell him. And stay away from those lips.”
The girl left and Serenity put her head down on Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and prayed the inspiration in it would seep through. You can’t win, but you can be brave.
Inspiring. But not a how-to book.
She wondered what Hemingway himself might do. She pulled her head up and looked for her cup. You can’t win, but you can stay drunk. She fished the bottle out and held it over her mug.
Joy slunk into Serenity’s office and dropped herself into the good chair.
“Some show this morning,” she said. “Got any more of that?”
Serenity poured, passed the mug to Joy, and found the stay calm and ask a librarian mug and filled that one for herself.
“Best part of my day,” Serenity said, “was when you came in to work early at seven a.m. and stumbled into the middle of Doom’s play. You said, ‘What the hell?’ and they added you and your line to the play.”
Joy turned her right arm sideways, almost spilling her rum. “Yeah. Now I’ve got to get up on a stage tonight, deliver the line I’ll probably have carved on my gravestone, and walk off into the night.” She studied the arm. “You think I ought to get Sneaky Pete to touch up the red on this before tonight?”
“I think you’ll stand out just fine without a touch up. It still raises the question: what the hell were you doing here at that time of morning? You always bitch when I ask you to open at nine.”
“You know how, in a really big rock anthem, there’s always that big chord? That barely-restrained thrum-thrum-thrum that sets your soul on fire, tells you something big is coming?”
Serenity took a sip of her rum. “You have a soul?”
“Yeah. Tattooed on my ass. Want to see? Anyway, I never felt that when I was coming to work in a library. MAD, on the other hand…”
Serenity said, “Joy, I don’t know how much longer we can—”
“Besides,” said Joy. “I have an idea for tonight. You’ll have to get here early tomorrow morning if you want to see it.”
Serenity nodded slowly. “You know, you might want to run ideas by the head librarian first.”
“Not after yesterday. Our MAD. My MAD. Your job is to keep it running for all of us. Reminds me, I need to borrow a pickup truck tonight.”
Serenity raised her eyebrows. “I don’t suppose I should ask you why?”
“No.”
“Okay. That I can do. Talk to the guys at the glass shop on Main Street. We give them enough business with kids knocking out windows, they ought to be glad to loan you one.”
“Thanks. May need more for this project eventually.”
“Good luck,” Serenity said, “I lay awake most of the night dreaming of ways to come up with more. Look, this was a one-time kind of thing. Now that I’ve shot my mouth off, I don’t know how to keep this going. We may be back to being just Maddington Public Library soon. If that.”
“Hell, no. Hell, no. Did you see the look on Doom’s face this morning? This isn’t just her job anymore; this is her life. Hell, you’ve even got a seventy-year-old burnout dreaming of what she’s going to do with her MAD, now that you’ve promised her one.”
“Joy, I have no idea where to look for what we need. Other than the truck.”
Joy said, “But we know you can work wonders. We’ve seen you—” She stopped to stare at Serenity. “Serenity, I’m sorry.”
Serenity dabbed at her watering eyes and forced a laugh. “No, I’m sorry. No big deal. I just can’t do all this.” She raised her mug and Joy reached out and pushed the cup down. “Enough of that. You need this now. You need MAD as much as we all do.”
Even the effort of pushing Joy’s hand away seemed too much so she sat there and dissolved.
“It’s just…”
Joy kept her hand on hers. “I know. Let it out.”
After a few minutes, Serenity said, “I made so many promises to all of you. To myself. And I can’t do it. I’ve got to find a way to put the money back. Apologize to Joe. Go back to being…”
“Don’t worry about us,” said Joy. “We were asking a lot of you, and we shouldn’t have. I don’t know where you came up with the money you have so far. Or the inspiration.”
“I really wanted us to be something more. All of us.”
“We can still do a little. Maybe we can’t do everything we wanted, but we can do more than we settled for. We can continue to do every little thing we can, as long as we can, until they stop us. Even if it’s not for long. You changed us with just that little sliver of a dream. Made us MAD women, if only for a day or so.”
The tears were gone. “I’m glad you had that day. Glad we all had it. But without money it’s going to die, and I can’t get the money.
“I’m just a lie-brarian, after all.”
twenty-two
beware of rabbits bearing gifts
EVERYTHING ABOUT JOE made her mad. Serenity stood in the doorway of The Café and watched the waitress swooning and chatting up Joe while he sat at their favorite table, smiling back sleepy-eyed. She wanted to march over and tell the waitress that those aw-shucks looks in that big man’s body made promises that they couldn’t keep. Well, she guessed they kept those promises. Maybe she didn’t want to say that to the waitress, but she did have things to say to Joe.
“You!” She bore down on his table. Joe looked up at the sound of her voice, his soft brown eyes coming into view from under his hat and his welcoming smile blooming before he had a chance to take in her expression.
“You!” She stopped in front of him and put her hands on her hips. “You are a fraud. Pretend to invite a girl to dinner and you bring her to a jail.”
Joe’s smile withered. “It’s one of your favorite places,” he said. “Sure, it’s a café built in the old city jail, but you always thought that was cool and—”
“It is still a jail. And I don’t like that you intentionally brought me to a place where people used to get tortured by people like you until they told their secrets, and then you people locked them up for having secrets.”
“Do you want to go somewhere else?” asked Joe.
Serenity pulled out a chair and sat down. “No,” she said, “this is fine.”
She looked up at the waitress, who was still standing there with a fixed smile on her mouth and her eyes wide.
“Let me have Charisse’s Quinoa Salad. And unsweet tea.”
Joe said, “No rabbit food for me. Cops eat cheeseburgers. Rare.”
“Yes, sir.”
When the waitress left, Joe put his hand over hers. Surrounding, warming, protecting. It was a safe place for her hand to be. She looked at their hands while Joe studied her expression and seemed to wonder if he had stepped on another land mine today.
But she didn’t pull away.
“You know,” she said, looking at their hands. “That’s kind of what we are. What we’ve always been. The lawman and the lawman’s wife. The fierce moral code and the little woman wrapped up in it. Dodge City.”
He smiled, a bit weakly, and she kept her eyes averted, studying their hands, not wanting to be charmed by his smile right now.