Long silence. “Don’t do this to me. Four o’clock. My boss will be knocking on my door at four-fifteen for confirmation that I’ve cut you off.”
Serenity took a deep breath. “But he would rather have money. What if I could promise you that the bill will be paid in full by Friday?”
There was a long pause. “I’d laugh at anybody else who said that, Serenity. But you and Joe are the only people left in town famous for being absolutely honest. If I guarantee my boss that payment is coming, then my ass is on the line. And yours. If you don’t come through, I’ll be in trouble and nobody will let the library slide on anything ever again—and the library always needs to slide on almost everything. You are absolutely, positively sure you can do this?”
Serenity looked at the screen and saw the string of zeroes that represented her projected income. Then she looked at the rat, who was exploring his rum. He looked up at her and she took his head bob as encouragement. Maybe karma really could work by Friday. She downed the rest of the rum.
“I absolutely, positively promise.”
She didn’t feel illuminated.
three
little women
TWO SKINNY WOMEN DRIFTED into Serenity’s office, just as they did every day at eleven o’clock.
Doom—nobody called her Amanda with a last name like that—was a model-thin young black woman with coffee-and-cream skin, and a taste for tight superhero t-shirts and tighter jeans. Joy Quexnt—nobody called her Quexnt with a last name like that—was as old as Doom was young, and skinny even compared to Doom. She peeled off a white oxford shirt. The Grateful Dead tank top underneath showed her skeletal white arms covered with blue tattoos.
“Remember,” Serenity said. “Keep the shirt on out on the floor. Our city council doesn’t like tattoos.”
Joy gave her a terse nod. Doom tried to sit on the edge of a crooked wooden chair that was in the corner by the door. The chair cracked and settled half way down and Doom jumped and balanced half on the chair and half in the air. Joy ignored this and slumped into the one functional visitor’s chair and studied a fresh patch of blue ink on one of her skinny arms.
“This place is a dump,” she said. “Broke chairs, broke toilets, a headless tin man in the playground from where kids were throwing rocks at him. And slow Wi-Fi.” Her tattoo seemed to pass some test and she dropped her arm into her lap, right next to her other white-skinned blue-tattooed snake of an arm.
Serenity watched Doom’s chair to see if it was done adjusting itself. Satisfied that it was as stable as anything else in the room, she sat relaxed in her chair and sipped her Myers’s. “What it is, is the best we can do with what we’ve got. This city needs us and our books, whether it knows it or not. Until the city figures that out, we’ve got to keep the public areas working as best we can. That includes rotating the broken-down furniture from the public spaces into the offices and being careful how we sit.”
The rat scampered out from his home in the books, took a long leap onto Serenity’s desk, climbed up on her coffee cup, and took a long whiz there. All three of the humans stared at the desk, as horrified as the rat was unconcerned.
The big, brown-and-gray-and-dirt colored Alabama Roof Rat (Rattus Alexandrinus Geoffroy—you could find his picture in 598.097, Peterson Field Guide to Mammals of North America, on Shelf 37) stared back at them and seemed to grin.
Doom snatched a book from the nearest stack and hurled herself straight up in the air, the book poised over her head like a sword of vengeance from the graphic novels she lived for. She screamed at the top of her arc then crashed down to smash the rat and the cup. Brown liquid, rat pee, and pottery shards exploded like a small mushroom cloud and settled all over the messy stacks of papers, cards, books, CDs, pink message forms, invoices, yellow post-its and leftover food on Serenity’s desk. In the end, the rat lay motionless on his back with his feet sticking up in the air.
“Jesus Christ, Doom.” Serenity dug a handful of paper napkins from yesterday’s half-eaten Wendy’s lunch and wiped down a now-stained book. Then she held it up and shook it at Doom. “Look at this. That’s a review copy from a local author. What am I supposed to tell Mike?”
Joy glanced up sideways from studying her fingernails and said, “Tell him the rat gave him his first honest review.”
Serenity glared and sopped up liquid.
“Ms. Hammer, he was peeing in your coffee,” said Doom. “He’s a rat.”
“He was our rat. We protect things around here.” In the middle of the mess, she poked the dead rat. The rat flipped over, hissed at her, and ran back into the clutter.
“Thank God Faulkner’s all right,” Serenity said.
Doom said, “He’s got a name?”
“He’s good luck, and we need all the luck we can get.”
Doom wasn’t convinced. Serenity looked at her. “I let you keep your good-luck spike. I’ve got my rat.”
“My spike is an actual library spike, a sharp hand-made nail from Colonial times set in a wooden base. It’s from America’s original library in Philadelphia, probably used by Ben Franklin himself to keep track of important papers by spiking them. That’s where the phrase, ‘spiking a story’ came from with newspapers—”
“Yeah, I know, I’ve heard it,” Serenity said. “I know spikes like yours used to be important in libraries and newspapers. But now they’re just a hazard to children—and others. I told you, you could keep it, as long as it stays high on the shelf behind your desk, where it can’t hurt anybody.”
“It does. I use it to keep notes on great chapters from my murder book club. I read about a great way to kill somebody and bam! It goes on the spike.”
“Jesus,” Serenity rolled her eyes. “This is supposed to be a library, not murder for hire.”
“What it is, is a dump,” said Joy.
“You said that already.” Serenity stuffed the wet napkins in the trash and sat down. “Let’s get back to budgets.” She pulled up a coffee-and-rat-pee-stained sheet and squinted at it.
“Rat should have peed on the budgets,” said Joy.
Serenity shook liquid off the paper. “Thanks to Doom, he did. Like everybody else.”
“How bad?” said Doom.
“Bad. The council is divided between our backers, who think that, since we’re already one of the best small libraries in the South—” Joy snorted and Serenity glared at her “—we don’t need more money.”
“And then there is the Evil One,” said Doom.
“Councilman Bentley’s not evil,” said Serenity. “He just wants to zero out the library budget and give everyone in the city Amazon discounts.”
“Evil.”
Serenity stared at the numbers floating on the brown-stained paper. “Maybe. He couldn’t convince the council to de-fund us completely, but he got them to slash our budget to the bone for next year. And they’ve given us nothing for right now. Even if I can find a way to pay our bills over the next few days, I don’t see a way out long term. Either we cut back on buying books or cut salaries. Or close. And that’s a real possibility if we don’t do something.”
Doom jumped up and clenched her fist in the air. “We don’t cut books. Books are our power.”
Serenity said, “Well, look around you. We’re the only three full-time paid employees left. We’re each doing two jobs, and the volunteers and part-time kids out there are doing more than their share. We are barely keeping up with getting books to people as it is. And it’s getting worse. Because we’re so short-handed, we get more complaints. If we can’t do something soon, we won’t have time to do anything but handle complaints.”
Doom stabbed a set of dog-eared blueprints that covered one wall. “That’s why we’ve got to push hard for a better future. What does their precious budget say about the library expansion we all know this city needs?”