“And he’s the only sane one who’ll listen to your stories of how the political machine and the flying saucers exiled you here.”
“It’s the truth, and you and he know it. I was the best city councilman Maddington ever saw until I went up against them. They bribed me with enough money to buy this place, told me as long as I never sobered up enough to stick my nose back into civic affairs—ha! Now that’s a crazy term for you—I could stay alive.” He cocked his head to one side and studied her. “Not sure that letting the town librarian in won’t violate my parole.”
Joy appeared behind Serenity. “I’ll vouch for her.”
Jerry beamed at her. “Hey, wondered where you’ve been. Haven’t seen you lately.”
Joy pushed the door open all the way and pointed a finger at Serenity. “She’s keeping me too busy. Tell the Association of Obsolete Boys and Girls in the back that I sent my regrets, and clear out a table in the front for Serenity and me.”
Serenity followed her in. A couple of faces peered out from the perennial twilight of the back room. Joy flipped a light switch and flooded the dirty dining room in the front with lights.
Jerry blinked. “Jesus F., Joy. Turn all the lights on and people will come in and demand service.”
She snorted. “What’d you say the motto for the Obsolete Boys and Girls was? ‘Anybody desperate enough to be here deserves to be here.’ Wouldn’t worry about anybody respectable falling in here.”
“I won’t.” He reached to lock the door.
“Leave that open,” said Joy. “In a couple of minutes, a beautiful young woman’s going to walk through that door. Don’t stop her, and don’t stare. Bring us a bottle of rum—unopened—and three glasses—preferably washed. And a pile of wings. I know you eat them yourself so I can trust them.”
“Who’s paying for all this?”
Joy nodded at Serenity. “She is. Make the receipt look like it’s books. Maybe Island Happiness by Alfred P. Myers, and How to Cross the Road by Chicken Little.”
“Bossy woman.”
“You got it.”
He rolled his eyes.
“Like I said about bossy women.”
Joy picked up a rag from one table and wiped the dust off a booth with a framed picture of William Bonney before she motioned Serenity in.
“Sure we want a booth with a baby-faced killer?” Serenity said.
Joy looked at the picture of a boy with dead eyes and a gun dangling from his hip. “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” Then she added. “And don’t let Joe find out.”
Serenity slid in across from her. “I’m doing my best to keep him off track. Remember when a big day for us was deciding whether Fifty Shades of Gray belonged in best sellers or pornography or the trash?”
“Yeah.”
The door opened and Doom came in. A couple of old men stuck their heads out of the back and stared.
“Back,” Joy said to them.
They disappeared.
Doom slid in and Jerry set down rum and glasses, and a plate of red-orange wings. He paused for a minute to stare at Doom.
“You, too,” Joy said.
Serenity pulled a notebook out of her bag and opened it on the rough wooden tabletop. “Let’s get down to business. I’m sure we’ve all got other things to do.”
She paused and looked at Doom. Looked at her for the dead eyes of Billy the Kid. Looked at her to see if she was scared. Or guilty.
All she saw was eagerness.
What the hell is wrong with you, child?
She put her head down and focused on the page.
“We—I—shot off my mouth and got us this seven-story monster. I keep acting like I have it under control and that we desperately need every square foot. But I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.”
Joy cracked open the bottle. “One floor of books, six floors of bars.”
“Yeah. Believe me, I thought about it. Even I don’t know if we need all of it.”
Joy poured a glass, slid it across the table. Serenity took that long first taste that usually brought back white sand and hot sun and no worries.
Not tonight. “If we don’t have a real need for every square foot, every librarian who ever asks for an extra dollar for a new table will have a harder struggle when people say, ‘just another boondoggle like Maddington.’ We have more money pouring in than we’ve ever imagined. But if every dollar we spend doesn’t bring two dollars back to Maddington, it will all be a waste.”
Doom said, “I claim one floor. My brother makes a living writing books that help people start micro-businesses. How to start a business on a hundred dollars, that sort of thing. How to set goals. How to navigate bureaucracy, and banking, and a million other things. I asked him what he’s going to do when he runs out of books and he laughed. Said ‘Once you get that one great idea that can change the world, there are still a million ways to fail, and nobody to help you.’ He said he could write a book a year and still be writing when he’s a hundred. What you need, he said, is not books but communities.
“My brother means business incubators and help centers, but I want more. One place. A place where guys with ideas can come in and say, ‘I’ve got an idea’ or ‘I’ve got a problem’ and talk to people who know how to connect to knowledge. Call it ‘Maddington Works.’ The businesses we grow will pay for all seven floors by themselves.”
Serenity scratched in the notebook. “You got it. Part of that floor’s also going to be a jobs center. We spend enough time helping people write resumes and find jobs as it is. Now we’re going to do it right, not separate from the businesses, but right there, on the same floor, people looking for jobs and businesses looking for people. Next.”
Joy said, “Probably one whole floor of day care by day, with shelter for the well-behaved by night.”
“Some people will say we’ve already got day care centers and homeless shelters,” Serenity said.
“Yet there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of women in Maddington who can’t hold onto jobs because they don’t have day care they can count on and afford.” Joy nodded at Doom. “And start-ups going out of business because they can’t find people like these women.”
“People already drop kids off at the library for hours at a time and hope that we and the kids don’t notice,” Doom said,
Joy waved a wing at Serenity. “We’re already doing the job. But because we’re so hit-and-miss at it, women can’t count on it, and can’t hold onto jobs. And, because nobody recognizes it as our job, we don’t have the funding or skills to do it right. I bet that, if we do this right, the money saved by women having jobs, and businesses having workers they can count on, will pay for this one.”
Serenity looked at Joy. “Okay, but how do you justify a shelter? I know we’re doing that now, but how come we need to go big?”
“Because the current shelters have gaps,” Joy said. “They have to handle the mentally ill, and those with drug problems. They can’t really help people who have just fallen into the life and need help getting out. But we can. We’ll have the resources. By night, our folks will have a bed. By day, they’ll have educational opportunities—something we need to talk about next—and the best connections to jobs in the state of Alabama. Can you imagine how much the city and the state would save for every person who moves out of homelessness and becomes a tax-paying citizen?”
“All right. That’s in.”
Doom said, “You already hit the next one: boosting education. Portland did a study last year and found that improving a student’s SAT score one hundred points gave them an average of eight thousand dollars more in scholarship money. We can do that for every student in Maddington. And that can make parents willing to pay more for houses here, and make businesses fight to locate here.”