you-gonna-do gesture.
Perry, the only child of Sally Allison, had worked at the library before, about three years ago. Overwhelming emotional problems and some substance abuse had put him in a hospital and then an outpatient home in Atlanta, where he’d flourished. After long thought and much negotiation, Sam had agreed to rehire Perry on a provisional basis.
Perry had terrified me before, but now I tended to think his time in the hospital and in the home had been time well spent. Perry, who was my age, seemed to be on an even keel and well in control of himself. Perry had dark hair, which he wore in a fashionable brush cut on top and rather longer on the sides and back. He had brown eyes, like his mother, and they were magnified by the aviator-style wire-rims he affected. Though he was weedy in build, Perry always looked good in the starched shirts and bright silk ties he regarded as his work uniform.
As we both shut our lockers and tried not to listen too obviously to Sam’s high voice, I realized that I’d accepted Perry with few reservations. At first it’d been hard, working with someone I used to be frightened of; I’d been tense every day. Now, I almost took him for granted.
“Who’d Lillian offend?” I whispered.
“Cile Vernon. You didn’t hear?”
I shook my head, pouring myself a cup of coffee from the staff pot. It had been Lillian’s morning to make it, and whatever her other faults, she made good coffee.
“Cile wanted to check out one of Anne Rice’s witch books, and Lillian told her she wouldn’t like them, they were full of witchcraft and sex, and Cile said she was sixty-two, she ought to be able to read whatever the hell she wanted.”
“She did not!”
“Yep, she did. And then she marched into Sam’s office and said for a librarian to comment on what a reader checked out was tantamount to censorship.”
“Sam waited all this time to talk to Lillian about it?”
“He had to go yesterday afternoon, after you got off work. He and Marva went to help Bess Burns pick out Jack’s coffin.”
“The kids haven’t gotten in yet?”
“They’d just gotten in, they were wiped out. I hear they’re furious someone killed Jack, but not exactly devastated with grief that he’s gone. I hear he’d been drinking a lot.”
I thought about the mooshy feelings I’d been having over Angel’s pregnancy, and I realized I was seeing the flip side of the coin. Children and parents didn’t always have close and loving relationships. Like marriages, the pairing of parents and offspring sometimes didn’t work out.
As I went to my desk in the children’s area, I reminded myself forcefully that bearing a healthy child didn’t mean you lived happily ever after.
Then I saw my aide Beverly, remembered this was the morning we worked together, and felt my day take another downturn. Fixing a pleasant smile on my face, I sat at my desk.
Beverly was shelving books and muttering to herself. This was one of Beverly’s most irritating habits, especially since I was almost sure she was saying unflattering things about me just low enough for me to miss. Despite my mental recital of her good qualities only the day before, I felt my heart sink at the prospect of trying to deal with the woman. That chip on her shoulder was the size of Stone Mountain, and everything you asked of her, everything you said or did, had to be filtered through Beverly’s resentment.
Feeling the familiar twinges of guilt, I recited my comforting mantra to myself: I was as glad to see black library patrons as white, I thought black kids were as cute as white kids, I worked as well with black librarians as white. Except Beverly Rillington.
Still, there were days when Beverly would just do her work and I’d just do mine, and I’d hoped fervently this would be one of those days.
But it wasn’t.
I could hear the book cart slamming into corners as she rolled it along from shelf to shelf. The muttering faded and grew stronger as she turned from the cart to the shelf, then back to the cart. I couldn’t quite make it out, of course, but I had a stronger-than-ever feeling it had to do with my faults.
I sighed and unlocked the desk to get out my scheduling notebook. I had two telephone message slips waiting on the blotter, and they both contained requests for special storytelling times for a couple of day-care centers. WeeOnes had asked for the time I’d slotted for another group; I searched the appointment book and made a note of two different times it would be convenient for them to come. Kid Kare Korner wanted to come in the afternoon; that would be feasible only if I stayed late or if Beverly were willing to do the story hour.
I sighed again. Getting to be a habit.
It would almost be better to work late without getting paid for it than to ask Beverly to do a story time. She violently resented being asked to do it, but she was offended if you didn’t ask. In a cowardly way, I put off making a decision, and began to work on the list of suggested books one of the kindergarten teachers had asked me to prepare. I’d gone over the list compiled by the previous children’s librarian and taken a dislike to a few of the books she routinely recommended, so when a new list had become necessary I’d found myself combing the shelves. I had a pile on the table in front of me I’d been reading, and I picked up the top one to whittle down my stack still further.
“Some of us have to come in here and really
I clenched my hands. I read another page. If the children’s area had been a real room, instead of a corner of the ground floor, I would have shut the door and had a discussion with Beverly. As it was, I could just hope to ignore her until I could talk to her away from the patrons. There weren’t many, but there were some; I saw Arthur Smith waiting impatiently at the checkout desk while Lillian put a pile of children’s videos into a bag, and Sally had come in and was talking to Perry in a hushed tone by the water fountain. A youngish man I didn’t know was browsing through the new books shelved close to the entrance, and it occurred to me that he’d been there an awfully long time.
To my surprise, Angel came in the double front doors, dressed quietly in blue jeans and a striped T-shirt. She was carrying a shopping bag from Marcus Hatfield and a gift-wrapped box. I didn’t recall Angel ever coming all the way inside the library before, and she was looking around now curiously, her head turning smoothly from side to side like a large cat surveying a new territory.
She spied me and came toward me just as the volcano that was Beverly Rillington erupted.
“Does just one of us work here?” Beverly asked venomously, approaching me from the left side.
“What?” I could not believe I was hearing her correctly, and her stance was even more threatening. Beverly was too close, her hands clenched, leaning forward, aggression in every line of her body. Beverly had never been pleasant, but she was obviously under a stress so extreme she had lost all judgment.
I was afraid that if I stood up Beverly would actually hit me, so I stayed in my chair at the low desk with the open book in one hand. Angel, who was approaching Beverly from the side, had quietly put down the bag and box. I suddenly knew I couldn’t bear it if Angel defended me here in the library, my own stomping ground.
“Beverly,” I said very quietly, aware that Perry and Sally had looked over curiously. Well, just about everyone was looking over. “Beverly, you are mad at me, but let’s not work it out here. We can go in the staff room or Sam’s office.”
“All you have to do is do your damn job,” Beverly hissed. “You’re sitting on your butt doing nothing, I’m doing all the work.”
There’s very little point carrying on a conversation with someone who is absolutely convinced you are wrong and bad. Instead of thinking of strategies I found myself speculating, not for the first time, on Beverly’s mental health. But I had to defuse the situation somehow; Angel’s face had gone blank and she was concentrating on Beverly as a target. If Beverly took one step closer to me, Angel would hit her. And then where would we be?
“Maybe you’re right,” I said. “Maybe you’ve been doing too much of the work and I haven’t been pulling my share. Why don’t we talk to Sam about it?”
“He’ll just side with you,” Beverly said, but there wasn’t quite as much repressed fury in her voice as before.
“I’ll call him right now,” I said, and lifted the phone and punched in the correct numbers.
“Sam,” I said briskly when he picked up the receiver, “Beverly and I are having some problems working
