Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
Phoebe
I can’t give Jay an honest answer. It will make him question my commitment to Foster’s vision, and he doesn’t need to. I’m all in.
I will do this job so well that in eighteen months when the Sutton’s chief curator retires, that board will have no grounds to doubt that I’m qualified and capable. This board will know that I am handing off the Museum of Serendipity in peak form to a candidate I will recruit myself, someone I trust to keep true to its mission. It’s a big factor in who I’m hiring over the next couple of weeks.
I answer Jay with a question. “Do you feel like I’m doing everything I can to fulfill Foster’s dream?”
“Yes.”
It makes me feel good that he doesn’t hesitate, not just because he’s a Martin, but because his opinion as a historian matters to me.
“I give everything I have because I’m not built to do less. I tend to overwhelm people with my enthusiasm, and that’s what I’m bringing to this, but I’m tempering it with the feedback I got while working at the Sutton. ”
“I’ve seen that,” he says. “It’s obvious you care about getting this right.”
“I am a professional. It bothers me that Catherine is starting on this board already doubting me.” I tap the almost-forgotten letter. “She takes me about as seriously as Dear Heart is taking Smitten Kitten. He talks like he thinks marrying him and getting a nice house and a nanny should be the height of her ambitions.”
It bothers me because it echoes Catherine’s ugly insinuation about “connections” last night. It’s the reason the heat and noise have all gotten to me. They mirror how her words make me feel, a hot, buzzing swarm of shame agitating inside me. It’s unfair, but when I feel the pressure of it building inside my sinus cavity, I refuse to let it progress to tears.
“I don’t get her,” I say. “Weren’t boomers supposed to crawl so our parents could walk and our generation could run? Catherine keeps tripping me instead of helping me.”
“I don’t have any answers for you, but I promise not to let her opinions affect my own.”
I sigh. “Sorry. I’m getting whiny.”
“You’re not whining. Thank you for telling me all that.”
“I hope you believe that it’s only fuel for me to work harder. I’m giving Foster my best.”
His eyes soften. “I know.”
“Can we change the subject? Like to the fat stack of clues in this new letter?”
He jumps up. “Yeah, there were. Let me grab my laptop. I might have an idea. MIT.”
“MIT?” I twist to watch him as he grabs his laptop and vaults over the back of the sofa to land in his spot again. I really have to learn that trick.
“Yeah, you were mentioning the gender ratio. But it made me think.” He starts typing. “MIT aeronautics … what was the name of the professor he mentioned? ”
I grab the letter and scan it. “Bryson.”
“Bryson. Enter.” His eyes scan the screen for a couple of seconds and then he grins. “We got him. We’ve been assuming Dear Heart was at Harvard, but Arthur Bryson was a visiting professor of aeronautics at MIT in 1966, and just to make sure”—he types and scans—“he was not teaching at Harvard at the same time.”
I like that he says we . Only history nerds get as invested in another historian’s puzzles as they do their own. “The Back Bay address still makes sense.” Rich kids who attend any one of several different Boston colleges still like to live there. I pull out my laptop and open my own search. “He mentions the Miss Serendipity pageant, which doesn’t appear to run anymore. Oh, I got a link to a news article saying the pageant is closing down after fifty years.” I skim it. “That was 1998, but it does mention that it happened annually in March, which means we could look up the?—”
“Miss Serendipity pageant in a March 1966 newspaper. On it.” After a couple of minutes, he says, “No dice. The current paper is the Serendipity Star , but it wasn’t around back then, and they only started putting articles online in the mid-nineties. The major city newspaper before that was the Springs Gazette , but it closed in 1982, and its issues aren’t digitized.”
“I bet they’ll still have been archived. I’ll stop at the library and ask Sissy if they indexed issues of the Gazette when it ran.”
“Good call. If we luck out, we might get a list of every contestant in that year’s pageant.”
“I also looked up the schools where Smitten Kitten might have taught. Six are still open now. I wonder if elementary schools had yearbooks, and if these schools would have kept them.”
“Even if they didn’t have yearbooks, I bet they have class photos. You know the ones with the teacher’s name, the grade, and the year of the photo?”
“Oh, yeah. That would make sense. I’ll ask Sissy if she knows of an easy way to find those because otherwise, schools are closed for the summer, so I don’t know if anyone is staffing the offices right now.”
“I love this part of researching.” Jay closes his laptop and smiles. “It’s like when you hear dripping from somewhere, and you’re looking, but you can’t find it. And then it increases to a trickle, and you can kind of tell where the sound is coming from. And then you realize it’s a faucet and it starts running full blast, and …” He trails off and pinches his bottom lip. “Wait, that’s not a good analogy because you’d fix the leak.”
I know exactly the feeling he’s talking about though. “Or maybe you’re like, yes, I am so thirsty, and you open up that faucet full blast.”
He snaps and points at me. “That. That’s what I love.”
“We’re still at a trickle here, but it feels like we’re getting close to the faucet.”
“I agree. Will you read the letter one more time? I want to make sure we aren’t missing any other clues.”
I do, and when I finish, I look up. “I think we’ve got them all so far.”
“I agree.” He looks over at the table and back to me. “If you want to hang out here to work, I don’t mind. The sofa can be your office.”
“Oh, no, it’s fine. I have to make phone calls, and I don’t want to disturb you.”
He slips his hand into his pocket and produces AirPods. “I have a great white noise app. My food game is weak, but if you can overlook that, you can work here and stay onsite in case you want to check on the crew or in case they have questions for you. ”
That’s a pretty good reason. “You sure I won’t distract you?”
He gives me a half smile. “I can get my work done.”
“Then I accept.”
“Cool.” He’s still watching me with that half smile.
“So when do you go to your office?”
“Now.” He stands. “Holler if you need anything, although I only have granola and frozen burritos.”
I expect it to be hard to work with Jay in the room, but it’s not. Within a couple of minutes, he’s typing, the soft tap of keys fast enough to tell me he’s in a groove.
I settle into the sofa and send emails scheduling my top three candidates for the curator and archivist spots. When those are done, I have an email waiting from Professor Martinez in his capacity as the board secretary with a copy of the minutes from the meeting. That’s fast, but maybe it’s the kind of thing you can get to when you’re retired.
I skim through, looking for the summary of my back and forth with Catherine. The minutes say only, “The board expressed satisfaction with the director’s presentation and vision with the exception of one trustee. She cited reservations for discussion at the next meeting.”
Her “reservations” are an arbitrary bar for me to clear to reach a standard of behavior she’ll immediately raise again, but I don’t have a choice: I have to clear the bar every time.
When I’m in problem-solving mode, the hardest problems require a spreadsheet. Giving every piece of a problem its own cell on the sheet, breaking it down into smaller pieces in more boxes, makes big things feel manageable. The step-at-a-time, day-at-a-time theory.
I open a new one and label it “Catherine Thinks I’m Wrong for the Job.” I start with her objections. Column A, line one gets THINKS I’M UNPROFESSIONAL. Beneath it I list the evidence, stated and inferred. The second column is her next objection. THINKS MY MUSEUM PLAN IS WRONG DIRECTION. In goes the evidence as I type “facts, no soul” beneath that.
I scoff. It has got to be the least true thing anyone has ever said about me.
From there, I keep working the problem, and after several minutes, I have five columns, some going at least eight lines deep. That’s bad. It represents a metric ton of disdain from a woman in a position to do something about it.
But … I lean back against the sofa and study the spreadsheet as an idea simmers. I add a new tab, labeling it “Solutions.” Two of Catherine’s issues are tightly connected, and I copy them over, giving each its own column. NO SOUL and VITAL PART OF COMMUNITY.
Catherine says she loves Serendipity Springs. We all know Foster did. And she claims I don’t.
She’s right. This is my third week here. I like it, but that’s not enough time to fall in love with a place when I’m working so much.
I start filling in the columns with ideas for falling in love with the city and ideas for finding out what would make the museum feel vital to its residents.
It doesn’t take long, maybe ten minutes, to dump every idea I have into those columns, and I know I’m onto something when I’m done. I may not ever be able to convince Catherine to believe my words, but I can leave her without any room to doubt my actions.
“Jay?” I call, turning toward him. “Do you have a printer here?”
He helps me connect to it, and a couple minutes later, I’m back on the sofa with a map of the city printed over four pages. I dig into my bag for a highlighter and go to work, dividing it into even squares.
“What are you doing?” Jay asks from over my shoulder. I jump and squeak, not realizing he has leaned over the sofa to watch.
“Catherine is right that I approached this academically. That has its place, but it also has its limits. I’m putting myself in a crash course to become a Serendipity Springs fangirl, one grid square at a time.” I’m excited for the adventure. It’s going to be a lot of work, but I’m also pretty sure it will be fun.
Catherine acts like my enthusiasm makes me unprofessional, but in museum work, passion is essential. For the subject, whether it’s natural history or modern art. For the public, so you can try and fail and try again to find the best ways to interpret it for them.
“Coming here as an outsider has its pros and cons, but a big pro is that I have an objective perspective that allows me to notice and question things a local would take for granted. I’ve divided the city into a sixteen-square grid, and my goal is to spend a week on each section, getting to know it as well as I can.”
I shift so he can see it better. “I’ll drive or walk every street, pop into every store, sit in every park and people watch, patronize every library branch, peek into every church service, go to every city council meeting, and observe any other activity I can think of that gives me a sense of what makes the heart of Serendipity Springs beat.”
Jay hasn’t said anything, and I glance back at him. He’s staring at the map, and his expression is somewhere between serious and dazed. “You don’t think this is a good idea? You’re wrong. It is.”
He doesn’t answer. Instead, he walks into the kitchen and pulls a glass from a cabinet. He fills it with water before he drinks it over the sink, staring out of the window.
“Jay?”
He holds up a hand, finishing off the water. He sets the glass on the counter and braces his hands on the sink, keeping his eyes on the view. “I’m okay.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I had to deal with a sudden urge to push you up against a wall and make out with you.”
Oh.
Oh .
He turns toward me, one corner of his mouth turned up. “We’re good. Go back to work.”
Are we good? I slowly turn to my map. Maybe he’s fine now, but chaos overloads my system again, except it’s not construction noise and the weather. It’s the pounding of my own pulse drowning out thought, and the heat is internal, coming from my nervous system or whatever makes it feel like currents of electricity are humming through my body.
Then something clicks, and I twist around. “Hold on. You got the urge to make out with me because I made a map and a plan?”
“You’re forgetting the against the wall part. I like that part a lot.”
I try to swallow but my mouth is dry, and that smile plays around his lips like he knows it. He’s enjoying knocking me off balance. I narrow my eyes. “Jameson Paul Martin, you are in violation of Friend Code Number One. No making out with your friend.”
“Did you see me walk away to get a drink of water so I wouldn’t violate Friend Code?”
“Fine, we’ll call it an infraction, not a violation, but saying you want to make out with your friend is not in keeping with the code.”
“My bad.” He strolls back to his seat at the table.
I push up to my knees so I can face him over the sofa without the awkward twisting. “Hey, friend , we need to go over the rules again. ”
He opens his laptop but keeps his eyes on me. “If you want. I can see that you really need them to keep yourself in check.”
He’s not wrong, I realize, but it only irritates me more. “I do not.”
“Cool, so can we get back to work? Your obsession with making out with me is slowing me down.”
“Ugh.” I flounce down in my seat. I dart a glance at the wall beside the fireplace. It’s bare. Is he thinking that one, or …
No way will I get any work done around him now that he’s planted that picture in my head.
I gather up my map and close my laptop.
“You’re leaving?” he asks.
In answer, I stand and slide it all into my workbag.
“Aw, come on, Phoebe. I’m sorry I messed with you. I didn’t mean to chase you off. Stay. I’ll behave.”
Doubtful. But the bigger issue is that I’m not sure I will.
“You didn’t chase me off. I do better when I change tasks often. I’m going by the main library to see if they can tell me where to find the old newspaper archives.”
“You keep saying ‘I,’ but you made it clear we’re friends.”
I don’t miss the emphasis he puts on the last word, like he’s almost wrapped a laugh around it. “Yeah …?”
“A friend would never leave me out of the hunt for something in a library. Lignin, Phoebe. You would hog all the lignin?”
That makes me flat out laugh. Lignin is the old book smell that all basic nerds love, but only true nerds know its name. “Fine. If I find the newspapers, I’ll text you to help.”
He fist pumps. “Also, I checked out Dear Heart’s reference in his last letter to the club and those girls crashing their table.”
“Guess we can rule out the Harvard Club. This is one of the gaps in my Boston knowledge, but what kind of club are they talking about here? A country club?”
“Possibly. Yacht club is a good guess.” He tilts his head, like he’s seeing me in a literal new light. “You’re not from Boston?”
I shake my head. “Lived in Boston for college, but I grew up in Florida.”
“I assumed you were from Massachusetts, but I probably should have realized you didn’t grow up here.”
“What does that mean?” I ask, offended and letting every ounce of it show in my tone.
“Nothing bad. Bostonians can be arrogant about our history but take it for granted at the same time too. But you are genuinely excited or at least curious about everything you find in the big house.”
“So now you’re calling me unsophisticated?” He groans, and I laugh. “I’m teasing. I do get excited.”
“That’s why I should have known. The only thing Bostonians get excited about is sports. Old buildings. Pfft. We’re lousy with them.” He says it in an exaggerated Boston accent.
“Give me all the old buildings. All the old papers, art, textiles. I want it all, and I’m going to go get it, starting with musty newspapers.”
“I’m so jealous.”
I scoot myself out of the cottage with a hasty goodbye because I know he means it, and I suddenly understand his push-you-up-against-a-wall-and-make-out feeling.