22. A New Bestie
A NEW BESTIE
A whole Friday off for the holiday had been wonderful, but this morning Jonathan needed the fresh air in the library courtyard to clear his head, so he’d volunteered to refresh the outside display case with the “Back to the Future” theme.
Last night they’d played yard games with Hank and Emma after eating ribs that had caused Jonathan to reconsider his hierarchy of Connor’s culinary achievements. Slow-cooked meat might possibly rank alongside baked goods.
The croquet had quickly become violent, and Emma had warned Jonathan to stay at least ten feet away from Hank and Connor when they swung a mallet.
He and Emma had posed all over the yard, Emma in a red and white floral sundress and Jonathan in white linen pants and a loosely woven pale blue shirt unbuttoned well past his clavicle, but their men had been too busy sending off each other’s balls to notice.
They’d resorted to selfies with their mallets and the elderflower spritzes Jonathan had made.
Emma had an easy laugh. She and Lily might get along well.
Wait.
Was he considering blending his friend circle with Connor’s crowd, letting his life merge with someone else’s in a way that could turn out worse than all-over foundation?
Not acceptable.
Lily was his friend, only his. Sharing was not wise, not wise at all.
Work wasn’t a place for drama, or at least it shouldn’t be, so he focused on balancing on the stool and reaching above his head to attach the retro geometric-print background paper to the display board.
The pressure of squeezing the staple gun handle and the chunk-chunk of staples finding their places settled into a rhythm.
He stepped down to look at his work.
There was a gap.
In the lower left, brown backing board showed between the edge of the paper and the display case’s frame where he hadn’t aligned the design correctly all the way down the frame, or maybe weather had warped the display case, or he’d lost focus.
Fuck fuckity fuck. He’d have to redo it.
This was an easy task, people did it every day, certainly elementary teachers like Connor did it all the time, and he’d made a glaring mistake. Everyone would see how sloppy he was. He was always sloppy.
It had to go. He must fix it.
He jumped on the stool and scrabbled at the first staple he could reach. His lips were mashed so tightly together, he had to breathe through his nose, and he blinked to clear his eyes.
“Shit!” A staple stabbed under his fingernail, and double fuck on a cone, it hurt like hell.
He lifted the finger to his mouth and froze at seeing a drop of blood.
Gross. And grosser to put this in his mouth.
He didn’t know what to do. He needed to fix this, but he couldn’t get blood on things, and this was gross.
And messed up. He’d messed up. He was messed up.
He closed his eyes to block out the zigzagging design that didn’t meet the edge. He was going to stop, that’s what he would do. The stool wobbled under his feet, and he held still using his core to balance.
Find his spine.
Stay upright.
The memory of how Connor liked it when Jonathan wrapped fingers around his wrist made him reach for his own and squeeze. Thumb to his pulse, four fingers digging on the back of his hand.
He breathed.
This didn’t feel bad. His wrist was strong. He could be strong too.
He opened his eyes and looked again, without loosening his grip.
The display wasn’t terrible, and removing the staples would cause more trouble and more damage to the paper than the slight misalignment, those were facts he could remind himself of.
Other fact: Strangers judging him wasn’t an outcome that was actually going to happen. Patrons weren’t going to care about a misaligned display backing. He could put a border edging, or he could just leave it as is.
No one else would notice.
Maybe, more like probably edging into definitely, it was time to find a local therapist. He could use some scheduled maintenance.
He called upon his lifetime of training in smooth motions to descend from the stool and set the staple gun carefully into the supply box, then picked up the replica DVD cases Lily had made for Goonies, Back to the Future, The Color Purple, and Ladyhawke, all hits from 1985.
Even a city with twenty thousand students who consumed everything on their phones also had thousands of residents who used physical media to watch Schwarzenegger’s Greatest Hits and obscure European films, so yes, the library had DVDs.
He stepped far enough back to get the full sense of the display, and also to blur the exposed corner of the board. The display looked colorful.
If he could do safe, seen and stable for Connor, maybe he should try it for himself, too. Be a good dom to himself, was that a thing?
You should be proud. You’ve done well.
Self-praise was agonizing, but at least no one else could hear it.
The bulletin board’s teaser about the Titanic discovery would draw kids inside to the shelf full of shipwreck themed books that he anticipated would be emptied before closing. The little ghouls loved everything Titanic.
A child, maybe five or six, on a bedazzled bicycle skidded around the corner and almost collided with Jonathan’s supply cart.
“Oh! Are you alright?” Jonathan leaned forward.
“Jackson! Stop! Please, stop!” A woman trotted into the library’s front plaza, chest heaving as she caught up with the kid. “Sorry. He just learned to ride.”
“That’s great. I’m glad there’s a new cyclist in town.
” He could people with the best peoplers when he was at work, and tiny children on two wheels were adorable.
The bike was already abandoned along the low rock wall that provided outdoor seating and created a raised planting bed in front of the large windows.
Jackson was hopping up and down and flapping his arms as if he was a bird.
Lily had story time today, darn it. It would be fun to read Eric Carle’s Very Busy Spider with this kid in the audience.
After watching them disappear inside, he felt lighter as he looked back over the plaza.
On a beautiful summer day right before story time, it almost resembled a Richard Scary parking garage, complete with two over-sized red wagons that brought children from a day care, Jackson’s bedazzled bike, a mini-scooter, and a range of strollers.
All it needed was Lowly Worm’s apple car, or a replica of Goldbug’s car hiding in the raised planter. Maybe Connor could make one in his secret craft lair.
Jonathan held his arms wide. Should he twirl? One rotation, no more?
Three weeks of dating and he was dangerously close to status change: Snow White.
“Don’t touch that, it’s icky.” The woman’s voice was outside the courtyard, and immediately after Jonathan heard those words, she entered with one child perched on her hip, pulling a kid wearing a blue and white sailor dress and glittery pink cowboy boots. “We don’t play with garbage.”
She nodded at Jonathan as she passed.
He moved to the courtyard entrance and peered at the sidewalk. Icky was an understatement.
In the parking strip in front of the library, the city maintained two large garbage receptacles, one for recycling, the other for the landfill.
Apparently yesterday’s Fourth of July festivities had more than filled them, or else raccoons had decided to do what raccoons do best, because trash was everywhere.
He could feel his nose wrinkling from the smell. And there was nasty goo. And yuck, now there were crows.
This couldn’t be in front of the building when story time ended and all the littles poured out at once to get back in their wagons and bikes and strollers and stagger around on their pitter patter feet, but neither city sanitation nor the evening custodian were here, only him. Him and the garbage.
He felt his shoulders go back and his spine straighten. Part of his brain was already mocking himself, but another part was selecting a soundtrack for what, he was sure, would indeed be a long and heroically choreographed clean-up program.
This was some gross litter, but he was a tough man and this would be okay.
Spoiler: It was indeed gross, and he was not tough.
But he’d found large black plastic garbage bags under the breakroom sink, filched the pair of yellow cleaning gloves someone had also left there (which were definitely going to be the last thing he threw in the last bag before he tied it, sorry not sorry whoever brought these gloves) and now it was done.
He wasn’t sure if he could find a hose to spray the ketchupy goo off the sidewalk, or if he must accept that the sidewalk slime would remain in place until rain occurred, but there was no more loose trash.
Go to library sciences school, he’d told himself during the pandemic. Get paid for sharing a love of books with actual people.
No one mentioned injuries from staple guns, the informal master’s in social work required to help many of the patrons, and the occasionally really nasty public garbage, but yes, absolutely he got to talk about books.
But also, the garbage.
Bag in each hand, Jonathan walked around the outside of the building to the dumpster in the alley.
When he lifted the metal lid, it groaned like a creepy spaceship, but there was plenty of space inside for the bags.
A moment later, it all clanged shut and he felt the satisfaction of having done a surprising, and surprisingly good, task.
Mew.
He paused.
Meeew.
That was an odd noise. The dumpster’s wheels kept it about six inches off the ground, so he bent down to look where the quivering sounds originated.
Mewww.
He saw gleaming eyes and white markings about two feet deep in the shadows, and knew he was looking at a kitten.
Mew. The kitten had closed its eyes when it made that thready noise, and then it opened them again and looked right at him, and he was done.