Chapter 4 Prudence, Possum & Awakenings
PRUDENCE, POSSUM & AWAKENINGS
BOOKS IN PERIL!
Christian Astor, the esteemed town magistrate and Library Board chairman, has convened the Board members meeting today to review the latest slew of book challenges.
Will more books be removed from the shelves based on accusations of obscenity and distortion of history? And what does Mayor Jedidiah Fowler have to say, given that his reelection campaign is heating up?
—Crow’s Caw
Patches was gone.
The morning had foretold a disaster brewing.
She had a terrible night. One that started innocuously, all things considered. Pru had gotten used to the dreams. She had had them for weeks now.
A woman—Rhiannon’s spitting image—looked terrified and alone, and sought Pru’s hands, leaned into her touch, even as cold, rusty iron bars prevented them from fully embracing.
That was standard for her dreams. But then the usual scenario changed, as if a mirror broken, the shards spilling onto a muddy floor, her fingers covered in blood.
Pru was the one trapped, the air around her full of smoke and despair.
And a male voice shouting, “For what is yours, for the sin, you shall bleed!”
She woke up in cold sweat. No amount of coffee managed to get the visions out of her head.
Then to make things worse, her father had stopped by.
Not that he himself made things worse, no.
Pru loved her father. She really did. She enjoyed his occasional dropping by.
But their time together today was interspersed with his boasting about the upcoming mayoral campaign, and she had neither the interest in it, nor the actual wherewithal to tell him so.
Oh, she was very involved in the town’s politics, just not in his.
A child of divorced parents, Pru had grown up juggling their affections and grudges. There were many said grudges, no matter how loudly they claimed their divorce had been an amicable one. Sometimes those claims were true. Other times, not so much.
Pru always felt that her father completely buried himself in the town’s affairs, in his responsibilities as the mayor.
While his life changed very little by his wife leaving him, Pru thought he still lost himself a bit, becoming distant, constantly busy.
Her mother was a different story. Demonstrative and extroverted, she suffered out loud, and perhaps it was that suffering that made Pru make the difficult choice of leaving Dragons with her.
After all, her mother just seemed to need her so much more.
Still, Pru’s relationship with her father was something she cherished. He had been understanding when she moved to Boston with her mother and equally supportive when she chose to return to the island as an adult after graduating college.
Pru had never regretted it. She always viewed it as a sort of homecoming, since the big city had never appealed. And when all was said and done, despite regular weekends together, being closer to her father was an important factor in her decision.
But that closeness never truly came, and Pru blamed herself.
Surely, it had to be her, because her father had tried very hard to involve her in his life, in his duties as mayor and deacon of the town’s church.
He was even fine with her bisexuality, or as fine as Pru expected him to be.
He never said a word against it, nor had he ever asked about her one and only girlfriend.
And that had been a blessing in itself, because Jedidiah Fowler could be stubborn and hardheaded, all qualities that Pru respected in a mayor but found difficult in a father.
And speaking of said girlfriend. As soon as she had finally seen her father out the door, Lisa called, and Pru’s already souring mood plummeted entirely.
Her girlfriend did not understand the word no.
Her ex-girlfriend. They’d been together for seven years, and if Jed Fowler had only recently started showing signs of unwillingness to bend, Lisa’s bullishness had always been there.
Initially Pru ignored it. Lisa was her first girlfriend.
She was in love. Head over heels, mushily, starry-eyed in love.
Or so she believed. Looking back, Pru thought she might’ve lied to herself a touch about the strength of her affection.
She remembered being lonely and falling headlong into the charming quagmire that was Lisa.
She had dated a few men in town before, but being with a woman was exhilarating in its own way.
A way that Pru tried not to analyze too closely.
Then during their seven years, something changed.
Shifted. At times Pru thought that she had grown up and Lisa just never did.
Except things were never that simple. Lisa’s cantankerous nature started chipping away at everything Pru felt for her.
And at everything Pru felt for herself. Grown up or not, Pru began questioning her own worth.
Nothing she had ever done was good. Nothing was ever right. And nothing was ever enough.
“This oatmeal is cold. And has the consistency of cement.” Lisa hated Pru’s cooking. Granted, Pru hated her own cooking, but she had been the only one trying.
“This apartment is cramped. I don’t know how you live like this!
” Lisa hated Pru’s studio above the shop.
No, it wasn’t palatial by any means, and her father had a much larger three-story villa on the outskirts of town, the Fowler Place a staple in Crow’s Nest for generations.
All stone arches and drafty hallways. Nobody needed five dining rooms. Well, nobody but Lisa, who really pushed for them to move there.
“You could be doing so much more with your life instead of staying here at the Nest in this quaint shop. I hate it here. Can’t we move to New York?
” When it became clear that Pru was not going to move to the Big Apple, back into her father’s mansion, or anywhere else for that matter, Lisa decided that bigger and better things beckoned. And maybe they did, but not for Pru.
Prudence Fowler was happy in her little corner of the world. Her shop was thriving. Her life was settled. And so she and Lisa parted ways.
Except, Lisa hadn’t gotten the message, as she kept calling and coming over.
Instead of pursuing those dreams of moving cross-country, Lisa had applied to one of the many positions that opened at the Dragons School For Girls.
With the new regime, the school expanded and required an increased staff in almost all of its departments.
Headmistress Nox did not do things by half, and soon enough a lot of townies were traipsing daily up the cliffs to their new place of employment.
It made for an interesting change of dynamic between the sleepy town and bustling school, always so apart and now suddenly dependent on each other for everything.
Pru wondered and waited for this particular brew to show its true colors. No change ever went this smoothly.
In the meantime, the townies had more money and were gainfully employed close to their homes, the businesses on the island boomed, and the school boasted an increased number of students. A win-win?
Pru was not ready to draw a firm conclusion just yet. Especially when it came to Lisa and her new job. How she even managed to get that job was a mystery to Pru. Her only previous professional experience was working at the island flower shop. Maybe the owner put in a good word for her?
The owner. Well, that was Pru’s other visitor of the day: Ceridwen Crowhart, the proprietor of Crow’s Blossoms. A touch taller than her younger sister, her hair pulled into a simple knot at the base of her head, she was almost Rhiannon’s spitting image.
Almost. Not that Pru had looked that closely at Rhiannon Crowhart.
So technically she didn’t allow herself to acknowledge that Ceridwen had lighter eyes the color of tormented sea or that her hair was darker, more mahogany than the fiery auburn of her sister.
Nope. Pru had no way of noticing any of that, because she never paid Rhiannon Crowhart that much attention.
“My darling.”
And that was another distinct difference between the sisters. Ceridwen was tranquility to Rhiannon’s storm. Serene and friendly, she radiated a calm that was enviable even to Pru, who always thought herself a laid-back person. Yet Ceridwen Crowhart was on a level all by herself.
“I couldn’t not stop by, Pru. I was just at the Library Board meeting. Can you imagine we have another anonymous complaint about several queer books?”
Pru sighed. She loved her town, and she found it somewhat isolated from the world on the mainland, from the ugliness and the despair that had been inching closer and closer to Dragons’s shores.
Still, sometimes that ugliness and that prejudice did cross the Dragons strait and unleashed itself on the town.
Book bans were something they had been seeing a lot of lately.
Always anonymous. Always against queer or racial justice literature.
Ceridwen was a councilwoman and sat on the Library Board. Pru had no idea how the woman did it all.
“Did you manage to deflect the complaint? This whole anonymity thing is just wrong. If you’re going to challenge a book, show your face, let everyone see your bigotry!”
Pru heard the alarm in her own voice but didn’t care. Some things were too important.
“We’d need to change the library statutes to exclude anonymous challenges.
I don’t even know when that whole thing started and who wrote it into the governing documents.
But no, I didn’t have enough votes to overrule this particular challenge.
I don’t know how these people who call me a colleague have the gal to look me in the eye every time they vote to ban queer literature.
” Ceridwen’s smile was sad, frayed at the edges.
“So, we lost two more books, Pru. Will you—”