A Kind of Paradise Read online

  Dedication

  To Mike, Nina, and Jeffrey

  for being my everything,

  and for believing,

  always

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  June

  Black Hat Guy

  Beverly

  Wally

  Sonia

  Lenny

  Black Hat Guy

  Trina

  Sonia

  July

  Wally

  Lenny

  Black Hat Guy

  Beverly

  Trina

  Shady

  Sonia

  Trina

  Beverly

  Wally

  Lenny

  Black Hat Guy

  Sonia

  Beverly

  Black Hat Guy

  August

  Wally

  Beverly

  Black Hat Guy

  Sonia

  Wally

  Beverly

  Lenny

  Black Hat Guy

  Sonia

  Wally

  Beverly

  Trina

  Quotes from Black Hat Guy’s Chair

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  My mom’s favorite piece of advice was “Know the players. If you know who you’re dealing with, you’ll know how to deal. You’ll know how to play the game.”

  She told me if I followed that advice, I’d never get into trouble.

  Another one she liked a lot was “Know when to fold and walk away.”

  Also, “Don’t play cards you don’t have.”

  She knew a lot of gambling-related sayings and loved to pass them on to me like sacred words of wisdom from a revered ancestor. But really she got them all from the years she spent serving drinks to strangers at a casino in Atlantic City. Her job was to strut around for hours in uncomfortable shoes delivering trays of drinks to people who dropped money on the table like it was nothing more than lint from the bottom of an old bag. She said she made decent money there, but you wouldn’t find another shred of decent in a casino if you looked behind every glitzy mirror and under every polished table and chair in the whole joint.

  The casino was where she met my dad, of course.

  This was before she learned how important it was to know the players. This was before she knew how important it was to tuck your emotions down deep into your back pocket every now and again, just long enough to clear your head and figure out exactly who you were dealing with. This was way before she had me, before she left my dad, before she moved the two of us to Foxfield, the small sidewalk town in central Pennsylvania that’s the only home I’ve ever known, to be closer to my aunt Julie. We moved into a tiny brick house with two cracked cement steps leading to the front door and identical square windows on either side, like two perfect dimples. She burned her high-heeled casino shoes and bought white clogs and took a job behind the reception desk at a dental office.

  That move happened before I turned two, and I hadn’t seen my dad since. I have no memory of him at all.

  What my mom also needed to tell me, but never did, was Know yourself. If she had taught me that, maybe I would have stopped myself. Maybe I would have been smarter.

  Maybe I would have heard the voice in my head reminding me who I was that afternoon back in May: straight-A seventh grader, aspiring artist and member of the Art Club, kindergarten reading buddy, thoughtful daughter and niece.

  Maybe I would have heard the voice in my head reminding me who I wasn’t: cheater, liar, thief.

  Maybe then I would have left the book where I found it.

  Or maybe I would have turned it in to the principal.

  Maybe I wouldn’t have been humiliated in front of the entire middle school population.

  And maybe I wouldn’t be spending my summer “paying my dues” as a volunteer at the Foxfield Public Library.

  Maybe.

  June

  Black Hat Guy

  The guy in the black hat pushed through the front door like a gust of angry wind, grunting under his breath as he went. He was hunched over himself the way he always was, his shoulders curved, his eyes pinned to the ground. He stormed past the circulation desk without looking up, past the row of public computer stations and the entire wall of New Fiction, his head shaking side to side the whole way. I was new at the library—it was Monday of my second week—but Black Hat Guy moved through the space like it was his own living room. It was clear he had been coming here for a while.

  I heard the words tyrant and coffee shop and sludge as I kept my eyes down and nested the Daily News sections back inside themselves. The only coffee shop in town was the Bean Pot. It had free Wi-Fi and served really thick hot chocolate with free whipped cream topping, which made it a popular after-school hangout. I never went there. I had no relationship with the word popular at all, unless you put the words not even remotely in front of it.

  From the way Black Hat Guy was ranting under his breath, it sounded like the Bean Pot wasn’t a great match for him either. At least he didn’t have to worry about tyrants or sludge at the library. He could sit here all day if he wanted to.

  I knew it was between 4:00 and 4:12 p.m. without even looking at the clock, because that’s when Black Hat Guy came to the library every day.

  Every. Day.

  I also figured Black Hat Guy must have some kind of medical condition that left him immune to outdoor temperatures, because it was a sweaty eighty-eight-degree day, but you’d never know it from the black sweatshirt, jeans, and winter knit hat he was wearing. And had worn every day of the summer so far.

  Every. Day.

  I tucked the Sports section inside the Arts section, even though it was supposed to go the other way around. It was pretty much the only power I had as the library’s one volunteer—to order the newspaper sections to my liking, or to choose which books to face out on a shelf. Art trumped sports, and a biography of my favorite painter, Georgia O’Keeffe, trumped any book on boxing champions and always would.

  Black Hat Guy huffed his way over to the chair by the window.

  He always went to the same chair.

  Always.

  It was the one upholstered in an ivory-colored fabric, with literary quotes printed in black cursive all over it. At least, I thought they were all literary. Some I knew for sure, like To be or not to be and Call me Ishmael and Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.” Pretty much everyone knew those even if they didn’t know who wrote them or what books they were from. Then there were other quotes that sounded familiar, but I wasn’t sure if they were just familiar because I had read them on the chair a dozen times already or because I actually knew them from life, like Tread softly because you tread on my dreams and What is essential is invisible to the eye. There were others still that could have been completely made up, for all I knew, like Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.

  That’s a famous quote? Really?

  Famous for making zero sense, maybe.

  Black Hat Guy pulled a charger from his pocket and plugged one end into an outlet under the window, the plate loose and jiggling side to side as he pushed the plug in. Then he sank into his chair, pulled his hat lower onto his brow, retracted his head into his sweatshirt collar, which made him look like a grumpy old turtle, and promptly went to sleep.

  It was amazing. Never in a million years could I walk into a public place in a foul mood, have a seat, and completely zonk out to Snoozeville in a matter of two minutes flat, but Black Hat Guy could. And did.

 
; At least he didn’t snore.

  Beverly

  “I clicked print. I CLICKED IT ALREADY!” a patron on computer number four yelled at the screen in front of him.

  Several patrons lifted their heads at the outburst, including a man sitting just two computers down from the yeller, but not one of them offered to help. The man at computer four was red in the face and sweating and looked about as approachable as a rabid raccoon.

  Beverly emerged from her cramped library director’s office in the back of the building. Even if the swish of her slacks didn’t announce her arrival ahead of her, you could see her coming from clear across the building because of her red hair, a deep red so fiery bright it was impossible to miss. She probably had to buy every packet of red hair dye at the pharmacy and mix them all together to get a shade that red. But hair color was the only flashy thing about Beverly. She didn’t wear a drop of makeup, her nails were never painted, and she didn’t put on earrings or even a watch. She wore no jewelry at all aside from a gold necklace around her neck, so neatly tucked inside her shirt that it took me a whole week before I even realized it was there.

  “Good afternoon, sir. Is this computer acting up on you?” Beverly ran her hands down the sides of her pants, as if to shush them, and clasped her hands together. “Maybe I can help.”

  The man glared at the computer screen through glasses so smudged it was a wonder he could see through them at all.

  “It won’t print my ticket! I clicked it a thousand times,” he sputtered, hands up in total frustration.

  I tried not to laugh at the thought of a thousand copies of whatever ticket he was trying to print flying out of the printer as soon as Beverly fixed it. But Beverly would fix that, too. Beverly could fix everything—the printer, the computer server, the Xerox copier, even the security system. She had master technician skills to go with her master librarian skills.

  “Let’s see if we can’t persuade it to cooperate. If I may,” Beverly said, leaning over him toward the keyboard.

  It took her less than fifteen seconds to get the ticket to print.

  The yeller thanked her and Beverly assured him it was no trouble at all. She didn’t even make it three steps toward her office, though, before another patron stopped her for help.

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” a woman in perfectly coordinated head-to-toe workout gear called to Beverly.

  I noticed on my first day that people in the library called Beverly ma’am. They called me miss, if they called me at all.

  “Yes, how may I help you?” Beverly asked, rubbing her hands down the sides of her pants again and then clasping them in front of her as she smiled at the woman. She did that routine with her hands all the time, like a nervous twitch. I noticed that my first day here, too.

  “I’ve been waiting for a book forever. I’m on the hold list and it was supposed to be back a long time ago.” She put her hands on her hips and huffed. “It’s not right that someone can keep a book for that long. These books are public property!”

  “I’m so sorry you’ve been waiting,” Beverly apologized right away. “If you would please follow me to a computer, I can look up the title and see what’s going on.”

  Beverly led her to a circulation computer, typed in the title, and nodded as she clicked and read the screen. She reported back, “Yes, I see it is quite overdue. I’ll put in an order for a copy from another library while I follow up with the person who has it out. That way I can assure you get the book in a timely manner. How does that sound?” She smiled and nodded again.

  It wasn’t policy to borrow books from other libraries when we owned our own copy—Beverly explained that to me last week—but I guess she thought this angry woman was worth bending a rule for.

  “If that’s all we can do, fine,” the workout lady answered, not even trying to hide her irritation.

  Maybe she needed a good workout to calm her down. It was just a book, after all.

  “I think this will solve our problem,” Beverly assured her, nodding some more. “I’m so sorry for the inconvenience. You’ll be notified as soon as it arrives.”

  The woman managed a half smile as she turned on her heel and sauntered out without saying thank you. Beverly didn’t seem the least bit bothered by it, though. It was like my mom said: Beverly knew the players. She knew who she was dealing with, so she knew how to deal. Maybe Beverly had worked in casinos before she worked in libraries and that was where she got so good at it.

  I would much rather spend my summer in a loud, dark casino, where I could hide behind tall barstools and fat slot machines, than in this old, musty, creaky library. But I’m pretty sure they don’t let thirteen-year-old middle-school mess-ups volunteer at casinos.

  Though I wasn’t exactly volunteering at the library, either. I was forced to work here. (“Try not to think of it as a punishment, Jamie,” Principal Shupe advised. “But our Honor Code is the backbone of the middle school. Of course there are consequences for violating it.” She leaned back in her fancy principal chair a bit and said, more gently, “I’m just sorry it’s you who has to face those consequences.” And she did look sorry, for about half a second, and then that drop of empathy evaporated faster than a raindrop on hot summer pavement. She launched into an explanation of my community service assignment and told me that I would have to hand in a list detailing what I learned from the experience at the end. And I had to write an apology letter to Trey.)

  Mrs. Shupe could call it a consequence all she wanted, but trust me: if your school and your mom were making you spend fifteen hours a week, every week, of your summer vacation working for free, it’s a punishment.

  The two-week sleepaway art camp I’d hoped to go to this summer—gone. A week at the beach with Aunt Julie—gone. A road trip to New Hampshire with my best friend Vic’s parents to visit her at camp—don’t even think about it. And it wasn’t like I could hang out at the local pool between my library hours—there would be people there, middle school people—and those were the last people on earth I wanted to see. My summer was going to be a sad combination of time at the library and time alone in my tiny backyard, drawing and reading and staring at a lonely blue sky.

  So on top of all the knots already twisting around in my stomach about what the entire middle school population was saying about me behind my back, I also had to worry about getting along with the library staff. Either Beverly had the best poker face in the whole entire world or she was a complete saint, because she didn’t seem the least bit wary about having some kid assigned to community service at her library.

  Beverly never asked me what I had done or why. She just acted like I was another member of her cherished library staff.

  I watched her pick up a piece of scrap paper from the worn tile floor, drop it in a recycling bin, then take a quick head count of patrons in the reading room before walking over to check on me.

  “Everything all right here, Jamie?” Beverly asked me.

  “Yeah,” I answered, then corrected myself. “Yes.”

  “The newspapers look great,” she said.

  “Thank you. I just finished them,” I said, smiling at her.

  Her eyes scanned the room and came to a stop on Black Hat Guy, still slumped asleep in the quotes chair, the rise and fall of his chest barely noticeable under his thick sweatshirt. The wire to the wall outlet was stretched taut, like a guitar string about to snap.

  She nodded at his sleeping body, then turned and smiled at me and said, “Yes, well, okay,” which I translated in my head to mean, Yes, we are here to serve the public in any way we can. I smiled back again, and then I just looked down at my sneakers and acted like I needed to fix my laces in order to escape the nodding-smiling loop. Beverly walked to the front desk to check in with Sonia.

  That was Beverly—supersmart and patient and genuine, with just a touch of awkward. But so what? What was so bad about awkward? Awkward was honest. Awkward was real.

  And after getting busted for cheating, after having my private crush o
uted to everyone, I had a pretty solid relationship with awkward.

  Wally

  “Good morning to you, and a good morning it is,” Wally half sang, half stated his greeting as he pushed through the library door the next morning.

  “Hello there, miss,” he said to me as he approached the circulation desk to return his items. “It’s nice to see you again. Jamie, is it?”

  “Yes, that’s right. It’s nice to see you, too,” I answered, smiling politely at him. “And you’re Wally, right?” I asked, even though I was sure. I had heard a lot about Wally from Sonia and Lenny, the other two permanent staff members besides Beverly. Wally was a Tuesday morning regular at the library and had been for years. He was a total movie fanatic, except he used the word flick instead of movie. He watched everything: classics, westerns, action, comedy, drama, even foreign. And he always checked out five movies at a time. Every Tuesday morning.

  “Good memory!” Wally said, his eyes opening a little wider in surprise. “That’s the first step to excellent customer service. Very well done.”

  I smiled at the compliment and blushed a little. “Thanks.”

  “I’ll be seeing you every week now, I guess,” Wally said.

  “I’ll be here for the summer.”

  “Well then, you’ll be seeing me!”

  He slid his five movies into the return bin on the counter and told me, “Really good flicks I watched this week. Really good. You might like ’em.”

  “Okay, thanks. I’ll take a look.”

  “War Games—it’s a classic. You seen it?” Wally asked.

  I shook my head no.

  “My kids’ favorite when they were growing up. One of my wife’s, too, God rest her soul.” Wally put his hand over his heart when he said that.

  I didn’t know what to say, because he’d basically just told me, without saying it word for word, that his wife was dead. I didn’t know if it just happened recently or if she’d been gone for a long time, but if he was watching a favorite family movie, he must miss her.