A Kind of Paradise Read online

  “So I should watch it?” I asked, trying to steer us away from death and back toward movies—flicks—instead.

  “Highly recommend it!” Wally said, removing his large, pale hand from his chest and giving me a thumbs-up sign with it. “All this smart kid wants to do is hack computers to find new video games to play, but a few wrong clicks and he ends up starting a real global war.”

  “Whoa!” I let out a gasp-shout combo, a little too loud for a library.

  Wally chuckled at my response. “Oh, it’s a great one.” Then he grinned with his whole face, the wrinkles around his eyes scrunching, and explained, “Of course, my kids were already crazy for video games when that flick came out, so that was why. They spent probably half their childhood sitting on the basement floor playing Atari.”

  Atari.

  That was my mom’s childhood favorite, too. My mom worshiped her Atari system and all the games she had collected to play on it. She still hadn’t forgiven her own mother for chucking them when she moved out.

  “She was mad at me for choosing a college so far away,” my mom explained. “It was one of the meanest things she ever did to me.”

  “That’s cold,” I agreed.

  “My most sacred childhood possession.” My mom shuddered.

  “I’m glad I don’t have to worry about that,” I said.

  My mom looked up from the sink, where she was scrubbing a pot. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you hated how that felt, when your mom trashed your toy—”

  “Do not call it a toy!” My mom pointed her soapy sponge at me threateningly.

  “I mean, when your mom trashed your ‘most sacred childhood possession,’” I corrected myself, rolling my eyes, “so I know you’d never do that to me. When I go to college.”

  “Yeah, don’t be so sure about that,” she told me, returning to her pot scrubbing.

  “What?”

  “I’m just saying, I hear weird things happen to you when your kids move out.” She shook her head.

  “Like, you get super mean?” I asked.

  “No.” She let the pot fill halfway with soapy water to soak. “Well, maybe.”

  “Fantastic,” I said, rolling my eyes again.

  “My mother still had your aunt Julie at home with her when I left. You’re my only kid, so it will probably be extra bad for me when you leave.”

  “Jeez, Mom!”

  “At least you know in advance,” she told me, as if this was all completely out of her hands. “Take your special stuff with you. Or hide it. Really, really well.”

  “Or just, like, go to college two miles from here,” I said, staring her down.

  “Yes, two miles. I’ll give you up to ten, maybe, before my mean meter ticks on. Eleven, tops.”

  “Gee, Mom. You’re the best.”

  “I try.”

  “It’s a good thing I don’t have my own Atari to lose.”

  “Greatest. Games. Ever.” And then she went back to scrubbing, humming under her breath.

  Vic and I searched online for Atari commercials one day after we came home from school to find my mom belting the jingle from the bathroom, her voice echoing off the tile walls. She kept singing it over and over again: “Have you played Atari today?”

  Vic and I cracked up watching the old commercials—the grainy footage, the terrible animation, the dated clothes and haircuts on the actors. It was hard to believe that games like Asteroids and Space Invaders could ever have been popular. They looked so amateur and basic to us.

  “Are you disrespecting my childhood passion?” my mom called from the bathroom when our giggles went on for too long.

  “No, never, Ms. Bunn,” Vic answered immediately, then covered her mouth and laughed so hard she fell off her chair.

  “Rome wasn’t built in a day, kiddos,” my mom lectured over the sound of a bristle brush scrubbing back and forth. “Those games were revolutionary when they came out.”

  Vic and I raised our eyebrows at each other, and Vic whispered, “What’s Rome got to do with it?”

  Then we cracked up even more, but quietly.

  “You do realize those kids in the commercial are seventy years old now,” Vic informed me once she caught her breath.

  “Not seventy,” I answered, calculating in my head. “More like midforties.”

  “Whatever, math geek,” she said, hitting the replay button so we could watch it one more time.

  I heard my mom singing the last line of the ad again. “Have you played Atari today?”

  I liked hearing the song in my mom’s voice more than the original recorded version. She sang it with heart—you could actually hear how special her Atari memories were in the rise and fall of her breath as she sang. It was way better than the song spewing from the laptop speaker.

  “Okay, Wally,” I said, picking up the War Games DVD and looking at the pictures on the back of the case. “Maybe I’ll watch it.”

  “All righty.” Wally gave me another thumbs-up. “You won’t be disappointed.” And then he made his face all serious and, in a bad robotic voice recited, “Shall. We. Play. A. Game?” Then he gripped the circulation counter between us and laughed.

  “Umm,” I stalled. “I’m . . . guessing that’s from the movie?” I half said, half asked.

  “You guessed right!” Wally laughed again. Then he had to stop laughing to cough. His cough was loud and guttural and phlegmy and made me want to back up about a thousand steps. He was good about it, though, and covered his mouth with the arm that wasn’t holding on to the counter, and he turned his head away from me. Then he cleared his throat, righted himself, turned back to face me, and laughed again. “Do excuse me,” he said.

  “You are excused,” I said.

  “All right then, time to look for five new ones. Gotta stick to my routine. Tuesday’s my day.” He grinned at me, a super-wide, happy grin. His teeth were crooked and gray and many were missing, but he smiled like he didn’t know it, or knew it but didn’t care about hiding it.

  I liked that. His mouth looked awful, but it didn’t stop him from smiling. He was cheerful and polite and responsible—his movies were never late—and that mattered to him a whole lot more than how he looked. I wished I could get Wally to walk through the middle school halls and spread some of that around.

  “I’ll do my looking now,” Wally told me as he motioned toward his DVD wall. “Thanks a lot, dear.”

  “Sure,” I answered, even though I hadn’t done anything for him to thank me for.

  “Oh, almost forgot my flower,” Wally said. He pulled a single-stem carnation out of a ratty plastic grocery bag. The flower was yellow this week.

  Wally took last Tuesday’s wilted pink flower out of the squat glass jar pretending to be a vase at the end of the circulation desk and tossed it into his bag. Then he carefully slid the new flower into the jar, turned it to his liking, and said, “There she is.”

  “Very pretty,” I told him, even though it was kind of a sad-looking flower.

  Wally brought a flower with him on each of his Tuesday visits. It was very cool of Beverly to allow it, since you’d think she wouldn’t want an open container of water around the books and computers.

  Wally wobbled around the reference desk, coughing and leaning on furniture on either side as he went, to get to his movie wall and begin his weekly search.

  Sonia

  Sonia put down her coffee cup where she always kept it, right above the money drawer, and grabbed a book with a white slip sticking out of it from the counter. “Watch the desk for me a minute, okay, Jamie?”

  She swung herself out from behind the circulation desk.

  “Sonia, I can’t—” I started, but her lightning-fast steps got her to the door and outside before I could finish my sentence. I stepped into her spot behind the desk and hoped no one came over for help. I didn’t know the first thing about how to use the circulation computers.

  I stood on one foot behind the desk, then shifted my weight to the
other foot. I started to pick at my fingernail but quickly stopped when I remembered I wasn’t alone in my bedroom at home where no one could see me.

  Alone in my bedroom at home was where I wanted to be, where I wanted to spend every second of my life since that horrific Wednesday in May. Although, if I were being truly honest, I would admit that my first choice would have been to dig a deep hole and climb in so I could hide from all life-forms for a good fifteen years. Second choice would have been to run away to Australia, like that kid Alexander from the book about the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

  Hibernating in my bedroom at home was my third choice. And even that turned out to be a very bad option those first few days after it all blew up and Mrs. Shupe called my mom into the school for a meeting. A meeting that the vice principal, my homeroom teacher, and the guidance counselor also attended. My mom came home from that meeting so distraught she could barely even look at me. And when she finally did look at me, her face was a mask of confusion, like she didn’t recognize me at all, like she wanted to know who in God’s name was that stranger in her living room who looked just like her daughter.

  A lump the size of my fist swelled in my throat when she looked at me like that.

  I apologized and told her I knew what I did was beyond dumb but that I couldn’t take it, her being so mad at me. She only shook her head.

  “I’m not mad, Jamie.” Her voice was the saddest whisper in the world. “I’m disappointed.”

  Her words made me want to crumple into the smallest ball possible and disappear.

  “You had a chance to fold, Jamie. You had a chance to walk away. Why didn’t you?” she asked, her eyes pleading, desperate to understand.

  I opened my mouth to answer but nothing came out.

  “I didn’t know it was possible to feel this disappointed,” she said again, which felt exactly like a knife twisting in a raw, gaping wound.

  And I knew it was true, her disappointment, because she called my aunt Julie then and they went out to dinner without me.

  They had never gone out to dinner without me before. Ever.

  Restaurants were our thing—as in all three of us.

  Aunt Julie loved to say, “We might live in small Podunk towns, but we travel the globe through our palates!”

  And we really did. Aunt Julie thought nothing of a forty-five-minute drive just to try a new restaurant serving cuisine from another part of the world. We had tried Japanese, Moroccan, Indian, French, and even Ethiopian, where we ate with our hands and used a kind of soft flatbread to scoop up our food instead of forks. But Chinese remained our all-time favorite, which was fortunate because it was only a ten-minute car ride away.

  Aunt Julie was my mom’s younger sister. She wasn’t married and she didn’t have kids, unless you counted all the animals she took in and provided for. She certainly considered them family. At the current moment, she had three dogs, two cats, and a bunny. She had worked at the same casino as my mom years back and was also a big proponent of knowing the players, which led her straight to a faithful love of animals.

  “Nothing and no one is more honest than an animal.” Aunt Julie believed this to her core. “You look at an animal and it’s clear as crystal—all their intentions right there on their face where you can see them. No games. No tricks.”

  “Your dogs know tons of tricks,” I countered.

  “Those are tricks I taught them, for stimulation. Dogs have brains and need to use them. But they’ll never use them to hurt you. Not ever.”

  It was true that none of her animals had ever hurt her, not the way I had just hurt my mom.

  So when they walked in the door together two hours later, the smell that came with them told me they’d been to Jade Noodle Shop, which stung like crazy. Jade Noodle Shop was our absolute number one favorite place. The smell of smoky green tea and candied sweet duck sauce wafted off their coats. Aunt Julie’s hair, when she leaned in to say good night to me, smelled so strong of stir-fry it might as well have been a salon product she blow-dried into her hair.

  When my mom wasn’t looking, Aunt Julie whispered to me, “Give her time. You know how much she loves you.”

  The truth in Julie’s words somehow made me feel both better and worse at the same time, and the tears rushed to my eyes again.

  It had gotten better since then, thank God, with my mom.

  “Everyone plays cards they don’t have at some point—that’s how they learn, from losing big,” she said to me, about a week after the meeting with Mrs. Shupe. “Let this be the one bad hand you played.” She said it like an order but then hugged me to soften it.

  And it was like we understood each other on a whole new level after that. But I still wanted to hide from the rest of the world.

  The library door opened like a gift and Sonia breezed in. Her face was flushed from the heat and she had a smudge of pink on one cheek, right above her giant smile.

  “I love making people happy,” Sonia told me, then gave me a light hip check to bop me out of her spot. “Did I miss anything?”

  “No, no one came up,” I answered, relieved that it was true. “You have something on your cheek, though.”

  “Oh, yes, that’s my kiss. She always gives me a kiss.”

  “Who?”

  “Sylvia Allen,” Sonia said, as if she were speaking of a famous celebrity.

  “Who’s Sylvia Allen?”

  “Sylvia Allen is a patron, and she’s NINETY-SIX!” Sonia’s eyes went wide. “Ninety-six years old and still driving and reading and knitting. She’s my role model.” Sonia’s entire face lit up as she smiled. “It’s good to have a role model. Believe me. It’s like a compass.”

  “A compass?” I repeated.

  “Someone to look to, to point you in the right direction.”

  “Oh.”

  “Everyone should have one,” she said.

  “I don’t have one,” I admitted. “Who should my role model be?”

  Sonia squinted in thought for a moment, then announced, “Me, mami!” She bounced on her toes and let out a laugh so full she spilled her coffee. “I am solid role model material. By the end of the summer, you’ll see.” She giggled as she wiped up her spill.

  I just stared at her.

  Sonia smacked my shoulder as if she could push fun into me. “So serious, Jamie. We’ll work on that.”

  She was right. I couldn’t even remember the last time I had laughed hard enough to spill something. How long had it been? Weeks?

  I changed the subject. “So Sylvia’s still driving at ninety-six?”

  “And no accidents. She’s amazing! But it’s hard for her to get out of the car and walk our steps, so she calls on the phone for the book she wants and I run it out to her when she pulls up.”

  “That’s really nice of you,” I admit.

  “Well, don’t spread the word, because I only do it for Sylvia.” Sonia took a sip of her coffee. “Hmm, that went cold fast.”

  “You need one of those mugs with a lid, to keep the heat in,” I suggested. “My mom has one.”

  “No, I’m fine. I’ll drink my coffee at any temperature.” She took another sip to illustrate her point, then added, “But see, I’d only let my coffee go cold for my role model. I’m not doing curbside for any lazy Joe who complains about rain or cold and not wanting to get out of their car. Just Sylvia. Because she’s my compass.”

  Lenny

  “Come feast your eyes on this, Jamie,” Lenny called out to me from the reading room.

  I trudged over with a stack of brand-new magazines and found Lenny holding open the latest Foxfield Biweekly Newsletter. The newsletter came out every two weeks and covered every bit of local news that could be mustered up. Foxfield was a small town, so it was a thin paper, and you knew it was an especially dry news period when the same advertisement was printed on more than one page, just to fill up space.

  “Lookee here,” Lenny said, holding the page lower where I could see it. Lenny had pale skin, broad
shoulders, and long, graying brown hair he wore pulled back in a ponytail. And he was so tall, if he hadn’t moved the paper down it would’ve been miles above my head. “Whaddya think of that?”

  I looked at the page and read the advertisement he was pointing to: Giant Painting Co., Lenny Bradford—free estimates, flexible scheduling, personal care, no job too big or small. And there was a phone number printed underneath.

  “Is that you?” I asked. I didn’t know Lenny’s last name.

  “Yours truly,” he answered, and bowed at the waist like he was meeting royalty. “My first print ad. I’ve been getting work through word of mouth, but I wanted to see if this would bring in more jobs.”

  “Well, I would hire you,” I told him. “I like the ‘Giant’ part.”

  “Yeah, well, I figure that’s my hook. There are a lot of painters out there, but how many of them are as huge as me?”

  Lenny had to duck every time he went down the stairs to the staff kitchen and supply room, and his sleeves almost never reached all the way down to his wrists. He said he’d been dealing with that since the ninth grade, so he was used to it by now.

  “I mean, I can reach ceilings without a ladder most of the time,” he bragged. “It’s a perk for painting.” Then he looked up at the ceiling above us in the reading room. It was eighteen feet away, with original scalloped woodwork that was ornate and beautiful and something you would only find in a historic building. Of course, the woodwork was also stained and chipped. It definitely could’ve used some Lenny painting.

  He craned his neck back even more to get a wider view of the ceiling design. “Most of the time I can reach,” he said again, more quietly.

  Lenny worked half as many hours at the library as Sonia did. He was a part-time librarian and a part-time house painter and was constantly running back and forth between the two jobs. He always changed out of his painting clothes before he came to the library, and he scrubbed his hands clean, but he wore the same shoes. His shoes were massive and impossible to miss. Thick drips and splotches of different-colored paint dotted the toe area and laces and soles and were a dead giveaway of his other job.