Library Books
By Rachel
Ashley followed her mother up the steps onto the porch, blond pigtails flying. She carried her worn backpack, which contained the library books she’d been reading and a change of clothes. Her mother, a tall woman who wore rather skimpy clothes and too much makeup, stood there for a long moment, looking at the door, before she finally rang the doorbell. There was quiet in the house for a moment, then footsteps, and then the door was opened by a woman who seemed very old to Ashley’s eyes. The woman’s eyes widened when she saw Ashley’s mother. “Eileen? Is it really you?”
“It’s me, Mom,” Ashley’s mother said.
The woman didn’t say anything for a moment. “We didn’t even know if you were alive…How could you do this to us? Eight years without a word! And now you show up dressed like a floozie! What were you thinking?” Ashley tried to make herself as small as possible behind her mother when she heard the anger in the woman’s voice.
“I wasn’t thinking, Mom,” Ashley’s mother said softly. “Is Dad here? We should talk.”
The woman nodded. She seemed calmer now, so Ashley slipped out a little from behind her mother. The old woman practically jumped when she saw her. “Eileen, who’s…Is she…”
“She’s my daughter,” Eileen said. “Ashley, say hello to your grandma.”
“Hello,” Ashley said shyly.
“Well, we shouldn’t be standing around out here,” Ashley’s grandma said, hustling them into the house and into a warm kitchen with a yellow tablecloth and roosters on the wallpaper. “Have a seat. Ashley, would you like some grape juice?” Ashley nodded, still looking around with wide eyes. There were clean dishes in a drainer by the sink, but no dirty ones, and the kitchen smelled like food instead of the faint mold and mildew smell of their kitchen in the apartment in New York. Ashley’s grandma set a glass of juice down in front of her. “Eileen, would you like something?”
“I’ll have some of that coffee, please,” Ashley’s mother said, pointing to a half-full pot on the counter. “Black.”
Grandma poured a cup of coffee, then said, “I’ll go outside and talk to your father.” She disappeared through another door.
Ashley’s mother sipped her coffee for a minute, then said, “You doing okay, baby?”
Ashley nodded. “I didn’t know it would take so long to get here, though. Did you call the school and tell them I was going to be absent?” Her mother shook her head. “You’ll have to send a note when we get back, then.” She wasn’t at all upset about missing school, which was mostly boring. Her teacher would give everybody something to do, which usually took Ashley about fifteen minutes, and then spend the next hour or two trying to get the bad kids to behave, and there were a lot of bad kids. Ashley had asked her mother once why there were so many bad kids in school, but her mother had said only that they lived in a “bad neighborhood.” Ashley thought that was strange. She liked their neighborhood. She could stop at the library on her way home from school. And sometimes, when her mom sent her to the grocery store to pick up soda at night, she would see the women that Mommy worked with standing on the sidewalks, and they would say hi to her—unless they were already talking to men in cars.
Ashley’s grandma came back in after a few minutes with a man with dirt all over his clothes. “Eileen,” he said, as her mom stood up and gave him a hug, “I’m so glad you’re all right. And this must be Ashley,” he said, turning to her. “I’m your grandpa, Ashley.”
“Hi,” she said, managing a small smile.
“How old are you, kiddo?” he asked.
“Seven.”
“And what grade are you in at school?”
“Second.”
He nodded, smiling at her. Then he said, “Well, Eileen, I think we’d both like to know why you left.”
“Avery!” her grandmother said, and pointed at Ashley. “Would you like to watch television, Ashley? We’ve got cable, so you could watch the Disney channel.”
“Okay,” Ashley said, wondering why the adults didn’t want her to hear them talking. Were they going to talk about her?
Her grandmother took her into the next room, which had thick, soft carpet without any stains in it, flowered wallpaper, and matching furniture. She settled Ashley on the couch and turned the TV on. As soon as she was out the door, Ashley jumped off the couch and went to the door to the kitchen.
“And so Tommy said he’d do the right thing by me. He gave me an address in New York, and told me that if I came there in a few weeks he’d marry me. But the address he gave me didn’t exist,” Ashley heard her mother saying.
“Oh, baby,” her grandma said. “Why didn’t you come home?”
“I thought maybe he’d just made a mistake, that I could find him if I looked. And I thought you’d be mad at me for taking the money to get there…”
“Of course not, sweetheart. We’d have come to get you.”
“I was stupid,” she said. “I really believed him when he said he loved me and wanted the baby. But of course I never found him.”
Ashley got tired of listening when she realized they weren’t talking about her. She went back to the couch and watched TV for a little while. Her eyes grew heavy, and before long she fell asleep.
When she woke up, she found that someone had turned off the television, put a pillow under her head, and covered her with a blanket. She got up and went into the kitchen, which was full of a mix of strange but good smells. Her grandmother was there, pulling a dish out of the oven. This seemed strange to Ashley. Her mother never used the oven except occasionally to cook a frozen pizza.
“Well, hello, sleepyhead,” Susan said. “Dinner will be ready soon, so I hope you’re working up an appetite.”
“Where’s Mommy?” Ashley said, sliding into a chair at the table.
“She must have been tired too, because she’s taking a nap upstairs.”
Although Ashley was a little wary of this strange person, she couldn’t contain her curiosity any longer. “How long are we staying? Are we going to stay all night?”
Her grandmother looked at her with a sharp expression, but it quickly softened to a smile. “Well, I don’t know exactly how long you’re staying, but it’s too late to head back to New York tonight, so you’ll have to spend the night.”
The door to the back porch opened, and Avery entered. Ashley saw through the door that it was just getting dark outside. “The chickens are fed,” he said. “How’s dinner coming?”
“It’s come,” Susan answered. “Why don’t you set the table and pour milk for everyone, and I’ll go wake Eileen up.”
Susan left, and came down a few minutes later with Eileen. Ashley couldn’t help staring at her mother; she had scrubbed off all her makeup, and Ashley had hardly ever seen her without it before.
All thoughts of the strangeness around her were forgotten, though, as Susan dished up the best meal Ashley had ever eaten. She ate two helpings of chicken, biscuits, and mashed potatoes, a big ear of corn on the cob, and two tall glasses of milk.
“Do you like it, Ashley?” her mother asked.
Ashley nodded through a mouthful of chicken. “It’s really good. How come you don’t make food like this?”
Her mother smiled but still looked sad. “I don’t have time, Ashley. You know I’m busy with work most of the time.”
“Oh,” was all Ashley answered between huge spoonfuls of mashed potatoes. She decided during dinner that this was a pretty nice place, all things considered. She’d been a little scared about meeting these strange people, but they were nice to her, and they had good food. She thought she might miss this place when she and her mother went back to the city.
Despite the nap she’d had, Ashley started to feel sleepy by the time dinner came to an end. Her grandmother noticed and said, “Ashley, why don’t we get you a bath and get you tucked into bed?” Ashley nodded and followed her grandmother upstairs. She had a quick bath and got dressed in a big, soft T-shirt that Susan gave her. Then her grandmother took her to a room that she immediately wanted for her own. It had a bed with a patchwork quilt, patchwork curtains on the window to match, a desk and dresser, and best of all, a bookshelf crammed with books. She went first to the bookshelf and started looking at the titles. Most of them were unfamiliar, but that was even better since it meant they were books she’d never read.
“Do you like to read, Ashley?” her grandmother asked. Ashley nodded. “Your mother used to like to read, too. I think there’s a whole box of old Wizard of Oz books up in the attic. We’ll have your grandfather get them down for you tomorrow. But for right now, I think you’d better get some sleep.”
Ashley yawned and agreed, even though she would have loved to stay up half the night reading. She’d spent most of her time engrossed in one book after another for the last year and a half, ever since she’d taught herself to read the summer between kindergarten and first grade. The library was just down the street from the one-bedroom apartment she shared with her mother, and she’d walked there weekly, sometimes more often, quickly working her way up from simple Dr. Seuss books to harder chapter books like Winnie the Pooh. She’d seen the Wizard of Oz books on the library shelves, but she’d been afraid they would be too hard for her—they were in the intermediate reader section, and all the books she’d been reading were for beginners. But tomorrow she would try one.
Ashley let her grandmother tuck her in and turn out the light. She left, leaving the door cracked. Ashley turned onto her side and was about to go to sleep when she heard the door creak open. She sat up and saw her mother coming toward her in the half light from the hallway.
“Ashley, baby, can I talk to you for a minute?” When Ashley nodded, her mother turned the chair at the desk toward the bed and sat down. “Do you like it here? It seems like you do.”
“Yeah, it’s nice. The food’s good,” Ashley said. “And Grandma said there’s a whole box of books up in the attic that I can read.”
“Do you think you might want to stay for a little while?”
Ashley nodded. “We should stay for two weeks.”
“Why two weeks?”
“That’s when my library books have to go back. But we can stay till then.”
Her mother smiled, but then her expression grew more serious. “Ashley, I want to talk to you about how things are.” She paused. “You know…well, you know the man I work for isn’t very nice.” Ashley nodded. He made her call him ‘Uncle Leo’, but she didn’t like him. “Well, the thing is, baby, I have to keep working for him. I owe him a lot of money from being in the hospital when you were born, so he’d be really mad at me if I moved away and found another job. But it’s not right for me to make you live like that too…I mean, you’re just a kid, you should have a good school and friends and be able to play outside and be happy.”
“A good school? What’s wrong with my school?”
Her mother smiled. “A lot of things, baby. In a good school there will hardly be any bad kids, and you can learn lots of things, and school will be interesting to you. You can get some new clothes, too, and read lots of books, and have your own room instead of sleeping on the couch.”
Ashley was confused. This was everything that she wanted, so why did her mother seem sad? She thought back to what had happened yesterday.
She’d gone to the library right after school, then come home to find Uncle Leo in their apartment, which wasn’t an unusual occurrence. Her mother and Uncle Leo had both looked upset, a little mad, but Uncle Leo had smiled when she came in.
“Well, there’s the little one,” he said. “You know, she’s an awfully pretty little kid.”
“Yeah, so?” her mother said.
“So I’m just saying that she could be the answer to your problems. You’re not even making enough money to pay the interest on your debt, but she’s just about the age where people might get interested.”
Ashley had only been half listening, already cracking open her first book, but she had looked up at that moment to see her mother’s face turn pale. “You must be crazy if you think I’d…”
“Now, honestly, Eileen, is it really that bad? I mean, I wasn’t thinking of just putting her out on the street. That’s not where the money is with kids. See, I’ve got this friend, and he takes pictures, with the kids, you know, and sells them to people.”
Ashley had gotten interested at that. She remembered having her picture taken once, at Sears. She’d gotten to wear a pretty dress and get her hair curled. It had been fun. But she could see that her mother didn’t like the idea of her taking pictures with Uncle Leo’s friend. “You’re sick, Leo,” her mother said, looking at him with an anger that Ashley had never seen before.
“Oh, come on, Eileen. Don’t get all moral on me now. You’d better at least think about it. I have people to answer to, you know, and they’re not happy with their share of the money. You’d better come up with a way to improve your income if you’re going to keep feeding yourself and the kid.” Uncle Leo had left then. As soon as he was gone, her mother told Ashley to pack some spare clothes because they were going on a trip to see her grandparents in Pennsylvania.
And now here they were. Ashley had thought they had left because her mother had been so upset about Uncle Leo’s idea about the pictures, but maybe she had been wrong. “Do you mean that I can have my own room and stuff if I get my picture taken?”
Her mother looked surprised. “No, baby, I’m not going to let anyone take any pictures of you. I mean, what do you think about staying here? Living here, with your grandparents?”
“You mean stay here forever? Could this be my room, just mine? And I could really go to a fun school? And never see Uncle Leo again?”
Her mother reached over and hugged her tightly. “Yes, Ashley, that’s exactly what I mean.” She pulled away, and Ashley saw with surprise that she was crying. Why would she cry? Shouldn’t she be happy too? “I love you, baby,” she said, giving her another hug.
“I love you too, Mommy,” Ashley said.
Her mother kissed her on the forehead. “Goodnight, little one,” she said, then slipped out the door.
Ashley lay awake for a little while, thinking of her own room and eating Grandma’s cooking every day. Eventually her eyes closed, and her thoughts turned into pleasant dreams.
She woke up to the smell of eggs and bacon. Remembering where she was, she got up and hurried down to the kitchen, eager to tell her grandparents that she was staying here forever. When she got there, she saw her grandmother at the stove, but her attention was diverted when she saw her backpack on the kitchen table, open and almost empty. She hurried to it and saw that only her clothes were there. “Where are my library books?” She turned to see that her grandmother had tears in her eyes. “What’s wrong? Where’s Mommy? Did she take my books?”
Her grandmother nodded. “She took them back to the library, Ashley.”
Ashley hurried to the front door and opened it, looking for her mother’s car. The driveway was empty. She heard her grandmother come up behind her. “I told her the books didn’t have to go back for two weeks. Why did she go all the way back to the city to take them back when I haven’t even read them yet?” She was crying now, too. “When is she coming back?”
Susan dropped to her knees and pulled Ashley close to her, ignoring the open door. “Poor baby,” she said into Ashley’s hair. “It’s all right, we’ll take care of you, I promise.”
Ashley pulled away. “When’s she coming back?” Her grandmother didn’t answer. Ashley knew, then, why her mother had been so sad last night. “She’s not coming back, is she?”
Her grandmother looked at her for a long moment, then shook her head.
“No, no, no!” Ashley screamed. “I want my mommy! She wouldn’t leave me here! She’s just taking the library books back!” She ran out the door, into the woods. She stumbled, scraping her knees, got scratched by brambles sticking out, cut and bruised her feet on sharp rocks, and didn’t care. She tripped over something and fell, landing face-first in a pile of dead leaves. She lay there, sobbing. After a while, she heard her grandfather calling her name. She didn’t answer, but he found her anyway. He picked her up, and she leaned her head against his chest, letting the tears soak his shirt as he carried her back to the house.