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Still, it was generous.
And it helped.
"No, Reese. We got a donation," she went on, looking at me like I was an idiot for not realizing that when she said it the first time, she meant a sizable one.
We never got sizable ones.
"Really? How much? From whom?" I asked, moving behind my desk to stash my purse under it.
"Eighty-thousand dollars," she declared from the other side of the desk.
"What?" I gasped, head shooting up.
My first thought was not the nicest. I figured someone must have died. You know, because who else had that kind of liquid income to give to the local library?
"Yes, right there," she declared, pointing behind me toward a box sitting behind the desk in a corner, one I figured for a shipment of books.
"Wait... in cash? We got an eighty-thousand dollar donation in cash this morning?" I gasped.
"Waiting right outside the door like it was no big thing when I got here," Marcy piped in. Her dislike of children - and obvious misjudgment in career choices - aside, Marcy wasn't my least favorite co-worker. She was the second closest to my age, next to the other night shift girl, at thirty-seven, childless, husbandless, but with a cat collection that made any seventy-year-old spinster jealous. She was short, heavyset, with a pretty face, shiny brown hair, and bright blue eyes.
I was trying to process that, trying to understand how careless one had to be to leave a box of cash outside a library unprotected, when a note slammed down on my desk.
Startled, I jumped back, my head shooting up to see Barb looking at me disapprovingly. Which, well, was her default look when it came to me, so I didn't think much of it.
"What's this?"
"The note that was inside the box," she offered, tone glacial. "Read it," she demanded.To the Navesink Bank Public Library,Please accept this donation of eighty-thousand dollars to build the long sought-after teen center.- AnonymousThe teen center was my dream.
And only mine.
See, we had a lovely library. Five years running, it was named the best in the state. There had been a grant seven years before which allowed them to completely renovate the space. The children's wing had new carpets, bookshelves, tables, puzzles, computers, a craft room, and a reading nook that had floor-to-ceiling windows. The main part of the library got new beige tile in the lobby, then swirled brown and beige carpets throughout the stacks, new shelves, new modern desks with plug-ins for chargers and even HDMI ports, new computers, a huge new collection of DVDs, books, and another matching reading nook, albeit a bit smaller. But after the landscaping, and paving, and the new roof, and the bathroom renovations, there had simply been no money to put in a proper teen room.
I see no reason why they need their own room, Barb had said when I brought up the idea at a budget meeting. They have shelves in the back behind travel.
Her argument won, of course, because a budget meeting was generally to decide how to cut back instead of genuinely make improvements, so I shelved the idea, even though it was a burning desire of mine.
Teens needed a room.
Teens in Navesink Bank, especially, needed a room. They needed a place where they could go to stay off the streets, away from the bad influences, where they were safe, and could talk with peers without getting shushed by the adults.
I had even, in my excitement over the idea, had Paine and Kenzi draw me up the plans, converting an old, outdated section we used for unusable things such as encyclopedias into said teen room. I wanted it closed in, but with all glass, so we could easily keep an eye on things. I wanted their own shelves full of new and relevant titles. I wanted a separate computer lab. And I wanted a comfortable seating section. And I wanted it to not look like some sixty-year-old who hadn't gone to design school in forty years (ugh, don't get me started on the choices of wall art in the main area of the library) designed it. I wanted it fresh and inviting so local teens would feel comfortable there.
But I had long-since given up hope of getting that dream.
Even if I got a genuine pang anytime a teen came up and asked me if we had the newest dystopian, and I had to tell them no, even though we did, incredibly, have six copies of the newest Grisham.
"There is also this," Barb went on, even though my head was spinning a bit too much already. She slammed down a document on top of the letter. "Which legally binds us to, if we accept the money, use it to build the teen center. If a penny goes to anything else, we could be sued."
It was like Christmas, my birthday, and every single book-mail day all rolled into one.
