Serendipity Green by Rob Levandoski Page A

house. Delores Poltruski’s car is not in Dick Mueller’s driveway. Rhubarb has not pissed the curio cabinet. She loves him up anyway. She puts on her nightgown and two pairs of socks and gets in bed. On the news, the Cleveland Indians’ equipment truck is arriving at Winter Haven, Florida. The driver, still wearing his Chief Wahoo cap and jacket, waves at the camera. As he does every year, Ernest Not Irish has followed the truck south, and is now standing outside the Indian’s spring camp, in summer shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, shaking a big homemade sign that shows Chief Wahoo holding not a baseball bat, but a plate of pancakes. AUNT JEMIMA IN REDFACE the sign reads.
    In the morning Hardihood walks to the library. She turns on the lights and turns up the heat. Weekday mornings are not very busy. A few retired people. A few young moms with their preschoolers. A few people who work odd shifts. At eleven she takes ten minutes to eat her lunch, and then, invigorated by the small bites of egg salad and Wonder Bread floating in her stomach, in a subterranean lake of grape juice, she returns to her desk for the lunch-hour rush. By 1 p.m. she has checked out eleven movie videos, five computer games, four CDs of children’s music, and three books, one of them a novel.
    The library is dead until three. Then school is out. Dozens of kids tumble in. There is the din of magazine pages turning, the din of homework going undone, the din of computer keys as seventh-grade boys tap onto the Internet to research their favorite rock stars and—if the Reverend Raymond R. Biscobee is to be believed—to download dirty pictures and chat with European pedophiles. By five the library is empty again.
    Katherine Hardihood has succeeded in keeping the Machiavellian Fart out of her mind all day. Then at five-ten, just as she is about to walk home for supper, leaving Megan Burroughs in charge for an hour or so, the wife of the Machiavellian Fart appears at the desk, her daughter Amy and son Cannon in tow. She is there to pick up her reserved copy of Lake Toads and Land Frogs , R.C. Corwin’s young adult fantasy about mutlicultural tolerance.
    â€œAren’t you so proud of Bill?” Karen Aitchbone says to Katherine Hardihood.
    â€œHmmm?”
    Karen Aitchbone blushes loving-wife pink. “Stepping into Don Grinspoon’s shoes, I mean. This is going to be the best Squaw Days yet, isn’t it? Not that Donald didn’t always do a great job. But he’s had so much on his mind the past few years. I don’t know how some people cope, do you?”
    â€œNo, I don’t,” Katherine Hardihood says. She hands Lake Toads and Land Frogs to Amy. “Be sure to return it by the 28th. There are lots of other children waiting.”
    â€œI will,” says Amy Aitchbone.
    Now the Machiavellian Fart that is the husband and father of these perfectly harmless people is stinking up the inside Katherine Hardihood’s head. She worries and fumes all the way home. She worries and fumes all the time she is wiping down the curio cabinet with Pine Sol and all the time she is simmering a can of Campbell’s Manhattan Style Clam Chowder and spreading margarine on eight saltine crackers. She worries and fumes while she is eating that soup and those eight crackers and sipping a half-glass of skimmed milk, scratching Rhubarb’s ears while he sleeps next to the plastic roses on the table.
    Knowing as many facts as she does, Katherine Hardihood can commiserate with any number of historic figures who faced similar damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t predicaments. But with the demon responsible for her predicament being D. William Aitchbone, her heart instantly reaches out to the biggest schnook in all Christendom, Judas Iscariot. How Judas must have felt that night, she thinks as she plays with Rhubarb’s head: If he betrays Jesus, as Jesus almost certainly wants, he’ll be the most reviled man