Serendipity Green by Rob Levandoski Page B

in all Judea, Jesus being the messiah and all; yet if he refuses to betray his lord, he might be mucking up God’s grand plan for human salvation. Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t.
    She walks back to the library and checks out videos and computer games and CDs and even a few books. At eight-thirty she turns off the lights and locks the door. She goes home and takes a zip-lock bag of rhubarb stalks from the freezer and puts it in the sink to thaw, just in case she proves as weak-willed as Judas Iscariot.
    The next morning she bakes a rhubarb pie.
    Victoria Bonobo waits for D. William Aitchbone in the parking lot of the Wagon Wheel. At exactly noon he pulls in. Inside, they take the booth nobody wants by the restrooms. One restroom door says BUCKAROOS. The other says SCHOOL MARMS. Victoria Bonobo orders a light meal for her nervous stomach, tossed salad and hot tea. D. William Aitchbone orders a mushroom burger, fries and coffee.
    â€œThanks for last night,” Aitchbone says when the waitress heads to the kitchen with their orders.
    Victoria can feel her red blood cells spinning. “I think privatization is the way to go, too. It will take some doing to convince the others, but—”
    The coffee and hot tea come. He waits for the waitress to pour and leave. “We’ll get it done, I think.” Then he smiles. “But that’s not what I wanted to see you about.”
    Her red blood cells are somersaulting now. “Oh?”
    D. William Aitchbone leans over his coffee steam. “When you were going through your divorce, I remember you telling me …”
    Victoria leans into her tea steam.
    â€œâ€¦ that your brother roomed with the Vice President when they were at Ohio State. And that they still keep in touch.”
    Victoria feels her red blood cells sink to the bottom of her veins like flakes of rust. “Oh.”
    While Katherine Hardihood worries and fumes at the library, the rhubarb pie cools on top of her stove, protected from her tomcat by the heavy lid of a turkey roaster. She does not go back to work after supper. For the first time since becoming branch librarian, she’ll let Megan Burroughs lock up. She changes into a comfortable pair of slacks and puts on a huge, poppy-red turtleneck that hides her unappetizing trunk under thick folds and blazing color. She applies a thin coat of gloss to her lips then, thinking better, wipes it off, leaving her librarian’s lips a bit pinker nonetheless. She brushes her teeth with baking soda, puts the rhubarb pie in a Rubbermaid pie carrier, and walks through the snowless night to the unpainted two-story frame on South Mill.
    Howie Dornick, breath smelling of peanut butter, cracker crumbs on his flannel shirt, opens the front door without turning on the porch light. “Katherine?”
    Katherine Hardihood stiffly offers him the rhubarb pie, the way Indians in old movies offer peace pipes. “I remembered how much you liked it,” she says. “I found some this morning in the freezer—not pie but rhubarb—and said ‘Jiminy Cricket, what the heck, I’ll bake Howard Dornick a pie.’”
    He takes the Rubbermaid container. “Isn’t that thoughtful.”
    The heat escaping from the open door mixes with the outside cold, forming a noticeable vortex of spinning air that, if this uncomfortable moment lasts any longer, Katherine Hardihood fears, might erupt into a full-blown tornado, ripping the porch right off its foundation stones. “We need to talk, Howard.”
    He backs inside. She follows and closes the door. “Why don’t you cut us some pie,” she says, peeling off her noisy coat and white knit hat. The power of her poppy-red sweater sends him fleeing to the kitchen. “I’ve still got a little coffee in my Thermos, if you want some.”
    â€œWhy not,” she says.
    And so they sit on the sofa eating rhubarb pie, drinking stale instant coffee.