Page 90 of Where You're Planted

He texted Tansy, too, just to be sure she got the message. He waited for her reply, but it never came.

27

Tansy

The manager’s office at the Rojas branch library had a sliding glass door to a small, paved patio with two rusty chairs, a pot with cigarette butts piled atop bone-dry dirt, and an empty bird feeder. As sad as the sight was, Tansy itched to suggest she and Rashida move their meeting outside into the sunshine slanting across the cement. She felt boxed in by the stacks of papers on the desk and the metal filing cabinets lining the walls, and she shivered under the AC vent, having forgotten the necessity of a library sweater during warm months since she’d been in the Little Green Library.

“So what’s going on?” Rashida asked, closing the main door and moving one of the paper stacks to the floor so she could see Tansy across the cluttered desk. “It sounded urgent.”

“There’s a tree on the library,” Tansy blurted. “On Grant Gellman.”

Rashida tapped the tips of her red acrylic nails together, just like she used to. Her eyebrows lifted and then she shook her head in sympathy and muttered, “Bless.”

“Yeah.”

Rashida waited, tap-tapping away. “What does that have to do with you coming to see me?”

Tansy shrugged. She honestly didn’t know what Rashida could offer. But Tansy had faked competency these few months as interim manager, and her library needed arealmanager, someone who actually knew what the hell to do, to give her some direction. “I applied for a grant to pay for our building reno, and I just found out we didn’t get it. And now there’s a tree on the roof, and I just—”

The backs of Tansy’s eyes stung, and a thick knot pushed up into her throat. She could barely acknowledge this truth to herself, let alone admit it to Rashida, who had once steered their ship so confidently.

Before she’djumped shipand requested to be reassigned here, anyway.

Tansy took a cleansing breath and chose her words carefully, swallowing down the emotion. “Why didn’t you come back with us?”

Rashida’s chair creaked as she pushed back into it, crossing her arms and studying the white ceiling tiles.

Everything in this office was new, replaced during their own renovation, yet after just a few months, it already looked lived in, messy.

“I told you,” Rashida said. “It was time for a change.”

“But whythen?”When we needed you, Tansy meant.

Rashida tapped her nails on the desk now, a rapid succession from pointer to pinky and back. “When else? We were closed. We were all scattered across the city.”

“Until I got us into the gardens. You could have come back and—”

Rashida pitched forward, the chair creaking loudly once more, and she pressed her palms on the stack of papers near Tansy’s side of the desk, fixing her with a stern look. “You’re here now because it’s the end of the line.”

Tansy shook her head. “Not yet. They won’t decide for two more weeks.”

“Honey,” Rashida said, a note ofmiss me with that naive nonsenseto it. “Two weeks from now. Three months ago. It’s all the same. They were never going to renovate. And frankly, it’s the right call. That place flooded four times while I worked there.Four times.”

Tansy’s hackles rose at the phrasethat place.

“Did you know my sister, my mom, and I came to Houston on a bus during Katrina?”

Tansy knew Rashida was from New Orleans, but of all her old coworkers, Rashida had always been the most private. The information dampened Tansy’s righteousness a bit.

“Left the home that was in my family for three generations. Started over here, only to ride out Rita and Ike and now this, on top of flash floods that just get worse and worse.”

Tansy picked at her nails in her lap. They were short and ragged, and she’d aggravated a hangnail on her thumb, unable to leave it alone. Fresh blood filled in the raw tear in her skin, the sting mirroring the burning behind her eyes.

“Every time the library flooded,” Rashida said, “we lost so much. Too much. Materials. But more than that. Patrons who left and never came back. Stability and routine. My goodness, a basic feeling of safety. Even when you replace the damaged belongings and get back to some kind of normal, those losses stay with you. They stack up somewhere in the back of your mind,so it’s not just the new loss when it happens again. It’sallof them.” She sighed, and Tansy felt it in her own body, the heaviness of it. “I’ve done all the losing and rebuilding I can take.”

Tansy couldn’t very well argue against that. “But don’t you think that when people have lost so much, they needusmore than ever?”

Rashida leaned all the way across the desk now to squeeze Tansy’s hands, stopping her anxious picking, before shifting back into her seat and tugging her chunky sweater closed across her chest. “You lost a lot, too.”

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