Probie Work

The six hundreds were still out of order.

June knew it every time she walked past them, the way you’d know a tooth was gone. She’d picked the books up off the floor the afternoon Nell went to Tillamook and stacked them on the cart, and the cart had sat at the end of the aisle for eight days, and she had not shelved a single one. She told herself it was because she was busy. She was busy. But she’d shelved eleven thousand books in her life and she could have put twenty back in twenty minutes, and instead she walked past the cart every morning and touched the handle and kept going.

Tuesday she chalked at six-twenty. She did the fire engine better this time — she’d studied the real one through the children’s room window and it had a shape she understood now, a long low cab and a big square back — and she wrote KINDERGARTEN FRIENDS WELCOME BACK across the top because Ms. Iverson had promised Thursdays and June wanted the town to see that a school bus came here. She drew forty stick figures holding hands. She’d counted forty for real, once, on a strip of grass, and she wanted it on the sidewalk where it could stay a while.

At eight-fifty she had twenty-six. Walt Hanratty came in with Owen and no umbrella, and Priya came with both children and a bag of oranges she set on the circulation desk without a word, and the bike teenager — Cody, she’d gotten it out of him — slouched in with his sister and went straight to the graphic novels like he’d been paid to. The room filled the way it filled now. Not fast. Steady. June stood in the doorway of the children’s room and did the math and thought, thirty-four by nine, thirty-eight by ten past, and then the window went red.

Every small head turned.

“Not again,” said Walt.

June’s stomach dropped and stayed dropped. She knew the sound — the low grumble through the floor, the enormous shape filling the glass — and her first thought was Nell, and her second thought was that Nell was in Tillamook, and her third thought didn’t get to finish because the engine had stopped in her gravel lot with its lights going and a man was climbing down from the back who was not in gear.

He was in jeans. He was in jeans and a Station Nine hoodie with the sleeves cut off at the shoulder, which on a man that size was a decision, and he had a cooler in one hand and a foil-covered tray balanced on top of the cooler, and he was bald as a river rock and wider than the door he was about to walk through. Behind him, Rosie Keough dropped off the tailboard in a flannel shirt and running tights and put her sunglasses on top of her head and looked at the chalk fire engine on the sidewalk for a long second.

“She got the cab right,” Rosie said, to nobody.

They came through the green door. Fitz filled the hall. He looked at June standing at the end of it with her mouth open and said, “Surprise,” in the exact tone of a man announcing that the water heater was out.

“You’re — is there a call? Is something —”

“Off duty.” He lifted the cooler an inch. “Brannigan signed a public education detail. That’s what the paper says. Public education. I’m the education.” He looked past her into the children’s room, at thirty-some children who had gone dead silent the way they did, and something went across his face that she couldn’t read. “That’s a lot of kids.”

“It’s story hour.”

“I know what it is.” He shifted the tray. “Where do you want the cookies.”

“You brought cookies.”

“I brought oatmeal cookies. They have applesauce in them instead of butter. They’re from page sixty-three and they’re not diet cookies and if you say the word diet in front of the kids I’m leaving.” He walked past her. Rosie followed. June stood in the hall with her hands empty and her count wrecked and then she turned and looked out the front window at the engine, because somebody had to be in it.

The window on the driver’s side was down.

Not the officer’s side. The driver’s. He was sitting where Sheehan sat, in the blue uniform shirt with his forearm on the sill and a book open against the wheel, and he was not looking at the library. He was looking at the book. But he’d parked it so the cab faced the green door, and the window was down in forty-degree fog, and June stood on the other side of the glass and counted the seconds until he looked up, and it was four.

He looked. She looked. He went back to the book.

She went outside.

It was cold. She hadn’t grabbed her cardigan. She crossed the gravel in her sneakers with her arms around herself and stopped at the driver’s door, and she had to tip her head back to see him, which was a new angle on a man she’d only ever looked up at, and she didn’t like how much she noticed that.

“You drove,” she said.

“Sheehan’s off.”

“Sheehan’s never off.”

“He’s off today.” Gray didn’t close the book. His thumb held the place. “Cap can’t spare two, so it’s the detail and me. I stay with the rig.”

“You’re on shift.”

“Till seven tomorrow.”

“So you brought the engine down the hill on shift, on a public education detail, and you’re going to sit in it.”

“That’s the detail.”

She looked at the book. She couldn’t see the cover from where she stood — it was flat against the wheel — but she could see the edge of a clear plastic jacket and a spine label, white with black type, the county’s. Her heart did something she told it not to do.

“Rosie’s going to read,” she said.

“I know.”

“In voices.”

“I know.” He turned a page. “That’s why I’m out here.”

She went back in.

---

Rosie read Ember Goes to Work. June had picked it Sunday night for herself — it was about a fire station dog who kept trying to help and kept getting in the way — and Rosie took it out of her hands in the doorway and looked at the cover and said, “Oh, this one’s got a dispatcher,” and sat down in the reading chair like it had been built for her, which it had not, and folded all six feet of herself into it with her knees up around her ears.

She did the dispatcher as a woman who’d smoked for forty years. She did the captain as Brannigan — the slow elevator, the pauses, June nearly bit through her lip — and she did the dog as a dog, a real one, with a bark that made the four-year-olds shriek and the seven-year-olds pretend they hadn’t. She did the fire in a whisper. Thirty-eight children leaned in until the front row was practically in the chair with her.

“And Ember heard the tones,” Rosie read, and then she did the tones, three long ones rising, exactly, and June saw Fitz — at the back by the cookie tray with his arms folded — go still for one second and then unfold and reach for a cookie like nothing had happened.

“Is that what it sounds like?” A girl in the front. Ms. Iverson’s class, a five-year-old with a gap where her front teeth should be.

“That’s what it sounds like.”

“Does it wake you up?”

“Every time.”

“Do you get scared?”

Rosie closed the book on her finger. She looked at the kid. She didn’t do a voice.

“Yeah,” she said. “For about a second. Then I’m too busy.”

She opened the book again and did the dog.

Fitz ran the cookies. He didn’t ask June if he could run the cookies; he had the foil off and the tray on the little table by the window before she’d finished reading the sign-in sheet, and when the line formed he stood behind the table like a man at a carving station and said “One,” and every child took one, including Cody, who took one and then took another when he thought nobody was looking and got a look from Fitz that made him put it back.

A boy named Tobias was fifth in line.

June knew Tobias. He was five and had come to every story hour since the second one, and he had a way of standing very close to whatever adult was nearest and looking up until they noticed him. He stood very close to Fitz. Fitz noticed him. Fitz was two hundred and eighty pounds of noticing.

“You want a job,” Fitz said.

Tobias nodded.

“Take this.” Fitz handed him the second tray, the empty one, the one the first batch had come on. “Take it to the librarian. Ask her where the trash is. Put the foil in the trash. Bring the tray back.”

Tobias took the tray with both hands. It was as wide as he was.

“That’s probie work,” Fitz said.

“What’s probie.”

“Newest guy on the crew. Does everything nobody else wants.” Fitz handed the next kid a cookie. “Somebody’s got to carry the tray. You’re the probie. When you get good at the tray you get a better job.”

“What’s the better job.”

“Cookies.”

Tobias looked at the cookies. He looked at the tray in his hands. Then he turned around and walked the tray across the children’s room with his tongue between his teeth, and June bent down and took it from him and said the trash was under the desk, and he put the foil in the trash and came back for the tray and carried it back across the room and handed it up to Fitz, who took it without looking and said, “Good. Now you’re a probie with a clean tray.”

Tobias’s mother was standing by the door with her coat on.

“He says he did probie work,” she said to June, twenty minutes later, when the room had started to thin. She said it carefully, the way you’d ask about a word your kid had picked up on the playground. “Is that — what is that.”

“It’s a fire department thing. It means the newest firefighter. It’s —” June looked at Fitz, who was folding foil into a square the size of a playing card with a face of total concentration. “It’s a compliment. I think.”

“He’s going to say it at dinner.”

“Probably.”

“He’s going to say it to his father, who is a lawyer.”

“I’m so sorry.”

Tobias’s mother looked at her son, who was standing very close to Rosie now and looking up, and something in her face gave way.

“He hasn’t stopped talking since we got in the car,” she said. “He hasn’t talked in the car since October. I don’t know what you did.”

“I didn’t do anything. Fitz did.”

“Who’s Fitz?”

June pointed. Tobias’s mother looked at two hundred and eighty pounds of bald man folding foil, and her eyebrows went up, and stayed there.

“Well,” she said.

The banter came in through the walls. June couldn’t have stopped it if she’d wanted to. Fitz told Rosie that her dog voice was just her voice, and Rosie told Fitz that she’d heard him on the radio and it was a wonder dispatch didn’t send a translator, and Fitz said that at least he could reach the top shelf, and Rosie said that at least she could see over the wheel, and the kids watched it like a tennis match. A girl asked Fitz why his neck was like that. She pointed. June started to move. Fitz looked down at the girl and put two fingers against the shiny skin above his collar and said, “Fire. Got too close,” and then, before the room could go quiet, “That’s why you go outside when the librarian says go outside. You go outside. She says it, you go. Understand?” and thirty children nodded like he’d read them the Constitution, and Rosie said, “Fitz didn’t go outside,” and Fitz said, “Fitz was inside, Keough, that was the job,” and the room laughed and it was over and June realized she was still standing half out of her chair.

She sat down. She counted.

Fifty-eight. Fifty-eight, with Walt and Priya’s baby and Ms. Iverson and the woman who’d come in for the tax forms two weeks ago and come back. She wrote it at the bottom of the sheet and circled it and then, because the number wasn’t done, she got up and went to the front window.

He was still in the cab. He’d moved the book to the sill. He was reading with one arm along the top of the wheel and his chin down and the fog coming in the window and settling in his hair, and from here she could see the cover, finally, black and white, a man’s hands on the planked hull of a boat.

She wrote Lt. Donnelly — lot on the line under fifty-eight. Fifty-nine. She did not go out and tell him.

---

The board met Wednesday at two in the county building in Tillamook, in a room on the second floor with fluorescent lights and a long table at the front and a pitcher of water nobody drank.

June had thought about asking someone. She’d stood in the kitchen of the apartment Tuesday night with the French press going cold and thought about it the way you’d think about a bill — it was there, it had to be dealt with, and she was going to deal with it, and the dealing with it was going to consist of not doing it. Rosie would have come. Rosie would have driven, in the truck that had been red, and talked the whole ninety minutes, and June would have walked into that room with a six-foot firefighter beside her and she’d have felt — she knew exactly what she’d have felt. She’d have felt like a woman being helped.

She wore the cardigan without the smear on it. She drove alone. She counted mile markers because there was nothing else on 101 to count, and she got to forty-one by the time the road bent inland toward town.

There were three of them at the table. Commissioner Tierney was in the middle in a charcoal jacket with the silver bob exactly at her jaw. To her left was a man in his seventies with a bolo tie and a face like a dried apple whose nameplate said R. SANDERLIN, DIST. 4, and to her right a woman June’s own age in a fleece vest with a laptop open in front of her and the look of someone who’d been given a lot of packets and had read all of them. D. MBEKI, DIST. 1.

There were eleven chairs for the public. June sat in the second row on the aisle. The other ten chairs were empty. A man from the county’s facilities office read a report about a boiler in Rockaway and then sat down, and then Tierney said, “Harbor Point,” and looked at June over the top of the packet.

June stood up.

“Ms. Callahan. You’ve read the quarterly.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Circulation’s up.”

“A hundred and ninety-one last month. That’s up forty percent from the month before.”

“That’s up forty percent from a number that was fifty-five percent of minimum.” Sanderlin didn’t look up. He was turning pages. “I’ve got here a branch that circulated a hundred and thirty-seven items a month for a year before you arrived. That’s four books a day. I’ve got a boiler in Rockaway that costs more than four books a day.”

“It’s a hundred and ninety-one now.”

“I heard you.”

“And it’ll be two-fifty. I’ve got a kindergarten class coming Thursdays and a toddler program Wednesdays and a partnership with the —” She stopped. She’d been about to say fire district. She didn’t have a partnership with the fire district. She had a lieutenant who read in a parked engine. “I’ve got the numbers going the right direction, Commissioner. That’s all I can show you today. I can’t show you a quarter I haven’t had yet.”

Sanderlin looked up. His eyes were small and pale and not unkind, which was worse.

“Do you have anyone here to speak for the branch?” he said.

June looked at the ten empty chairs. She looked back.

“No sir.”

“Letters? Written support? Anything from the community.”

“Not yet.”

“Not yet.” He turned another page. “Ms. Callahan, I’ve closed two branches in nineteen years and I didn’t like either one. But both times, the room was full. People came from forty miles to yell at me. They brought their kids. They brought signs.” He set the packet down. “Nobody’s here.”

“I didn’t ask anyone.”

It came out before she’d decided to say it. Tierney’s eyes moved.

“Why not?” said Mbeki. It was the first thing she’d said. She had a soft voice and a notebook open beside the laptop.

June opened her mouth. She thought of Rosie’s truck and Fitz’s tray and a man in a cab with the window down in the fog, and she thought of every one of them driving ninety minutes to sit in a chair for her, and she couldn’t make herself say the true thing, which was because then I’d owe them, so she said the other true thing.

“Because it’s my job to make the case. Not theirs.”

Tierney let that sit for about three seconds. Then she closed her packet.

“Here’s where we are,” she said. “The board’s going to formalize the third criterion, because ‘community support’ is soft and Commissioner Sanderlin doesn’t vote on soft. So it’s this. A petition. Five hundred signatures of district residents — residents, Ms. Callahan, not visitors, not the summer people — attesting that the Harbor Point branch is a necessary public service. And documentation of what the packet calls community integration. That means the branch embedded in the life of the town. Partnerships in writing. Organizations that will put their name on paper next to yours. Not attendance. We’ve got your attendance. Attendance is people coming to you. Integration is you being part of something they’d miss.” She paused. “You told me the fire district. I’m going to hold you to that.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Five hundred,” said Sanderlin. “Harbor Point’s got what, eleven hundred people?”

“Eleven hundred and forty in the district,” Mbeki said, from the laptop.

“Then she needs half the town.” He picked his packet back up. “Good luck to you, Ms. Callahan. I mean that.”

June sat down. Her legs did it for her. The facilities man got back up and started talking about a roof in Nehalem, and June sat in the second row with her hands flat on her knees and did the math.

Five hundred. Sixty-one days. Eight a day, if she didn’t take Sundays.

She’d gotten forty on a strip of grass with her hands shaking. She could get eight.

---

Nell was on the third floor in a room that faced the parking lot.

She had the bed cranked up and a large-print mystery open on the tray table that she couldn’t read and hadn’t closed, and her left hand lay on the blanket like it belonged to someone else, and when June came through the door she turned her head toward the sound and said, “Sneakers. That’s you.”

“That’s me.”

“You’ve been to the county.”

“How —”

“You smell like the county. Fluorescent lights and that carpet.” Nell’s speech was slower than it had been. Not much. A quarter beat behind, like a record on the wrong setting. “Sit.”

June sat. She took Nell’s right hand, the good one, and it gripped her back, hard, the way it always had.

“Well?”

“Five hundred signatures. And proof of community integration.”

“What’s that when it’s at home.”

“Partnerships. In writing.” June looked at the left hand on the blanket. “The fire district.”

Nell made the sound. Hm.

“How’s the room,” June said. “Are they feeding you? Is Walt —”

“Walt’s been. Brought me that.” Nell tipped her head at the mystery. “Can’t read a word of it. Like having it there.” She was quiet for a moment. “Who’s shelving the six hundreds.”

June didn’t answer.

“June.”

“Nobody. They’re on the cart.”

“Eight days.”

“I know.”

“Books don’t care who puts them back.” Nell’s grip tightened, once. “You’re not leaving them for me. I’m not coming back to that aisle. Not to shelve. My hand doesn’t know what a hardcover is anymore. Doctor says maybe. I say I’m eighty.” She turned her face toward the window, toward the gray square of parking lot she couldn’t see. “Shelve the damn six hundreds.”

“Okay.”

“Who’d you take with you today.”

“Nobody.”

“Hm,” said Nell, and that was all, and it was enough.

June drove home with the fog coming in off the ocean and the sun behind it like a coin under water, and she counted the mile markers backward, and at seventeen she had to pull over on the shoulder for a minute and sit with the engine running and her hands on the wheel and look at the dune grass until it stopped being blurry.

Then she drove the rest of the way.

---

Friday she shelved the six hundreds.

She did it at four-thirty with the green door locked, on her knees on the industrial carpet, one book at a time, checking every spine against the one beside it because she didn’t trust her hands the way Nell had trusted hers. It took forty minutes. When it was done the aisle was whole and the cart was empty and she stood at the end of the six hundreds with her hand flat on the third shelf where Nell’s fingers had been, and she didn’t cry, because she’d done that on the shoulder of 101 and she wasn’t going to do it twice in one week.

Then she printed the petition.

She made it herself on the beige computer, which took eleven minutes to open the word processor, and it said at the top THE HARBOR POINT BRANCH IS A NECESSARY PUBLIC SERVICE and had twenty lines below it for name, address, and signature. She printed thirty copies. The printer thought about each one. She clipped them to a clipboard she found in the bottom drawer of the circulation desk with Carol’s handwriting on the back, and she got eleven signatures before five — Marguerite at the bakery, and everyone behind the bakery counter, and Dell Amundsen, who was walking past with a book under his arm and signed with the book still under his arm and then handed her the book and said, “That’s two,” and kept walking.

She drove up Cedar Hill at five-forty with the clipboard on the passenger seat and the fog behind her.

He was at the sawhorses.

He had the porch ceiling done — she could see it from the turnaround, the white beadboard running clean and even the whole length under the eave — and he’d moved on to the steps, which had been three planks on cinderblocks since she’d arrived and were now a set of stringers cut and stood up against the porch edge, waiting for treads. He was cutting a tread. He had the saw in one hand and a tape in the other and a pencil behind his ear, and he had the window down on his truck with the radio going low, and he didn’t turn around when her car door shut.

She got the clipboard and her bag and walked toward her stairs.

“Board was Wednesday,” he said.

She stopped. He still had his back to her. He set the tape and marked the board.

“Yes.”

“Walt said.”

“Of course Walt said.”

“You went alone.”

“Who was I going to take?” She shifted the clipboard. He’d looked up now. Not at her — at the clipboard, at the thirty sheets of paper with twenty lines each. “It’s a hearing. You sit in a chair. Nobody needs to watch me sit in a chair.”

“Five hundred,” he said.

“Walt said that too.”

“Fitz said. Fitz heard it from Walt.” He put the saw down. “How many.”

“Eleven.”

He didn’t say anything to that. He looked at the clipboard for a while, and then at her, and she had the feeling she’d had on the wet apron, of being checked for something. Except that this time she couldn’t tell what he was looking for, and she wasn’t sure he could either.

“Rosie asked,” he said. “If you’d called her. About Wednesday.”

“I didn’t call anybody.”

“I know.”

“It’s my job, Gray. It’s not — I’m not going to drag five people ninety minutes to Tillamook so I can feel better about a room.” She heard herself and made herself stop. Then she made herself say the rest of it, because he was standing there and he’d asked. “I didn’t ask Fitz to bring cookies. I didn’t ask Rosie to read. I didn’t ask the captain to sign a detail so you could sit in a parking lot for an hour. I don’t ask. It’s not how I —” She shrugged, and the clipboard slid, and she caught it. “You know how I do it. I told you.”

Nobody sends you away.

He picked the saw back up. He looked at the tread he’d marked. He set the blade against the line and didn’t pull the trigger, and stood there like that for long enough that she thought the conversation was over and turned toward her stairs.

“Callahan.”

She turned back.

“Market.” He said it to the board. “Saturday. The one on the waterfront. What time’s it open.”

She stood in the gravel with her bag on her shoulder and the clipboard against her chest and the fog coming up the hill behind her.

“Nine,” she said.

He nodded once. He pulled the trigger. The saw went through the tread in one clean pass and the offcut dropped into the shell and he bent to pick it up, and she went up her stairs, and she didn’t count them, because for once she’d lost track of what the number was.

---