I won. Mrs. Delgado gets to keep her kids, and she gets a roof that doesn’t leak. And I did it as Harley Matthews, social worker, not as a Thompson accessory.
“Matthews, you still breathing over there?”
I look up. Sarah is leaning against my cubicle wall, a stained mug of lukewarm decaf in her hand. Her hair is a disaster, and there’s a smudge of highlighter on her cheek.
“Just finished the Delgado case,” I say, stretching my arms over my head until my spine pops.
Sarah’s eyes widen. “The eviction stay? You got it?”
“Signed and sealed.”
“Damn,” she breathes, a small, genuine smile breaking through her fatigue. “Nice work, Harley. I thought that landlord had the city council in his pocket.”
“He did,” I say, shutting down my computer. The screen blinks into blackness. “But he didn’t have me.”
Now Mrs. Delgado gets to stay in her apartment until she can move into the new housing development that’s about to break ground.
I gather my things. My bag is a canvas tote with a fraying strap, packed with a half-eaten granola bar and a notebook full of scribbled court dates. I look around my office. It’s a mess of beige partitions and motivational posters from 1994 that say things like “Teamwork Makes the Dream Work” in a font that’saged like milk. The carpet is a shade of gray that was probably meant to hide dirt but ended up just absorbing it.
It’s ugly. It’s cramped. Yet I’m not holding my breath.
“See you Monday, Sarah,” I call out, heading for the door.
“Have a good one, Harl. Don’t think about cases. Drink something that didn’t come out of a vending machine.”
The elevator ride down is slow, the cables rattling in the shaft like a box of old bones. When the doors slide open, the lobby is filled with the usual Friday evening rush.
As I slide into the driver’s seat of my Honda, my phone buzzes in my pocket.
It’s a text from Maria.
Still coming by the store? Lily found a crate of ‘classics’ from the seventies that smell like mothballs. We need a professional eye to tell us if they’re vintage or trash. Also, Dad made your favorite stew.
Smiling, I type back: On my way. Tell Lily I’m bringing my ‘trash’ radar.
I pull out of the lot, merging into traffic. The route to the bookstore takes me through the heart of the city, past the brick three-flats and the corner bakeries where the windows are fogged from the heat of the ovens. I pass the park where I used to walk with Skyler back when we lived in the apartment—the real one, the one with the drafty windows and the neighbor who played the cello at two a.m.
I don’t look away when I see the park bench where he told me he wanted to spend the rest of his life with me. Two months ago, that memory would have felt like a punch to the gut. Now, it just feels like a footnote in a book I’ve already finished reading.
I hit the blinker and turn onto the street where the bookstore sits. The neon sign for Turning Purple Pages is flickering, a warm, inviting beacon in the growing dusk. Last month Maria and Dad worked hard on renovating the store. It’s about an houraway from their home, and about an hour and a half to Lake Forest, so it’s taken a lot of time and hard work. Like my own career, I’m so proud of them.
I park and sit for a moment, listening to the engine tick as it cools down.
The bell above the door gives a cheerful, tinny jingle as I step inside. Immediately, the air changes. It’s a thick, intoxicating mix of fresh pine sawdust, wet paint, and that specific, vanilla-scented musk that only comes from thousands of old pages.
Turning Purple Pages is currently a beautiful, chaotic mess.
Dad is at the far wall, perched on a short stepladder. He’s wearing his old, charcoal-stained work pants and a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbow, holding a level against a new shelf.
“Dad,” I say, dropping my bag onto the counter.
He doesn’t look down right away. He waits for the bubble in the level to settle exactly in the center, then marks the wood with a pencil stub he keeps tucked behind his ear. Only then does he turn, his face breaking into a slow, weathered grin.
“Hey, Peanut. You’re late. Lily already tried to organize the ‘Romance’ section alphabetically by the hero’s eye color.”
“It was a valid system!” Lily yells from the back.
She pops her head out from behind a stack of boxes, her violet curls wilder than they were this morning and a smudge of black ink across the bridge of her nose. She’s currently wrestling with a vintage cash register we bought on eBay.
