“Good luck, kid. You’re going to need it.” Harry Blackwell dropped a well-worn set of brass keys into my unsuspecting palm and stepped toward the open door of the mayor’s office—an office which, until last week’s election, had been his. For twenty-eight years, he’d served Trillium Bay’s community. Before that, his older brother had been the mayor, and before that, their father, and his father before him, and even his father before him. You get the picture. A Blackwell patriarch has been running the show around here on Wenniway Island pretty much ever since a fiery comet crashed into the earth and killed off all the dinosaurs. That is, until now. Now it was my turn.
That’s right. Me. Modest, pragmatic Brooke Therese Callaghan, science teacher turned public servant. Not only had I toppled the Blackwell dynasty, but I was also the first female, and the youngest, mayor ever elected in Trillium Bay. Unprecedented stuff, and trust me, no one was more surprised by my landslide victory than I was. Except for maybe poor old Harry Blackwell.
He took a shuffling sidestep, his scuffed brown loafers scraping softly against the hardwood floor as his long-suffering assistant, Gertie, stood in the background with both hands pressed to her heart, as if the sight of him departing was more than she could bear. She listed to the left, her bony hip bumping up against a gigantic mahogany desk strewn with stacks of manila files, tattered papers, and a plethora of office-y type things. A dented black stapler. A wire in-basket. A dusty bust of Ronald Reagan.
“Where are you going?” I asked as he continued to amble toward the door. “I thought we were meeting to go over . . . things.” I wasn’t entirely sure what kind of things because, truth be told, I was wholly unprepared to be the mayor. Like a bride who thinks a lot about the wedding but very little about the marriage, I’d focused most of my energy on the campaign without a great deal of strategizing over how to run things in the event that I actually won. But won I had, and having earned the trust of my constituents, I was now determined to be the best damn mayor the town had ever seen. Luckily for me, while Harry may have had size-fourteen feet, his shoes should not be all that hard to fill.
“I’m out of here. Goin’ fishin’. Gertie can bring you up to speed.”
I glanced at his assistant just as Gertie dashed a fat tear from her splotchy cheek.
“Um, I’m sure Gertie will do a fabulous job filling me in, but don’t you and I have lots to talk about? I’d like to learn as much from you as I can before you officially step down. You’ve got so much knowledge and expertise.” Out of necessity, I chose to appeal to his battleship-size ego, because even though Harry Blackwell wasn’t the most dynamic character, or the most inventive, or ambitious, or insightful for that matter, at the moment, he was my best source of information. Plus, admittedly, the people-pleaser in me wanted him to be happy about this turn of events, which he clearly was not. I’d tarnished his reputation and usurped his power. That was evident in the harsh set of his fleshy jaw.
He plucked a raggedy khaki fishing hat from a spindly coatrack and dropped it on his nearly bald head. “It’s already official. I resigned this morning. The tribe has spoken and voted me off the island, so no sense in me sticking around where I’m not wanted. Next week I’m heading down to Florida to visit my grandchildren. You can keep the Reagan statue, but I’ll be back for my autographed photos with George and George W.”
My breath cut short and I looked to Gertie once more, hoping in vain for some reinforcement, but his assistant just let another tear dribble down her face, her pale brown eyes magnified to triple their size behind her thick reading glasses. She looked like a praying mantis.
“You already resigned? But . . .” My tongue felt suddenly clumsy and thick. “But I’m not supposed to take office until January. It’s November. If you’ve already resigned, then who is in charge right now?”
He crooked a bushy, bristly white eyebrow and looked down at my still-open palm. “See those keys?”
I nodded.
“Looks like you’re in charge.”
He took advantage of my surprise to slide around and lurch out into the hallway. He was pretty agile for a grumpy old man.
“Best to you, Gertie,” he called out, and the bell rang over the lobby entrance as the door rattled open and slammed shut. The sound reverberated against the walls, and inside my chest. The keys grew twice as heavy, and twice as cold, matching the new sensation of foreboding in my lungs. I’d been nervous about our scheduled meeting today. Anxious to get started because I strongly suspected my learning curve wouldn’t be steep so much as it would be a straight trajectory upward. Being born and raised on Wenniway, I’d participated in my fair share of committees over the years, and you couldn’t live on an island this size without being aware of what things had an impact on the community, but negotiating those decisions and presiding over the city council were far above any of my previous experiences. My gaze lifted from those keys back to Gertie’s stricken expression.
“I suppose you’ll want to fire me and hire someone younger.” She squared her shoulders in a blatantly false display of courage. Her peony-pink lipstick seldom stayed within the actual boundaries of her lips, making their current trembling even more obvious, but her worry was misguided.
“Fire you? Are you crazy? I’m going to need all the help I can get. Please don’t leave me.” No false flattery there. I was completely sincere.
“Really?” The trembling stopped, and a wobbly sort of smile slanted all her pinched features. Gertie wasn’t beautiful by anyone’s standards, with jet-black bangs cut too short and straight across her pale forehead, and a reed-thin body that made stick figures look voluptuous, but she had a sweet and efficient quality to her. Never married, she’d devoted her life to the running of this island’s government. She was as instrumental in the inner workings as Harry had ever been, and some even went so far as to speculate that she was the real brains behind anything that actually got accomplished. I hoped that was true because it looked like Harry Blackwell had prematurely evacuated.
“Of course I want you to stay, Gertie. You were Harry’s right-hand gal, and I’ve heard that nobody knows the rules and regulations and bylaws like you do. I need you.” Relief flooded Gertie’s expression, followed by a slight blush, and I got the sense that Harry hadn’t spent too much time telling his assistant she did a good job. As a teacher, that was something I could certainly relate to. With a winter population of just over six hundred people, the island had only one school, and that school had only three teachers. I’d been one of them for the past thirteen years, and in all that time, I’d been thanked by parents exactly never times. Teachers are often taken for granted. Like Gertie.
“Oh, thank you, Mayor Callaghan.” She all but saluted.
“You’ve known me since I was a little kid, Gertie. I think it’s okay to call me Brooke.”
Her smile widened, exposing seriously crooked teeth as she nodded. “Of course. Can I get you some coffee, Mayor . . . um, Brooke?”
Coffee? No one ever got me coffee at school. I could get used to this. “That would be lovely, Gertie. Thanks so much. I take it black.”
An all-too-brief flutter of power rushed to my head but was gone as soon as it arrived because, as Gertie walked out, I took my first good, long look around. The mayor’s office, my office, was a study in chaotic disarray. Dingy walls with marks where pictures had once hung and been moved, gray metal filing cabinets, most with drawers that were too full to close, and cracked pleather furniture with permanent butt dents. And every surface stacked a mile high with papers. This place was one spark away from a raging inferno, and setting it on fire might be the best place to start. I sensed the implementation of a new filing system on the horizon. And some fresh paint on the walls. Surely there would be money in the budget for one gallon of paint?
Gertie returned and handed me a stained, chipped mug with a Wenniway Island logo on it that dated back to the mideighties. Maybe there would be cash in the budget for some new cups, too?
“Thanks, Gertie. I appreciate it. Now, maybe you can take me on a tour of this obstacle course? The first thing you might want to know about me is that I’m obsessively tidy, so all this”—I gestured to the room at large—“this is going to need to be organized.”
Gertie’s hands clapped together. “Really? Oh, that’s the best news I’ve heard in ages. Harry never let me throw anything away. And he didn’t know how to use a computer, so everything had to be printed for him. Even his emails.”
“He didn’t know how to use a computer?” We good people of Trillium Bay pride ourselves on not just clinging to bits of the past, but embracing and celebrating it, like all the old Victorian architecture and the fact that we don’t allow cars, but that was no reason for the mayor’s office to be without a computer! I mentally moved that item to the top of my political agenda. Bring modern technology into the city government. I’d successfully managed to get some decent computers for the school, so this shouldn’t be that different. Although reliable internet service was another thing entirely. The whole island suffered from spotty service and sluggish loading times. If I could fix that problem, I’d be a local hero.
Gertie’s shellacked, bobbed haircut remained solidly in place as she shook her head. “Harry didn’t trust computers. He said the interwebz were created by godless individuals to bring pornography and Amazon drones into our lives. I finally convinced him to let me have one, but there isn’t one in his office. Not that there’d be room for one. I haven’t seen the surface of that desk since Michael Jackson was at the top of the music charts.”
“That’s a very long time.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Well, I guess we should get started then.”
Seven hours and twenty-six garbage bags full of shredded documents later, we’d barely made a dent. I still considered the time well spent, however, because Gertie, as everyone suspected, had her finger on the pulse of just about everything happening on the island, and listening to her talk was like an immersion class in small-town government. I, of course, already knew who all the players were, since I’d known most of them my entire life, but Gertie had the inside scoop on the inside scoop. She knew all about how Sudsy Robertson had voted against the new bike-helmet ordinance because his wife loved to ride but thought helmets made her cheeks look fat. She knew that April, May, and June Mahoney were pushing for new zoning laws so they could turn their parents’ old house into a bed-and-breakfast and were bribing other members to vote in their favor by plying them with cookies and muffins and rum balls. And she knew that Vera VonMeisterburger, the village librarian, somehow managed to steer every conversation toward the island’s current fruit bat shortage, even when it wasn’t on the meeting agenda. Actually, everyone knew that, because Vera couldn’t not talk about the island’s fruit bat shortage. That little tidbit was not news. Still, the rest of it was helpful. My father, Chief of Police Harlan Callaghan, sat on the city council and must surely know all this, but being a man of few (or no) words, he hadn’t shared any of it with me.
“I think people are excited to see what you can do with this job, Brooke,” Gertie said, pulling another trash bag from the box. “But I should probably warn you: they’re not going to go easy on you. I wouldn’t be surprised if they thought they could push you around because you’re so young.”
That brought an unexpected smile to my face. I was thirty-six, not sixteen, and I knew how to get things done. Being the oldest of three sisters had its benefits—not to mention the fact that I’d become the de facto woman of the house after my mother died. I was just fourteen when that happened, but old enough to step up and take care of my family. My father was around, of course, but children, and girls in particular, seemed to be a mystery to him. I understood that, and it was easier for me to just handle things on my own, so I was quite accustomed to being in charge.
“I hope people are excited about me being the mayor, and I also hope to prove to everyone that they made the right choice.” My heart gave a little thump as nerves gripped me. While my victory may have been decisive, I wasn’t naive. I knew why I’d been elected. The good folks of Wenniway Island hadn’t chosen me because of my vast intellect or political brilliance. It wasn’t my witty, insightful rhetoric or fresh ideas, either. They’d chosen me because Harry Blackwell was a bajillion and a half years old, scientifically speaking, and had no more relatives to follow in his footsteps. They’d chosen me because over the past few years, the business owners of Trillium Bay had grown increasingly frustrated with his stodgy lack of foresight and his refusal to adapt—as evidenced by his inability to use a computer and his less-than-inspirational campaign slogan: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And they’d chosen me because, as a homegrown girl and a teacher, they’d figured I could handle not only the work but the personalities. I knew the score. Like an expert poker player, I understood that playing the cards in my hand was only half the game. The other half was all about learning how to play the players.