Lenny

“Let me help you with that, Jamie.”

Lenny was already in the staff kitchen when I came down with two big boxes of supplies that had just arrived. Deliveries always came on Monday afternoons. I had been spending so much time at the library that I now knew this kind of information. Sonia even let me sign for the delivery today, which made me feel like a pretty big deal.

Lenny took both boxes out of my hands in one swoop.

“Thanks. Beverly said there’s a closet down here for all this stuff?” I asked.

“There is, right here.” He slid a half-full file cabinet a few inches to the left and then swung open a partially concealed door. The door was peeling paint in long strips and the doorknob didn’t turn. Lenny had to just pull it, really hard, to get the door open. “We’re a little pressed for space here, and maintenance funds, if you hadn’t noticed.”

“Oh, I noticed,” I told him.

“They don’t build ’em like this anymore, though.” Lenny looked up at the ceiling above us and spun in place, slowly. “I mean, look at the detail in the woodwork on this door. And look at this doorknob. You can’t buy these anymore. We even have a dumbwaiter! No one has a dumbwaiter!”

“There’s a dumbwaiter here? Like in Harriet the Spy?” I asked.

“Absolutely. On the other side of the stairs you just came down. It still works. It’s a bear to pull up and down, but if you’ve got the muscles, it works.”

“That is too cool!”

“I’ll show you when we go back up. Sonia showed it to me when I first started here. She knows all the secrets of this place.” Lenny’s voice got all sweet-sounding when he mentioned Sonia.

“She does, huh?” I couldn’t keep the smirk off my face.

Lenny’s cheeks flushed a rosy pink that matched the new spatters of pink paint on his shoes.

“Wait, how long have you even been here with us? Three weeks?”

“This is my sixth week,” I answered in a huff, throwing my hands on my hips dramatically.

“Really?” Lenny asked, surprised.

“I started right after school let out.”

I remembered my first day well. I was on the front steps that Monday morning way before the library opened, my stomach squeezing my nerves from the inside out. I had packed my sketchbook to draw in until the doors opened, but I was way too nervous to focus on it. I just wanted to put in my hours and get back home, where I could climb into my bed and hide and pretend this wasn’t happening to me.

Maybe if I knew back then that I’d be working with people like Lenny and Sonia and Beverly, I wouldn’t have been so nervous.

“Six weeks, huh?” Lenny was still trying to absorb it.

“I’ve been here long enough to notice that Sonia knows all the secrets around here and that you notice everything Sonia knows, let’s just put it that way,” I said.

Lenny looked at me and smiled. “Fair enough.”

“Sonia’s great,” I told him.

“Yeah, she is great.” He sighed.

He tucked the boxes into the closet and closed the door on them. “I’ll organize that later. That’s an hour’s job at least.” He shimmied the file cabinet back in place. “So, are you hungry? You gotta try these,” he said, before waiting for my answer. “They’re my newest masterpiece.” He gestured to the rickety table behind me. In the middle of it sat a square plate piled high with some kind of unrecognizable food.

“What is it?” I asked, trying to hide my confusion.

“They’re cookies, of course.” The smile vanished from his face like a drop of water on a hot skillet. He furrowed his brow. “Why? What did you think they were?”

“Cookies,” I said unconvincingly.

“No. Really. What did you think they were?” he tried again.

“Um,” I shifted my weight, stalling.

“Tell me,” he insisted.

“They look like nests.”

“Birds’ nests?” He was incredulous.

“Really small ones, but yeah, that’s what they look like.”

“Nests? On a plate?”

I shrugged as apologetically as I could. “That’s why I was confused.”

“Will everyone think that?” I bet he was really just asking about Sonia, if Sonia would think that.

“I don’t know. Are they good? What’s in them?”

Lenny proceeded to list the ingredients, which included a lot of different seeds and nuts and nut flours and dried fruits and some things I’d never even heard of. But he definitely said chocolate, and I’m always a big supporter of chocolate, even if it’s mixed in with a whole lot of strange healthy stuff.

I tried one. It was sweet and salty and crunchy and chewy all at the same time. And the chocolate was there, like an old friend.

“Lenny, these are actually good.”

Lenny smiled big and then got serious again very quickly.

“So you think Sonia will like them?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what she likes to eat. I only ever see her drink gallons of coffee.” I thought for a second, then offered, “I have an idea! I could give her one to try, and if she loves it, I’ll tell her you made it and send her down here to get more. If she doesn’t like it, I’ll just say I got them from that bakery in town.”

“Brilliant. Let’s do it.” His smile returned. And then he went from normal to supremely overexcited in half a second flat. “Move it then, kiddo. Up you go, right now. Take her this one.”

Lenny handed me a cookie on a bright pink napkin. Then he took it back. “Should we put two on here? How about like this? Does this look better?” He was arranging cookies on the napkin as if he were assembling a bride’s bouquet.

I couldn’t help laughing. “Oh my God, Lenny, you’re a little bit flipping out. It’s just a cookie.” Even though he was an adult, and a gigantic adult at that, it was easy to feel really comfortable around him. Being with him was a lot like hanging out with an older, smarter, really cool friend. It was easy to forget he was older than my own mom.

“If you really wanted to win Sonia over, you would brew her a whole pot of coffee,” I told him.

“Way ahead of you there, darling,” Lenny answered back with a smirk of his own. And right that second, as if on cue, the Mr. Coffee machine on the counter behind him let out a hiss, and a stream of fresh, hot coffee trickled its way into the glass pot waiting below.