Lenny

“Come feast your eyes on this, Jamie,” Lenny called out to me from the reading room.

I trudged over with a stack of brand-new magazines and found Lenny holding open the latest Foxfield Biweekly Newsletter. The newsletter came out every two weeks and covered every bit of local news that could be mustered up. Foxfield was a small town, so it was a thin paper, and you knew it was an especially dry news period when the same advertisement was printed on more than one page, just to fill up space.

“Lookee here,” Lenny said, holding the page lower where I could see it. Lenny had pale skin, broad shoulders, and long, graying brown hair he wore pulled back in a ponytail. And he was so tall, if he hadn’t moved the paper down it would’ve been miles above my head. “Whaddya think of that?”

I looked at the page and read the advertisement he was pointing to: Giant Painting Co., Lenny Bradford—free estimates, flexible scheduling, personal care, no job too big or small. And there was a phone number printed underneath.

“Is that you?” I asked. I didn’t know Lenny’s last name.

“Yours truly,” he answered, and bowed at the waist like he was meeting royalty. “My first print ad. I’ve been getting work through word of mouth, but I wanted to see if this would bring in more jobs.”

“Well, I would hire you,” I told him. “I like the ‘Giant’ part.”

“Yeah, well, I figure that’s my hook. There are a lot of painters out there, but how many of them are as huge as me?”

Lenny had to duck every time he went down the stairs to the staff kitchen and supply room, and his sleeves almost never reached all the way down to his wrists. He said he’d been dealing with that since the ninth grade, so he was used to it by now.

“I mean, I can reach ceilings without a ladder most of the time,” he bragged. “It’s a perk for painting.” Then he looked up at the ceiling above us in the reading room. It was eighteen feet away, with original scalloped woodwork that was ornate and beautiful and something you would only find in a historic building. Of course, the woodwork was also stained and chipped. It definitely could’ve used some Lenny painting.

He craned his neck back even more to get a wider view of the ceiling design. “Most of the time I can reach,” he said again, more quietly.

Lenny worked half as many hours at the library as Sonia did. He was a part-time librarian and a part-time house painter and was constantly running back and forth between the two jobs. He always changed out of his painting clothes before he came to the library, and he scrubbed his hands clean, but he wore the same shoes. His shoes were massive and impossible to miss. Thick drips and splotches of different-colored paint dotted the toe area and laces and soles and were a dead giveaway of his other job.

“Are you working on a house now?” I asked him as I started slipping the latest magazine issues into their plastic covers.

“Starting a new job today, actually. Painting a screened-in porch for someone who knew my dad back in the day. You know, my dad grew up in Foxfield,” Lenny said with a certain pride.

“But you didn’t?”

“Nah, I was born and raised in New Hampshire. I ended up here by, well, jeez, how did I end up here?” He cupped his hand around his chin and thought. “Lots of moves over the last twenty years, I guess, and I just kept going south, and south, then west.” He dropped his hand from his face and shrugged. “Anyway, I’ve been here for years now. It’s a good place to be. I’m staying put.”

And then he switched into an overly animated voice to say, “Did I mention I have a business here?” He opened the newsletter again and put on a small show, gesturing at the Giant Painting Co. advertisement, displaying it in front of him at all angles like someone on an infomercial. But he couldn’t hold a straight face and broke into laughter as he tried to get out the words, “Customer service representatives standing by now.”

I had to laugh, too. He was way too old—at least in his forties—and way too large to be acting the way he was, which was like a total goofball.

“All righty then, back to work,” he said after finishing his performance and rolling the Biweekly into a small tube to shove in his back pocket. “There’s some oat bran granola bars down in the kitchen if you’re hungry. They’re a lot better than the last ones,” he said as he walked back to the circulation desk to help patrons.

Lenny loved to invent his own recipes and baked constantly, bringing all his creations to the library for us to try. But Lenny’s baked goods looked and tasted unlike any other baked goods I had seen before in my life. So far, in just the week I’d been trying them, they were hit-or-miss, a pretty even fifty-fifty split.

I finished with the magazines and straightened the stack of new Biweekly newspapers. Then I flipped one open to take another look at Lenny’s ad. I thought of ways I would draw a decorative border around the edges, or a small design in just one corner, maybe, to spruce it up a bit if I were Lenny. I thought of the set of archival-quality felt-tip markers my mom had just given me for my thirteenth birthday. They would be perfect for this.

I closed the newsletter and my eyes landed on a front-page headline: New Mayor Addresses Spending Cuts. And in smaller print beneath it: Sanitation, Police Department, Library, Fireworks.

I looked around me, at the age-warped wooden window sashes, the threadbare carpet in one room and the pocked floor tile in another. Paint was peeling off the baseboard molding, and the shelving and desk furniture looked older than dirt. I didn’t see how it would be possible to cut even a handful of nickels from the library funding—the place was already falling apart.

Of course, if it fell apart entirely, like, tomorrow, I wouldn’t have to volunteer here anymore and I’d get my summer back.

One could hope.