“Like hell we do.”
“Sorry. I know.” Hands up like she might hit him. “That’s not what I meant.”
“That’s exactly what you meant.”
“It would be better if you could be nice to them,” he over-enunciates.
“Better for whom?”
“Better for everyone.”
“Better for you and for them and for not a single other person in this—”
“Jesus, Nora, enough.” He draws in a deep breath, lets it go. It’s shaky on the way out. “It’s time to move on.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“It is not easy for me to say.” Omar is standing now and loud. Omar is never standing and loud. Omar is always cowed before Nora.
“Here’s a game the girls love.” She is so good at pretending to be calm. “Truth or dare?”
“God, Nora, I don’t know.”
“Well, just for variety, how about you tell me the truth for once? You’re the one who arranged for them to buy the library.”
I have figured this out already but am surprised Nora has as well, having far less time than I do to dwell on the issue.
He hangs his head. “Not arranged for. But yeah.”
“What do you mean, ‘Not arranged for but yeah’?”
“I didn’t offer it to them.” He throws out one hand, helpless, or like it doesn’t matter. “But I didn’t say no when they asked.”
“No to what?”
“They came scouting for housing. They didn’t tell me who they were, but they didn’t hide it either. I knew the last name of course, and then I took one look at the father, at the kid, and knew for sure who they must be. They flat-out asked if the library was available. Said they drove by and noticed it was empty.” He looks up from the ground at her, waits for her to meet his eyes. “I said I’d ask.”
“And?”
“And the person it turned out I had to ask was me.”
“Why you?”
“Because for what it’s worth, and it’s not much, I’m still mayor.”
“I noticed.”
“You want the job?”
“You wish.”
“Exactly.”
In a town where irony literally flows right down the middle, this is perhaps the saddest instance of all: Omar Radison, once and future and eternal mayor.
Twenty years ago, Omar ran on the Belsum platform. His opponent, Carl Castillo, moved away soon after he lost, and died—of old age, mind—soon after he moved, but before he did either of those things, he ran on a platform of tradition, staying the course, honoring the old ways, and keeping Belsum out. He wanted the town to stay as it was: small, historic, closed. Because he was eventually vindicated as Galileo, we don’t talk much about whether what Carl Castillo really was was a xenophobe and a racist. He wanted to keep Bourne for Bourne residents. He wanted to keep our money in our community. He wanted things to stay the same.
Whereas Omar was twenty-five, back in the town where he was born and raised, armed with a brand-new college degree and the unearned optimism of quarter-centenarians. He campaigned for change, growth, increase; he ran for new citizens, new jobs, new opportunities. He painted a picture of a Bourne thriving with the influx of money from Belsum, money from clearing land and paving fields and building factories, from working at the new plant, from feeding Belsum employees and their families, entertaining them, getting them drunk, selling them things they needed and things they didn’t. There were tax incentives and growth incentives and investment opportunities.
Think of our past, said Carl Castillo.
Imagine our future, said Omar.
He won by a landslide. I make the whole thing sound like a political maelstrom, which is how it’s been presented to me, but we aren’t a big town. Both candidates went door-to-door, sometimes together. In lieu of a debate, they played a couple friendly games of pool at Norma’s. We few thousand people went and voted for change. And change we did receive.
Conventional wisdom says when the populace is angry, the incumbent gets voted out, whether or not he’s to blame. But Omar is more like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, doomed to live out an error in judgment for the rest of his days, endless witness to the suffering he’s wrought. After it all went to shit, no one wanted to be mayor of Bourne. There weren’t enough people left. No one knew how to clean up the mess. No one was willing to take on the burden of figuring it out. And besides, who volunteers to captain a ship with a hole in the hull so wide it could be a portal to another galaxy? If only.
So Omar is stuck with the job.
“The library is city property. As mayor”—he winces—“the decision as to what to do with the empty library was mine.”
“So you gave it to them?”
“Sold it to them, yes.”
“Your pound of flesh?”
“Not flesh.” He shakes his head, but not especially vehemently. “Money. We need it.”
“How much can that library possibly have gone for?”
“It’s a pretty building.”
“In a moldering town.”
“A pretty moldering town,” he says.
“So you were just faking before?”
“When?”
“In the bar last month. When you had big news and the big news was Donna saw a moving truck.”
“She did.” He shrugs. “I was trying to ease you in. Besides, I knew they bought the place, but I didn’t know when or even whether they were coming, what they wanted it for.”
“And then it turned out you already gave them permission to reopen the plant two decades ago, so the library was just the gravy on the potatoes.” The fake cheery tone she’s wrestling into submission looks like it’s paining Omar physically. “And conveniently, of course, you’ve never signed on to the lawsuit, so no conflict of interest there either.”
“We’ve been over this.” They have. Nora thinks it would send a strong signal to Bourners if they knew Omar was joining their fight, and to Belsum if they knew the mayor himself had added his name to the class action. Omar thinks that’s not his place as mayor and that he needs to be available to everyone as go-between should Nora and Russell ever get that far.
“We have,” she agrees. “You like to be nice to them, and you’d like me to be nice too. Make them feel welcome and at home.”
“Not make them feel welcome.” He throws out his arms, frustrated, begging her. “Just don’t go out of your way to piss them off.”
“How am I doing that?”
He gives her a look, arms still out. “We hold zero cards here. We’ve got no power at all. If these guys don’t come in angry and defensive, if they like us, that’s our best shot at them treating us right.”
“We were down-on-our-knees grateful last time.” Nora gets down on hers to demonstrate. “We hailed them like war heroes. We were so happy-they-picked-us welcoming we were groveling. And that didn’t inspire them not to poison us. Now they’re back as if nothing happened, as if they didn’t ruin everything”—her voice breaks, and I can see it break something in Omar too—“as if we’ve all forgotten, and you’re asking us just to let it alone?”