Dragonfly by Jax Hill 

Story Hour in the park. That was a new addition to our repertoire. At first the drunks and bums turned up to ogle Tawny, but Maggie sized this up pretty quick and told Tawny the truth, I guess ... I don’t know exactly what Maggie told her, really, but she started appearing for story time dressed in Bermuda shorts and button-front shirts. She still looked darn good, but she didn’t look quite as much like a stripper. And I think the bums and drunks liked to hear the stories.

We’d all wander to the park about 3 p.m. and sit and listen to the stories. Tawny would practice the day before; she took her job very seriously. Sometimes the kids would ask her to read it again, and she would. Other days they would wander away, and we’d sit there with the homeless guys and talk about what was wrong with the world and how much better they could run it.

Torstein didn’t talk a lot in these bull sessions, but if someone actually opened up and shared something personal, he was ... sympathetic. He was the best listener in the bunch, and he didn’t have this built-in guy thing where he would suggest what could be done to fix the problem. Some loser might be drunk enough to tell us how his dad or his uncle or his step-dad had abused him as a kid ... and Torstein wouldn’t say, “That loser! We oughta track him down and beat his face in!” No, he’d say to the guy, “That must have really ruined your childhood. How did you cope?” or he’d say, “Child abuse is a tragic cycle. Do you have kids?” and get them talking about why their crummy life ended up this way drunk, alone, homeless.

And of course, he offered them sunflower seeds.

After Story Hour, Tawny would sit with us and listen to the yahoos defend their sorry lifestyle (drunks almost always blame someone else), but every once in a while, she would say something that cut right to the heart of it. And she wouldn’t even seem to know it.

Once this smelly freak was telling us that he’d had this great job at a car factory in California (which, do they even make cars in California?!) until the elitist liberal losers in management had made it impossible for an honest man to make a buck. Oh, yeah, he’d been this very big deal with headlights or tail-lights or something, but when he tried to show them how backward it was the way they were doing it, and how much money he could save them doing it his way — they made his life a living hell. And eff him if he was going to work for sons of guns who didn’t recognize a man of genius when they saw him! He was so far advanced of the guys who were supposed to be his superiors that it wasn’t even conceivable they were shafting him for lack of initiative. It was straight-up jealousy. So he quit.

It was lies from start to finish except maybe he did, at some time in his sorry life, have a job for 30 minutes and tried to tell the boss how to do things, then got mad and quit. Maybe.

Tawny was buying it, though. I think she thought they probably did make cars in California, and maybe this genius really had figured out a way to make them more cheaply, but she said:

“You know what, though? Even smart as you are, it didn’t do you any good to quit. I mean, because then you didn’t have a job at all. And now look where you are.”