Chapter 28: Ribbon Day
The reopening of the playground at Sixth and Birch was set for ten o'clock on a Saturday morning, and by nine thirty the Maplewood district had filled the sidewalks around it. Families carried folding chairs. A church group had set up a table with lemonade in paper cups.
Brennan arrived with the sanitation crew in clean program shirts, assigned to keep the grounds clear through the ceremony and to handle the extra bins the city had placed along the pavilion. Otis had given him the station near the back of the crowd, by the service gate, where the work was steady and the sight lines were easy. Brennan was grateful, and then ashamed of being grateful, and then simply went to work emptying a bin before it could overflow.
State Senator Desmond Hartley arrived a few minutes before ten with Monica Hartley beside him. Brennan saw them from across the playground and felt the old, useless instinct to look away. He made himself keep working. Hartley moved through the crowd the way he had moved through Fairhaven as mayor, shaking hands, bending to hear an older woman, remembering names. Monica spoke with the librarians who had run the summer reading tent on this grass for years, and more than once Brennan saw neighbors touch her arm with the ease of people who considered the Hartleys theirs.
Mrs. June Park had a reserved chair in the front row, a small honor the neighborhood association had insisted on. She wore a blue dress and held her purse on her lap with both hands. When Hartley reached her, he took her hands and spoke with her for a long moment, and she laughed at something he said and patted his cheek the way grandmothers claim the right to do with men they watched grow into themselves the hard way.
The ceremony itself was brief. The parks director thanked the crews, the donors, and the block captains who had attended three years of planning meetings in a school cafeteria. A city councilwoman spoke about safe places to play. Then Hartley was introduced, not by his old title, which the crowd used anyway in its applause, but as Fairhaven's state senator and, the director added, a son of this neighborhood who had never stopped treating it as home.
Hartley stood at the small podium under the new pavilion and looked out at the playground before he spoke. Brennan, holding a fresh liner for a bin he did not yet need to change, found that he could not move.
"I was arrested here," Hartley said. "Many of you know that. Some of you were here. I was a young auditor with a notebook in my pocket, watching a procurement process I thought smelled wrong, and I ended that day on the ground, handcuffed, beaten, and booked into our jail with no name on the sheet. John Doe. I have thought for years about what to do with that day, and I want to tell you plainly that deciding this place would not stay a wound was the best answer I ever found."
The crowd was quiet in the way crowds get when a speaker has trusted them with something real. Children fidgeted. Balloons knocked softly against the fence.
Hartley spoke about the fountain that worked again, the fence that would keep toddlers from the street, the pavilion roof that would hold through winter. He thanked the Fresh Start crews by name as a group, and Brennan felt the words pass over him without singling him out, a mercy he recognized as deliberate. He thanked June Park, who lifted one hand, embarrassed and pleased. He thanked Monica, who shook her head at him with a smile that said he was exceeding his time.
Then he cut the ribbon with a pair of oversized scissors that the smallest child on the block had carried to him on a cushion, and the playground filled in a rush. Kids hit the slides shouting. The fountain came on to a cheer. Water caught the sunlight and threw it in pieces across the pavilion floor.
Brennan worked the rest of the morning the way Otis had taught him, bin to bin, steady, invisible in the useful way. Twice he passed close enough to Hartley to hear his voice, and twice Hartley was deep in conversation with neighbors, and Brennan kept walking. Whatever needed to happen between them, if anything ever did, would not happen in front of lemonade tables and other people's children, with cameras up and a crowd ready to make a story of it.
Near noon, as the ceremony thinned into a long, happy afternoon, Otis found Brennan by the service gate and handed him a cold bottle of water.
"You did good work here this week," Otis said. "The fence, especially."