A TwinStar Side Story: Jenny's Day

Jenny Canyon’s presence is always quietly there in GW’s journey.

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The lunch bag was already on the counter when GW came downstairs.

She heard him on the stairs and didn't turn from the window. Davey was at the end of the drive, his orange backpack vivid against the frost-browned grass, shoulders squared with the self-consciousness of a fifth-grader who suspected he was still being watched. The bus would come from the left. He always looked right first.

"Creature of habit," she said.

GW stood behind her and she felt him looking, not at Davey but at her looking at Davey, and she let him. The coffee maker finished. She crossed to fill her mug and caught herself in the window glass — hair half down, yesterday's mascara she'd missed, her old fleece with the pulled thread at the cuff. She looked like herself. That was fine.

He kissed the back of her neck and said he could cancel the afternoon meetings. Stay home. She heard the offer fully — the Lake Creek trail, the picnic he'd pack with entirely too much food, what came after the picnic before Davey got home — and held it against the afternoon she'd already built in her mind. The PowerPoint needed another pass. The board member she hadn't been able to reach needed a voicemail that sounded like a request and functioned like a deadline. The district's facilities director had promised her a number on the parking logistics and had not delivered and she would need to produce that number herself.

She kissed him and meant it. He went to Boulder.

The house settled.

Jenny refilled her mug and opened her laptop at the kitchen island. The PowerPoint was better than it had been two days ago and not as good as she needed it to be. The budget slide was the problem. She'd rounded the per-vehicle cost to the nearest thousand, and the rounding was conservative but could be read as imprecise. A board member who wanted to kill the project could hold that number up and call it a guess.

She pulled the original estimate from the county fleet manager's email. Read it again. He'd given her a range — nineteen to twenty-three thousand, depending on shelving and connectivity package. She'd used twenty. She could footnote the range. Or she could pull the shelving cost out into its own line and show her work.

She stared at the slide. Outside, a pair of Stellar jays fought over something in the aspens.

She made the change. It looked worse. She changed it back.

What she'd done — what she hadn't told anyone, including Robin, who would have laughed at her and then agreed with her — was base the whole funding model on a conversation she'd had at a cocktail party with a charitable fund director who had been on her second drink and said the words *that's exactly the kind of matching underwriting we love to do* with the warmth of someone who meant it in that moment. Jenny had gone home and built a three-year budget around that sentence.

She knew it was probably fine. She knew the project was fundable, had merit, and answered a real need. She'd done the work. The numbers held. What she also knew was that she hadn't followed up with that foundation director in six weeks, and the director had not followed up with her, and the board would ask about the funding path, and she would describe it with more confidence than she currently felt.

She was good at that. She didn't love that she was good at that, but she’d get through it. A one-million-dollar grant that would match a million from the Canyon Family Foundation. GW would be surprised. He might wince, but he wouldn’t question her. He never did.

She dressed, did something minimal with her face, chose the blazer she always chose for school district meetings, the better jeans, the nicer boots with the pointier toes that suggested western without trying because it read competent without reading expensive, which mattered in Eagle County in ways it wouldn’t in Denver. Pulled her hair back. Looked at herself and added an earring, then took it out. Put it back.

The drive to Eagle took fifteen minutes. She was early, which she'd planned for, and used it to sit in the district parking lot and read the slide deck on her laptop one more time. She reconsidered. She found a photo of Davey in second grade, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich all over his face and hands, with a toothy grin, holding up his “Subby the Submarine” book. She made it a split-screen with the budget.

The meeting was in the district's smaller conference room, which smelled of dry-erase marker, the scorched smell of popcorn someone had left a minute too long. Gary Reeves from the library district was already there, arranging laminated brochures he'd printed at his own expense. She noticed immediately that he'd used the old logo. She arranged her face.

"These look great, Gary."

He beamed. She left the brochures where they were.

The two board members arrived together, which meant they'd already talked and there was already a position. She'd learned to read that walk — the way the conversation continued in body language even after it officially stopped. One of them, Renata Walsh, had been warm to the project in an informal conversation. The other, Jeff Polley, had said almost nothing across two preliminary meetings, which was its own kind of answer.

Jenny presented for twenty-two minutes. When the budget split-screen appeared, she couldn’t help but laugh, and the board laughed too. She knew she had their attention.

She had planned for twenty-five. The last three slides — the rollout timeline and the partnership acknowledgment page — she cut in real time without showing it, because the room's attention had peaked at minute eighteen with Davey, and she knew better than to overstay a good moment.

Polley asked about liability. She had the answer and gave it cleanly.

Walsh asked about the community survey results. Jenny described them and held back the one data point she privately found unconvincing — the statistic on unmet demand for reading programs, which came from a survey her own foundation had commissioned. Technically valid. Optics-adjacent.

She didn't use it. She didn't miss it.

At the end, Polley looked at Walsh. Walsh looked back. One of those visible negotiations that happens in half a second between people who've sat on the same board long enough to have a shared language.

"I think we can give this a thumbs up," Polley said.

She thanked them. Shook hands. Walked to her car.

In the parking lot, she texted Robin: *Board said yes. Vantastic Reads is a go.*

She sat for a moment with the phone in her lap, waiting to feel something proportional to the past eight months. A small, clean satisfaction arrived, and she accepted it. The fund director still hadn't called back. She'd call her tomorrow. Worst case, the Canyon Family Foundation would cover it all.

She started the Grand Cherokee.

I-70 east to Lake Creek was always a little faster, but the low autumn light was bright against the remaining gold of the aspens, so she decided on the more scenic route through Red Canyon, past Wolcott, and along the Eagle.

A call to GW went to voicemail. The afternoon meeting. He’d be home tomorrow, and she’d fill him in. By then, she’d know if it was going to be a one or two-million-dollar convincing.

She passed the turn to Lake Creek. She’d go on to Fiesta’s and pick up enchiladas with white green chile sauce, a bag of chips, and homemade salsa. Davey would be very happy, and so would she.