Work Text:
Robert Knope was from Boston.
Dad, her mother had said, moved out to Indiana to go to Indiana University, and he had liked it so much he stayed. Boston was too big for him; neither Bloomington nor Indianapolis quirky enough. Pawnee, like the mama bear, fit just right.
When he settled in Pawnee, working in the marketing department of Sweetums, he met Marlene Griggs. She was young, bright-eyed but sharp-tongued, in her second year of teaching American history and government to Pawnee High’s juniors and seniors. He had told Leslie many times throughout her childhood that her mother finally resigned herself to date the persistent marketing guy. Mom said that she went out with him on a dare.
There was no question of where they would live. Marlene was pure Pawnee, however much she detested some of the town’s odder quirks. When you traced through the flimsy pamphlets at the local historical society, it was easy to see that the Griggs family -- as well as the Ratchetts, Leslie’s grandmother’s side -- had been permanent figures of Pawnee since the town was settled.
It was where Leslie grew up. Her favorite place in the world. And sometimes it was hard to reconcile the fact that Dad was from somewhere else – somewhere a thousand miles away. It would have been harder if they hadn't traveled to Boston for three weeks every summer.
For one week, Mom and Dad and Leslie would go to Boston and stay with Grandpa and Nana Knope in Quincy. They would visit with family and eat lobster rolls and clam chowder and take multiple walks on the Freedom Trail that ended with Leslie lying next to her father sprawled in the Public Garden.
And then Dad would have to get home to his work, because he didn’t work for a place with summer break, but Mom and Leslie would travel. They went to Plymouth and Concord, Amherst and Salem. They traveled to Hartford and Newport, Hyde Park and Sleepy Hollow, staying in a tiny B&B or with some distant Knope relative three towns over from whatever they wanted to see.
For two weeks every summer, Mom was a little softer than she normally was, determined to show her daughter the history of the northeastern United States. There would be plenty of time to show her Indiana and the surrounding states, but for now tiny Leslie Knope was eager enough to practically inhale everything she was shown.
And every night, there was a phone call back to Dad, living in the best place in the world, and ready to hear all about the amazing day his daughter had from a payphone wherever they were on the road.
The summer when she was ten, Mom and Leslie made their longest trip ever, to Seneca Falls and Rochester. It was important, Mom said, now that Leslie was double digits and on her way to adulthood, that she realize what strides had been made in the fight for women’s rights and how much further they still needed to go.
It was a great trip, but the whole time Leslie couldn’t help feeling like something was off with Dad. He had been okay when they’d been in Quincy with Grandpa and Nana Knope, but after he had flown home his tone had seemed to go downhill. And she worried.
There was plenty to see in Rochester and Seneca Falls and the surrounding areas, as far as Leslie could tell, but Mom didn’t have her boundless energy, so they went back to Quincy for a few days and hit some historical sights there they had done when Leslie was little but she couldn’t remember now, like the Statehouse and the U.S.S. Constitution. And of course they went to Leslie’s favorite place in the city: Boston Public Library.
The library itself wasn’t so great. It looked like it had been built in the Stone Age, with its outdated pillars and ugly floors. It had all the great books, of course, and Leslie gobbled up books in a similar method to a rabbit with carrots. It was a portal to every world she could possibly imagine. And the Boston library had thousands of books, all right at her actual fingertips. But it wasn’t great.
But when you went to some of the older wings --
It was impractical, but this summer, Leslie had packed her very first pair of heels (kitten heels, the girls at school would have corrected her, but they didn’t matter now that she was a thousand miles away). She took these little heels with her to the library, and, sitting on a bench outside the grand steps and watching the crowds flow through Copley Square, exchanged her ratty sandals for the pretty heels. Mom, rolling her eyes next to her on the bench, complained that they were ridiculous and why had she packed them anyway?
But Leslie didn’t care. To her, it was just another thing that helped her picture her future, hopefully in the White House. She’d be the first female president by miles - Geraldine Ferraro got close to being vice-president last year, even if people voted for stupid Reagan instead, that stupid-head, but Leslie wants to go further. She wants to be president. And she’s going to do it, too.
She’s looking through her stack of Nancy Drew books as she waits for Mom in the lobby when she hears a very familiar tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap of heels. Nana Knope is with Mom, and Leslie wonders, very briefly, how they found them - they’ve been walking all over the city today, and this was their last stop before getting back on the train to Quincy.
They walk towards her, when Nana Knope and Mom sit down next to her, Mom gently prying the Nancy Drew book out of her hands, her heart drops.
“Leslie, dear,” Nana Knope says, “we got a call from St. Joseph’s in Pawnee today…”
Leslie hates libraries, after that.