Chapter Text
“I’m running for president,” Leslie says through a mouthful of JJ’s waffles. “After the break’s over. And I know I should have called more and I’m very sorry that I haven’t, but you understand, right? I mean, you’re busy too. Busier than me, obviously. But I am busy, I really am. It’s just, I’ve been preparing for the election and I have the breakfast program and tax assistance and the water campaign, and now we’re trying to negotiate subsidised—”
“Chew your food, Leslie.”
“Sorry.”
Leslie drops her eyes to her plate and covers her mouth with a hand while she chews and swallows. She can just feel her mother’s eyes on her as she grabs a napkin and cleans whipped cream off her face and she wishes, for the millionth time, that her mother would just be a normal mom and say ‘Honey, that’s great.’
But Marlene Griggs-Knope hasn’t been a normal mom in a long, long time and Leslie has never exactly been a normal daughter, and she knows it’s a stupid wish.
“And how are your grades, if you’re spending all your time on this student association?”
“I have a four-point-oh,” Leslie says automatically, fidgeting with the napkin, scrunching it and smoothing it back out in her lap. “But I’m taking extra credit assignments anyway.”
Marlene lines her knife and fork up in the middle of her plate and pats at her mouth neatly with her own napkin, really as more of a gesture than anything else, before leaning back in her seat and eyeing Leslie carefully. “And have you thought about summer internships?”
Leslie shifts under her gaze. “Well… if I win the election I’ll be student association president and that’s full-time hours.”
“You know I want you to be successful, Leslie.”
“Mom…”
“What’s wrong with getting a start at the school board?”
“Mom. Do we have to do this, like, today?”
Marlene twines her fingers together and says nothing while Leslie looks at her hands and picks at the napkin, frustrated.
Well, of course there’s nothing wrong with an internship at the school board. There’s nothing wrong with it at all.
It’s just that Leslie just doesn’t want to be handed anything just because her last name is Knope and she lives in Pawnee. She’s had enough of consolation prizes for a lifetime. At Indiana she’s just another small town girl in Bloomington, and she likes that. Likes that she really gets to throw herself up against it and see whether or not she’s any good.
And the thing is, she’s pretty sure she is good.
She’s pretty sure she can make a difference. Pretty sure she can earn the right to do it, all on her own.
Leslie sighs, looking back up. She doesn’t quite meet Marlene’s gaze, but studies the new lowlights in her hair, the glint of her earrings instead. “There’s nothing wrong with it. It’d be great. I know it would be great. But I really want…”
Marlene waves her off and gives her a look that says ‘later’ as a server approaches with the bill and their drinks to-go.
Leslie digs in her purse for her wallet. “Let me get this one? Please?”
“Don’t be silly, Leslie. I’m your mother.”
JJ gives them a sympathetic smile and a small wave as they walk out.
As it turns out, there’s no charge for the Knope women’s breakfast.
Not today.
***
So Leslie’s not exactly home for spring break.
Pawnee is bursting with green, fresh leaves and new flower buds and there’s that faint smell of rose-tinged hope in the breeze, and it’s such a wonderfully her dad thing, she thinks, that he held on for this.
“I’m not ruining Christmas and I’m not ruining Leslie’s birthday, and February’s already too damn dreary without this miserable sort of business,” he’d said, laughing as Marlene scolded him for cursing. “Besides, baby, I want to see flowers again. No, I’ll be going in the spring.”
And he’d kept his word.
He’d spent his last days watching Leslie play in the park in the springtime, and after he’d died the town had raised a little money to plant an oak sapling and install a dedication plate just next to it. Leslie had patted the damp earth down around the little tree while Marlene looked on, and although she knew her dad wasn’t really there at all, that her grandmother had taken his body back home to Florida and the family plot, it felt like she was tending to a real piece of him, keeping him safe, letting him take root here where they’d been happy.
As the years passed, Leslie and her tree had each grown in fits and spurts until one day she found herself looking up to it the way she’d once looked up to the living Robert Knope.
When she was fourteen years old, city council had tried to sell Harvey James Park off to a property developer and Leslie had wrangled nearly the entire middle school to go and sit in the park in the afternoon and into the evening until worried parents jammed up the block around the park with their cars, flooding onto the lawn, frantic... only to join their children on the grass when they found that the whole affair was about that poor Knope girl’s tree.
Even Marlene had been an accomplice.
She hadn’t left the office, of course, but she’d tipped the press off when Leslie had called her from school to tell her about it. “We’re gonna keep sitting here until city council decides to keep the park,” fourteen-year-old Leslie had said to the journalists. “My dad’s memorial tree is in this park.” And she’d sat right back down by the tree and stayed put into the night until the sky was inky and the stars winked down at her and she was all alone.
***
Harvey James Park is still here, of course.
It’s unseasonably cool for March and Leslie clutches her hot chocolate close, eking every little bit of warmth out of the cup as she and Marlene make the quiet, easy stroll from JJ’s to the park.
They’re not the first ones here for the picnic.
Leslie recognises half a dozen people from the rec centre, her old school teachers, Todd from the public pool, Evan and Mandy from the zoo, and a dozen other people from a dozen other things her dad had been a part of when he was alive. Her other family.
No one’s exactly sure how it started, but for twelve years there has been an unspoken rule that on this day each March, Pawnee gathers by the oak tree and keeps the spirit of Robert Knope alive.
God, yeah, it’s so her dad.
And really, it’s so Leslie Knope. Because they might have started coming for Robert, but they’ve kept coming for her.
When she was in middle school, one of the rec centre teachers had called her “that poor orphaned Knope girl”, speaking to a colleague as though Leslie couldn’t hear them. She’d bristled, boiled, almost stormed over and screamed that she’s not an orphan, thank you very much, her mother is Marlene Griggs-Knope and she’s the most incredible woman in local government, possibly any government… but then Leslie had stopped. She’d remembered it was eight forty-five on a school night, long after the rec centre had officially closed, and her mother was still nowhere to be found. Realised with sagging shoulders that she was going to have to walk home in the dark with all her books again. It occurred to her that the teachers knew all of this, and for one of the first times in her life, she had been silent.
So Pawnee had taken up the mantle of raising one tiny, incorrigible Leslie Barbara Knope.
She swam at the pool for free and was welcome at the library long after opening hours were over on nights when the school board had marathon meetings. The rec centre teachers lied barefacedly about her classes being paid for and Lindsay Carlisle-Shay’s oma adopted Leslie as wholly as if she had been her very own granddaughter. In summertimes Leslie roamed the zoo and cleaned up the parks with the park rangers and put on half the picnics and barbecues her father had once run, and in the winters she knitted scarves for the homeless with the women’s caucus and sung Christmas carols at nursing homes.
Everyone in Pawnee knows Robert and Marlene’s kid.
And Leslie’s sure that one day, any day now, Pawnee will look at her and see the woman they’ve raised. That she’ll come home and, where they once saw a little girl in need of a family, they’ll see her, really see her. Leslie Knope, the grown woman who loves her town so much she could burst.
It just… hasn’t happened yet.
But it will.
She’s really sure it will.
“Hey kiddo,” says Evan from the zoo, after Leslie and Marlene get settled amidst the picnickers. They’re offered blankets and cushions and snacks from all directions, all of which Leslie accepts and most of which Marlene politely refuses. “How’s school?”
Evan is a big, gentle man. He once let Leslie and her dad into the penguin enclosure so Leslie could watch them swim up close.
She likes Evan.
So Leslie tells him all about everything, and pretends not to notice that his eyes glaze over when she starts talking about her plans for the student association.
***
She and Marlene never do finish talking about her plans for the summer.
They keep missing each other, coming and going at odd times and passing one another like ghosts in her mother’s empty house.
Leslie loves her home but god, she hates this house.
When Leslie lived here, she’d hung pictures and awards and filled the spaces with foraged flowers and ornaments and models, but after she’d gone to college Marlene had packed it all away, like she had packed all of Robert’s things into boxes in those first languorous months after he was gone.
The house is too big, too empty without it all and Leslie has never quite forgiven Marlene for her lack of sentimentality.
The sting she felt when she’d seen a picture of her father in a photo album at Lindsay’s house is just as fresh now as it had been a decade ago, the first time she’d seen his face since the funeral, peering out at her from behind flimsy plastic. It was a stupid, out of focus candid from Leslie’s ninth birthday party and she’d mustered up all her courage to pluck it from the album and stash it inside the cover of her Famous Five book like it was a precious artefact.
She’d begged and pleaded with her mother until she agreed Leslie could have a camera for her eleventh birthday, and Leslie has been hoarding memories ever since.
Not Marlene. Her mother packs it all away and soldiers on. (“It’s what Griggs women do,” she says, about a whole lot of things.)
It’s super depressing, is what it is, when you could live with the joy and the warmth of well-remembered times instead, but Leslie’s never quite been brave enough to say so.
The last way she wants to spend her time in Pawnee is sitting alone in the tomb of her mother’s grief, so Leslie spends the rest of the break roaming the town and doing all her favourite Pawnee things, and on her last day before going back to Bloomington she puts on an end-of-spring-break barbecue in Ramsett Park.
“You’ve really done it, kid,” says Bjorn Lerpiss, clutching a hotdog and surveying the proceedings with satisfaction. He doesn’t have any kids, but the man does love a barbecue. “It’s a real bang-up Knope cookout. He’d be real proud of this one.”
It’s his unspoken Robert that makes Leslie’s heart twinge. She honestly has no idea what a Robert Knope cookout might have looked like.
This is all Leslie.
One day, she thinks.
One day, they really will see it.
And if bitterness comes to her on sleepless nights like a devil and a temptress, if sometimes she can’t help but think that dead men cast very long shadows, well, she’d never admit to it. Not even to herself.
***
And just like that, spring break is over.
Leslie always misses Pawnee when she goes back to Bloomington, but she really has so much to do that she can’t dwell on that for long.
There’s essays and society meetings and dozens of nomination forms for the election and her breakfast program is running twice a week now, plus she’s starting that petition about student subsidies at the campus doctor and she’s got to find out what happened at the student council meeting she missed while she was in Pawnee…
She’s never missed a council meeting, even before she was on the council. But she’d written all the motions out, organised speakers for them and gotten assurances they’d be supported – and since she sits on the council as a Vice President but doesn’t actually have a vote on it, the only thing that’s different is that she hadn’t been there to watch the votes pass herself.
She’s sure council went fine without her. Probably. It probably had been fine. Although there’s an outside chance that they hadn’t understood her notes, or they’d made an amendment without consulting her. She’d left a binder, of course, with possible questions and answers all laid out simply enough even for stupid Eric to understand, but they might not have read the binder, or there might have been a question she hadn’t thought of…
Well, she’ll have to find out later.
She’s got bigger fish to fry this morning.
This morning she’s launching peer tax assistance.
It’s going to be awesome. She’s got a dozen upperclassmen accounting majors coming in to help out other students with their taxes in the next few weeks, and the first rotation of dorky numbers geniuses are due for the first shift soon.
The student association’s receptionist has called in sick (hungover, Leslie thinks, but she’s not a snitch) so Leslie’s pacing in the reception area, waiting for the nerds.
It’s a cramped little room in a sagging 1940s building, so she’s really walking in circles, more or less, clasping and unclasping her hands in anticipation.
Finally there’s a creak on the decrepit old stairs up from the ground floor. Leslie claps to herself happily as a scruffy looking boy appears on the landing clad in a horrifically mismatched shirt and tie, padfolio in hand.
And when he looks around with wide brown eyes and settles apprehensively on Leslie, all her pre-rehearsed greetings and introductions fly immediately out the window.
She knows him.
Holy crap. She knows this guy.
She has his picture on her desk, in her office not twenty feet away, along with half a dozen other inspirational people including Bella Abzug and her mother.
His hair’s longer, dirtier maybe, not slicked back, but yeah. Yes.
This is Benji Wyatt, mayor of Partridge, Minnesota.
“What are you doing here?” she says, before she can help herself and before he can take two steps across the room.
This is insane.
In fleeting moments of self-doubt, when she feels stupid for trying and very small, Benji Wyatt… well, it sounds pathetic when she admits it, but the thought of him being out there somewhere kind of keeps her going. She just looks at newspaper clipping and thinks, “if Benji Wyatt can be mayor, I can do this.” It’s a mantra that saw her through winning senior class president, her first job, summer internships, and it’s been in the back of her mind for weeks while she’s been preparing for this next election.
Benji Wyatt is kind of her touchstone.
What the hell is he doing here?
“Uh, peer tax assistance?” Benji says uncertainly, eyeing her carefully. He looks a little on edge and glances at the watch on his right wrist. “Um, I’m early. Sorry.”
“No,” Leslie says incredulously. He is missing the point. Wait, what would he want with tax assistance anyway? “What are you doing here? Indiana?” she demands, gesturing emphatically.
He grimaces and it’s the look of a man resigned to the gallows, or something. He covers his face with a hand, peering at her through his fingers and groans softly, “Oh, god.”
This isn’t very mayoral of him. He’s a public figure, after all. Leslie wonders momentarily if she could be mistaken but dismisses the thought almost right away. It’s him. She walks up to him, stopping about two feet away, and inspects the boy mayor in the flesh. Same guy, definitely. His nose is a little uneven. It hadn’t looked uneven in the pictures. And he smells like gross hair product and warm printer paper and oak when she would’ve picked him for a cologne kind of guy. Whatever. That isn’t the point.
“You’re Benji Wyatt,” she says.
He rubs his face and lets his hand drop to his side. He’s around her age, she knows, but he looks… older, all of a sudden. He looks at the ground, exhales, and looks back up at her, rocking on the balls of his feet. “I am.”
“Well, shouldn’t you be, you know—” he seems to shrink from her a little “—home? Running your town?” she finishes, waving a hand around her. It occurs to her that maybe she shouldn’t be interrogating him, but the horse is sort of out of the barn now and she really does want to know.
And now he looks absolutely perplexed. Looks at her for a moment, runs his hand through his hair, blinks. “Oh.”
“Shouldn’t you?” Leslie presses, putting her hands on her hips. Mayors can’t just go gallivanting across college campuses around the midwest asking about tax assistance. What is he thinking? And wouldn’t he have some sort of fancy accountant, anyway?
“Oh,” Benji Wyatt says again. “Uh, this is awkward. I—um—I guess you don’t know.”
“Know what?”
“I kind of… got impeached. Like, years ago.”
He’s right. She did not know. Suddenly there is circus music in her head.
“You what?” she yelps, hands flying into the air. Benji flinches again and Leslie feels an immediate pang of guilt, although she’s not exactly sure what for. “Those jerks!”
Benji blinks again. “What?”
“Your town are jerks,” Leslie says again, with feeling. “I can’t believe they impeached you.”
“I mean, I, uh, I kind of—”
“Who impeaches a kid? That’s horrible!” Although she has no idea what Benji Wyatt may or may not have done in Partridge, Minnesota and she’s kind of out on a limb here, she’s still pretty sure nothing could justify that. “You were just trying to help!” He was, right? He always sounded like he wanted to, in the articles. “Weren’t you?”
He’s staring at her blankly like he’s never seen another person before in his life. “Weren’t you?” she repeats.
He blinks, frowns a little, and tilts his head. There’s almost a smile at the edge of his mouth. Almost. It’s rueful. “Well… trying,” he mumbles.
“Well, there you go,” Leslie says decidedly. “Screw those jerks.”
She really wants to ask what the hell happened, but he’s still looking at her like that with those wide, searching eyes as if he doesn’t understand anything that’s happening right now—and there’s a brightness in them now that wasn’t there before and a strange, soft look that sort of reminds her of the way you’d look at an old childhood toy—and she just doesn’t have the heart.
He blinks hard a couple of times and rubs his eyes with his palms, exhaling a long, uneven breath.
When he removes his hands from his face he doesn’t quite meet her eye.
“So, um, anyway,” he says, after a beat, looking over her shoulder at the reception desk. “Tax assistance?” There’s a strain in his voice. “Are you—”
“Right! Tax assistance.” She pauses and bites her lip. She still isn’t sure what he wants with… oh, god. “Wait, do you go here now?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh. Oh, you’re… oh. Right. Really?”
“Yeah. I’m, uh, majoring in accounting. So I’m here to, you know... assist?” he finishes weakly.
“Oh! Right. Right, right. Um. Yes, well, I’m in charge.” She smooths her hands over her jeans and shakes her head. Crap on a cuttlefish. She has just super, super embarrassed herself in front of Benji Wyatt and now to make it five thousand times worse, she has to run him through the tax assistance program. “Wow. I’m sorry. I’ll get you—um, just come through here.” Leslie makes for the door to the offices and pulls it open for him.
He steps through and she shows him to the area she’s set up for the program, talking him through how it’s all going to work. They move awkwardly around each other as Benji unpacks his padfolio, sets down his calculator and arranges his things on the desk while Leslie hovers.
Maybe she ought to leave him be and go wait at reception for the others. But she finds herself lingering, unable to bring herself to just walk away from him now when he’s been with her for years, in a strange sort of way, even if he doesn’t know it, even if he isn’t really mayor of Partridge anymore after all.
He avoids her gaze as he sets his things just so, but Leslie catches him looking at her out of the corner of her eye.
She’s deciding whether or not to try to talk to him again and contemplating what in the world she could possibly say when the reception buzzer goes off.
It’s actually nine o’clock by now, and that’s probably her other accounting nerds.
Benji looks up at her, startled by the noise, and Leslie smiles feebly at him. “Well, I’ve gotta…”
“Yeah, yeah, of course,” he says, waving a hand towards the door.
She wills herself to move. “Okay. Well.”
“Yeah.”
She’s still standing there.
This is stupid. He’ll be on the roster again. In fact, she knows he is. She wrote the roster. The name hadn’t jumped out at her at the time, but… Anyway, she can just check the time for his next shift and she can think of something to say to him and dream up an excuse to be here at the same time he is. She works here, after all. It won’t be hard. And Leslie’s great at thinking of excuses to talk to people about stuff. She does it all the time.
She’s got this.
Finally, she forces her feet to move. She takes a step backwards and turns to leave but stops again, struck by another mortifying thought. She never even told him her name. That’s so unprofessional. God, she’s flustered. So she looks back over at him, smiles weakly, and says, “I’m Leslie, by the way.” She might never live this down. “It was very nice to meet you, Benji.”
But he nods and smiles back, a real smile that reaches his eyes. Had they been that warm brown colour before? “Leslie Knope, right?”
She nods. “Yeah.” And then: wait… what? Leslie blinks at him. “How’d you know?”
He doesn’t answer. Instead, he says, “This is a really awesome idea, by the way. Your programs are… they’re really awesome. I should have said that earlier.”
Crap on a cheesecake. Benji Wyatt knows who she is.
“And, um, I’m Ben, by the way. Just Ben.”
“Ben,” she repeats dumbly. The circus music from earlier had never really died down and it’s all she can hear now.
Or maybe it’s the sound of blood pounding in her ears. She really couldn’t say.
“Yeah.”
“Okay,” Leslie says, shaking her head against a sudden wave of dizziness. She tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “And, um, thank you. That’s… it’s… Thanks.”
Ben looks a little bashful and gestures towards the door again. “Um, do you need to…?”
Oh, yeah. The other nerds. She has to get the other nerds. Somehow she’d forgotten all about them. The buzzer goes off again, more loudly this time, snapping her out of her daze.
“Oh. Crap, yeah, I do.” She straightens her blazer even though she knows there’s nothing wrong with it and takes a hesitant step backwards. “Well, um… I’ll see you.”
“Yeah,” he agrees, smiling a little as he grabs his calculator.
Leslie gives him an awkward wave and jogs to reception to bring in the rest of the accounting students.
Holy crap.
Peer tax assistance is going to be awesome.
She always knew it would be.