Just endless meetings with citizens who all thought their problem needed to be solved immediately, but with absolutely no logical solutions at hand.

She’d taken to having this biweekly meeting where citizens could bring concerns to the mayor’s office. They only had city council meetings every six weeks, so she’d thought it would be great to have listening meetings with the citizenry. She’d envisioned herself truly communicating with the citizens and coming up with innovative plans to help out her hometown. At the time she’d been ready to show them all what she could bring to the table by having big conversations.

Nope. It was mostly complaints. She’d once listened to an entire group of protesters upset over Dixie’s Café changing their pancake recipe.

She’d gone to Tulane for this.

“Leonard, you have to see that you can’t keep a raccoon as a pet,” she began.

Leonard was eighty-three and stubborn as the day was long. He’d also lost his wife of fifty-two years six months before. Sylvie felt a deep well of compassion for the man.

“Brian is not a pet,” Leonard corrected. “He’s a friend.”

“He’s a potential source of rabies.” Justin owned the fourplex where Leonard lived. He also lived in one of the units. He’d recently inherited the property from his father and moved to Papillon to take over running the business. His father had been in the community for years, but Justin had rarely visited and didn’t seem to be fitting in. “I’m honestly not sure it doesn’t have rabies now. It threw grapes at me. And they were half eaten. I was perfectly in my rights to have it removed.”

“He was defending his home,” Leonard insisted.

“It’s my property. I own it. His home should be in the woods,” Justin shot back.

She’d thought she’d get to hear about real problems—things like how the parish still hadn’t fully recovered from the last hurricane, and shouldn’t city hall do something about that? Nope. She got to hear about raccoons and how Otis was scaring the tourists. Otis was the town’s most famous alligator. Her town had a pet alligator. Should it be so surprising that Leonard wanted his raccoon friend treated fairly?

She’d been home too long.

“But I don’t want him gone.” Leonard sat back with a lost look on his face. “Did you already kill him?”

Sylvie sighed because if there was one thing she’d learned from being the mayor of Papillon, it was that no matter how silly the problem seemed, it meant something to someone. Wasn’t that what her mother had tried to teach her? Her mother ran the local beauty salon, and it was a universally acknowledged truth that half a beautician’s job was to listen.