The Book the Librarian Held for Years

Nan Greer reached under the desk and came up with a box of tissues.

The sign on the door already said Closed, at ten past two on a Tuesday, and the faded blue canvas bag sat at her elbow with its handles worn white. She had already taken the green hardback down from the shelf behind her without once looking, the way a hand does a thing ten thousand times. Now she set the tissues on the oak between the book and the soft brown slip and slid them six inches toward me with one finger.

“You’ll want those before I start,” she said. “I know your mother’s face on you. I’ve been looking at it since you came through the door.”

“I’m fine.”

“Judith,” she said. “Sit.”

So I sat, in the wooden chair on my side of the desk with the needlepoint cardinal worn to the thread. I had sat in that chair at seven years old, swinging my feet, waiting for Nan’s mother to stamp Misty of Chincoteague, while Nan, a long-legged girl of sixteen, shelved behind her and pretended not to watch me. Nan took over the desk when her mother retired, thirty-four years ago.

The radiator knocked. Through the tall front window I could see Kurt’s truck at the curb and Kurt behind the wheel looking at the dashboard on purpose. He is a man who knows when to stay in a truck.

“I promised your mother I would wait until you asked,” Nan said. “She told me you’d come in. She said it would be a Tuesday.”

“I’ll start with the book,” she said, “because the book is the easy part.”

She put her palm flat on the cover. It was a plain green library binding, the cloth gone shiny at the corners, a call number inked on a paper label at the foot of the spine. My Ántonia, by Willa Cather. A Nebraska book, in a Nebraska library, and every one of us in Alder Creek had a grandmother who broke sod just like the people in it.

“It’s been checked out to your father since the second week of January, nine years ago,” Nan said. “Arnold Tiller, card number 0412. He and your mother were reading it out loud to each other at the kitchen table after supper. Your father read. Your mother knit. You know how they were.”

I did know. My father had run the county road grader out of the Alder Creek shed for twenty-eight years, and he had a flat, steady, kind voice, the voice of a man not in a hurry because the road was going to get graded. After supper he read to my mother. Westerns when I was little. Then the Psalms. Then whatever Nan Greer handed him over the desk on Saturday mornings. My mother sat in her chair with her needles going and her eyes shut, and when he came to a part she liked she would say, “Read that one again, Arnold.”

“They had one night left, maybe two,” Nan said. “He told me so himself, on the Saturday. He stood right where you’re sitting and said, ‘Nan, we’re going to be late with this one, Agnes won’t let me skip ahead.’ I told him there was no fine in this library for a man on his last chapters.”

She stopped and pressed her lips together.

“He died on a Thursday,” she said. “February. You remember.”

“At the supper table,” I said. “He’d just finished clearing his plate.”