The Book the Librarian Held for Years
“Your mother told me later the book was sitting on the counter by the toaster with his glasses folded on top of it.”
I had not remembered that. I remembered the Methodist ladies in the kitchen before I’d even got there from Lincoln, and my mother in her good cardigan standing in the middle of all of it with her hands empty. I was fifty-three years old and that was the day I stopped noticing what was on counters.
“She came in on the ninth of March,” Nan said. “Five weeks after. It was the first time she’d walked out of that house by herself. She had the book in a grocery sack. She put it on this desk right here, and she said, ‘Nan, I cannot finish it without him.'”
“I said, ‘Agnes, you don’t have to finish it today. Keep it. Renew it. Nobody is going to chase you.’ And she said, ‘I don’t want to keep it at home. It’s too much in the house. But I don’t want it going back on the shelf either, where some child can pull it down and read the end.’ She said the end belonged to Arnold. She wasn’t being foolish about it. She just said it plain, the way she said everything.”
“That sounds like her.”
“So I told her about holds. You put a slip in the book and set it behind the desk with the person’s name on it, and it waits for her. That’s all a hold is. A promise with a rubber band on it.” Nan almost smiled. “The rule in this library is seven days, and then the book goes back out. I wrote that rule. I wrote your mother’s name on a slip and put it in the book and set it on the shelf behind me, and I told her it would be there.”
“For a week.”
“For as long as she wanted it,” Nan said. “That is the only rule I ever broke, Judith, and I would break it again.”
I picked up the slip again. Hold for Tiller, A. Placed March 9. In Nan’s handwriting, the Palmer method, upright as a fence.
“I found this in her Bible,” I said. “In Ecclesiastes, chapter three. To everything there is a season. I almost put it in the burn pile with the grocery receipts. I thought it was a bookmark.”
“It was,” Nan said. “She was always marking her place in something.”
I should tell you how I found it, because I don’t want you to think I went looking.
My mother, Agnes Tiller, died on the second Tuesday in September at the age of eighty-eight, in her own bed in her own house on Elm Street, which was what she had asked of the Lord for as long as I could remember. She had been shut in for seven years. First it was her hip, which she broke on the library steps of all places. Then it was her back, the narrowing in the spine that the doctor in Grand Island called stenosis and my mother called “my business.” She had a walker she hated, a chair by the front window she loved, and a woman from the county who came Mondays and Fridays to help her bathe.
I drove up from Lincoln every Sunday. Ninety minutes each way, with a cooler in the back seat, lunch meat and soup and a loaf of the soft bread she complained about and then ate half of before I’d hung up my coat. I did that for seven years. I missed two Sundays for weather, and she called both times and said, “You stay put, Judith, I’ve got my soup.”