The Book the Librarian Held for Years

I thought I knew what her days were. The chair by the window. The television with the sound off. The clock. I had pictured her alone, and hated the picture, and driven up every Sunday to fill it in with the hour and forty minutes I had to give. I thought of myself as the only light in that house, and I was not proud of how much I’d needed to think so.

She never complained. When I asked what she’d done all week she’d say, “Oh, this and that,” and change the subject to my grandchildren.

The last good day she had, three days before she died, she took hold of my hand and squeezed it hard enough to surprise me. “Judith,” she said, “is it still waiting?” I patted her hand and said I thought it was. I thought she meant the mail.

I buried her on a Saturday at First Methodist, with the Lutheran ladies bringing ham sandwiches and half the county in the fellowship hall. Three weeks later, on a Tuesday when I had a personal day from the school office, Kurt and I drove up with boxes and a roll of tape and started on the house.

It is ten thousand small jobs, each with a lump in it. The hall closet, the drawer of twist ties, a baby tooth of mine in a Sucrets tin. I did all right until I got to the Bible.

It was on the stand by her chair, the big one with the zipper, the one my father had given her the year they married. I wasn’t going to throw it out. I only wanted to see whether anything was loose in it, because she kept things in there, recipes, obituaries, the program from my wedding. I held it by the spine and fanned it, and out of Ecclesiastes came the slip, and a bookmark, and a church bulletin from 2019.

I read the slip standing in the middle of her front room with the sunlight coming in over the chair.

Hold for Tiller, A. Placed March 9.

There was no year on it. Nan never wrote the year on anything, as if the library existed outside of time. But my mother put the date on her jars of tomatoes, and I counted back from the funeral program on the hall table to the spring after my father died, and I stood very still, because that was nine years ago, and in nine years I had not once seen my mother with a library book in her hands.

The slip was soft and brown with handling. Whoever had been looking at it had looked at it a lot.

“Kurt,” I said. “Come here.”

He read it over my shoulder. He read it twice, which is what Kurt does when he doesn’t know what to say.

“Maybe it’s an old one,” he said. “Maybe she forgot she had it.”

“She forgot nothing in her life.”

He was quiet. Then he said, “You know, I saw a car at her house on Thursdays.”

“What car?”

“A Buick. Tan, or white. Parked out front a few times when I was running feed out to Overton on a Thursday. I figured it was somebody from church.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I never went in. I didn’t think anything.”

“A Buick,” I said.

“Thursdays. Around noon, I’d say. It was always gone by one.”