The Book the Librarian Held for Years
I stood there holding a slip of paper, and I will tell you what went through me, and I’m not proud of it. It was not gratitude. It was something small and hot and ashamed, the feeling of walking into a room and finding out the party had gone on without you for years.
If somebody had been in my mother’s house on Thursdays, then she had not been as alone as I had made her. And then what had I been doing, every Sunday, with my cooler and my grim little face?
I put the slip in my coat pocket. I told Kurt I was going to the library.
“I’ll drive,” he said.
“I know you will.”
“I’ll wait in the truck, Jude.”
“I know that too.”
“Who drove the Buick?” I asked.
Nan looked at me with an expression I would have called surprised, if she hadn’t looked so much like someone being very patient.
“I did,” she said. “A tan Buick LeSabre, 2004, with a hundred and ninety thousand miles on it. It’s still out back.”
She opened the canvas bag and took out the first stack of index cards, the rubber band gone brittle, and laid them in front of me like a hand of solitaire.
“Your mother broke her hip on those steps the second fall after Arnold,” she said. “She’d been coming in every Saturday. Same time, ten o’clock, in her good coat, whether it was seventy or five below. And that October she came up the steps with her book bag and her heel caught on the third one, and I was behind the desk and I heard it. I heard it through the door. I have never heard anything like it before or since.”
“I was at the hospital that night,” I said. “I don’t remember you.”
“I stayed in the hall,” she said. “It wasn’t my place to be in the room.”
“When they sent her home,” Nan said, “she called me on the phone. She said, ‘Nan, I’m not going to be able to get up your steps.’ And she said, ‘I suppose that’s it for me and books.’ She said it flat. Like you’d say it’s supposed to rain.”
“Mom hated to be a trouble.”
“She did. She’d rather have gone to her grave without a book than ask somebody to bring her one.” Nan smiled a little. “So I didn’t ask her. I put six in a bag on Thursday at noon, when the library closes for lunch, and I walked over to Elm Street, and I knocked, and when she said ‘Who is it?’ I said, ‘Library.’ And I stood on the porch and listened to her thinking about whether to let me in.”
“Did she?”
“She said, ‘I haven’t got my teeth in.'” Nan laughed, and the laugh wobbled, and she waited. “I said, ‘Agnes, we taught the primary class across the hall from each other for nineteen years. I’ve seen you without your teeth.’ And she opened the door.”
I laughed. I hadn’t expected to. It came out wet.
“I went every Thursday after that,” Nan said. “Noon sharp, bag of books, and I stayed until quarter to one, which is the full length of my lunch hour. She’d have the coffee made. We had it at the little table, not the big one. She never let me wash a cup. I’ll tell you what, Judith, I’ve been in a lot of kitchens in this town in thirty-four years, and I never once went into one where I felt more waited for than that one.”