The Book the Librarian Held for Years

“For seven years.”

“Three hundred and some Thursdays. Not counting Christmas and the weeks I had my knee done. Delphine Ames covered the desk then.” She tapped the stacks. “When Agnes was too poorly to get to the door, I let myself in with the key under the milk can.”

“I put that key there,” I said. “For the county woman.”

“I know. She told me where.”

I looked down at the cards.

They were three-by-fives, lined, the cheap kind from the drugstore, and every one had my mother’s tight upright hand across it in pencil. I picked up the top one and read it.

Nan. Too much weather in this one. Three pages of snow before anybody says a word. Fine writer, but I was cold by chapter two. Put another by this man, but a warmer one. A.

I read the next.

Nan. The woman is a fool but I like her. I stayed up till 11 to see what she does. Do not tell Judith I was up that late. A.

My heart turned over in my chest like a loaf of dough.

There were two hundred and twelve of them. My mother had rated, argued with, and lovingly demolished more than four hundred books in seven years. She’d read the Louis L’Amour her father had read, the Hillerman mysteries, and a biography of Eleanor Roosevelt she called “a brave woman, a dull book.”

And all of it was a secret from me. My mother, who told me everything about her bunions and her bowels and the neighbor’s dog, had kept this one thing in a pantry for seven years.

“Why?” I said. My voice came out smaller than I meant. “Nan, why wouldn’t she tell me?”

Nan took her time.

“I asked her that,” she said. “In the second year. I said, ‘Agnes, Judith would be so glad.’ And she said, ‘I know she would.’ And then she said something I wrote down when I got back to the car, because I wanted to have it exactly. Do you want it exactly?”

“I want it exactly.”

Nan reached into her cardigan pocket and brought out a folded square of yellow paper. She’d had it with her all along.

“This is what she said,” Nan read. “‘Judith drives ninety minutes every Sunday because she thinks I have nobody. If she finds out I have somebody on Thursdays, she’ll think I’m fine, and then she’ll start coming every other Sunday. I’d rather she worry and come.'”

I put my hand over my mouth.

“Then she said, ‘A mother is allowed one secret from her child, Nan. This is mine.'”

I laughed. It was the worst sound I have ever made in a public building. It was a laugh and a sob wearing the same coat, and it bent me over the oak desk with my forehead almost on the stamp pad. Nan came around and put her hand flat between my shoulder blades, the way she had the Saturday morning I was nine and had lost a book in a creek, when she was a girl of eighteen with her mother’s keys on a string around her neck.

“She said it more kindly than that,” Nan said. “She said it like she was apologizing to you ahead of time.”

“She tricked me.”

“She did,” Nan said. “On purpose. For love. For seven years.”