The Book the Librarian Held for Years
I don’t know how long I sat there. Myrna Putnam came in the back door, the high school girl who shelves after three, and found the front door locked and Nan Greer with her arm around a crying woman, and she did what a smart sixteen-year-old does, which is nothing at all. She set her backpack on a shelf cart and stood by the biography section holding a book against her chest like a shield.
“It’s all right, Myrna,” Nan said. “Come sit.”
Myrna came. She sat on the edge of the second oak table, swinging one foot, trying to look like she was not listening.
Nan handed me a tissue, and then a second one. I blew my nose like a farm truck.
“There’s one more thing,” she said. “The reason I closed up. It’s about the book.”
“I know about the book. You said she couldn’t finish it without Dad.”
“That’s what she said the first day.” Nan folded her hands. “Here is what she said after.”
She told me how, the first winter after the hip, with a sack of books on the table between them and the coffee going cold, my mother had gotten quiet and said, “Nan, is it still on the shelf?”
“I said it was. I’d had it on the top shelf in the back room where nobody goes. And Agnes said, ‘Don’t let it go.’ And I said, ‘I never would.’ And every Thursday after that, sometime between the cups and the coats, she’d say it again. Is it still waiting? And I’d say it is, Agnes, and she’d nod, and we’d go on to the next thing.”
“Is it still waiting,” I said. “She asked me that. Three days before she died. I thought she meant the mail.”
“Some Thursdays I’d say, ‘Would you like it today?’ And she’d shake her head. She’d say, ‘Not yet.’ And one Thursday, in maybe the fourth year, I asked her straight out, the way you do when you’ve known somebody long enough. I said, ‘Agnes, what are you waiting for?'”
I knew. I felt it before she said it, the way you feel an answer in your knees.
“She said, ‘I’m not waiting to finish it, Nan. I’m waiting to hear it finished. I want to hear his voice do the last of it. And I figure that’s coming.'”
Myrna shifted on the table. She was sixteen, and she studied the ceiling tiles very hard.
“She wasn’t morbid about it,” Nan said. “She never was. She said she’d been to enough funerals to know the Lord keeps a good ledger, and that somewhere on the other side my father was holding his place in the book with his glasses folded on it, waiting for her to come sit down. She said she’d read it to herself plenty of times if she wanted to, but she didn’t want to. She wanted to let Arnold have the last chapters, and she wanted to let the book wait until she could hear them. It was how she kept him, Judith. It was how she kept him in the kitchen.”
I had not known my mother was keeping my father in the kitchen. I had thought the kitchen was where she was waiting to die.
“I never read past where he stopped,” Nan said quietly. “I’ve taken that book down off the shelf a hundred times to dust it. I have never opened it past the bookmark. I want you to know that. I’m a librarian and I’m curious by nature and I could not do it. It wasn’t mine.”
“May I?” I said.
She pushed it across the desk.