The Book the Librarian Held for Years
Nobody said anything for a minute. The rocker creaked once.
“Well,” Nan said finally, thickly, wiping her glasses on her cardigan. “That’s a book.”
“It is.”
“Agnes would have said the middle dragged.”
I laughed again, and it was a better laugh this time, one that left something behind besides salt.
“She’d have said there was too much weather,” I said.
“Three pages of snow,” Nan agreed, “before anybody says a word.”
It was past five when I came out. The grain elevator was holding the last of the light on its side like a lantern. Kurt was exactly where I’d left him, the window down, a county road map open on the wheel that he wasn’t looking at. He’d been there three hours.
I got in on the passenger side and put my head on his shoulder. He took his cap off, which is how he says things he doesn’t have words for, and set it on the dash.
“She had Thursdays,” I said. “Nan Greer came every Thursday for seven years. With books.”
“That Buick,” Kurt said. He shook his head slowly. “Lord. And I never went in.”
“She didn’t want us to.”
Through the windshield I watched Nan come out onto the steps with her purse and keys. She stopped on the third step down, the one where my mother had fallen, and stood with her hand on the rail, looking at nothing. She did not look like a woman who had done anything remarkable. She looked like a woman at the end of a long day.
“I thought I’d be mad,” I said. “I’m a little robbed. But mostly it’s like finding out somebody I love was in a good place the whole time without me.”
“You were what she was making it for,” Kurt said. “If you hadn’t been coming Sundays, she’d never have had anything to be tricky about.”
“That’s the nicest thing you’ve said to me in a year.”
“I’m saving up.”
Then I prayed out loud, with my eyes open, looking at the windshield. It wasn’t much. I told the Lord I was grateful. I told Him I was sorry for thinking I was the only light in that house. I said that if He kept a ledger, as my mother believed, He might look at the Thursday column and put a mark by Nan Greer. And I said I hoped somebody up there had read Mom and Dad the end.
Kurt said, “Amen,” and put his cap back on.
I went back on the Thursday.
I didn’t plan it. I told myself it was to return the book properly. But I got there at ten to noon in the good coat, and I stood on the third step for a minute before I went in. It was only gray concrete, worn in the middle, with a small chip out of the edge where my mother’s heel had caught.
Inside, Myrna was at the desk with a pencil behind her ear. Nan was in the back room with her coat on and the blue canvas bag.
“I’m going over to Mrs. Odell’s,” she said when she saw me. “She’s on Pine Street. Ninety-one. She has glaucoma, so it’s large print, and she wants anything with horses in it.”
“Is that a Thursday thing?”
“It’s a Thursday, a Tuesday, whenever,” Nan said. “It’s whoever can’t get up the steps.” She settled the bag on her shoulder. “There’s three of them now. I started with your mother. I thought she’d be the only one. But you do a thing once and a person asks you, and then you do it twice.”