The Book the Librarian Held for Years

“Can I come?”

She looked at me for a second. Then she took the bag off her shoulder and held it out.

“It is heavier than it looks,” she said. “Your mother said that about most things.”

I took it.

“She never once said it out loud to me,” Nan said. “But she wrote your name on about forty of those cards. Judith would like this one. Ask Judith about the snow. Mostly in the margins. That was how she told people she loved them.”

I gave the book back that day. I mean I did it properly, with the stamp. Nan took My Ántonia in both hands, opened the front cover, and ran the date stamp down the card, and for the first time in nine years the thing was in. Arnold Tiller, card number 0412, returned. She wrote Closed out in pencil at the bottom of the hold slip, and she gave the slip back to me, and I put it in my wallet, behind the photograph of my grandchildren.

“Now,” Nan said, “somebody’s got to shelve it.”

I looked at the green spine.

“I think she’d want it on the shelf,” I said slowly. “I think she said that. That some child could find it.”

“Some child with no idea,” Nan said.

I carried it to the C’s, past the large print and the table of new releases. I found the gap between Carver and Chesnutt, and I stood there for a moment with the book against my chest the way Myrna had held hers on Tuesday.

I thought of my father climbing down off the grader with his lunch pail. I thought of my mother in her chair with her needles, saying read that one again, Arnold. I thought of a seventy-one-year-old librarian with a bad knee who had kept a promise for nine years without anyone telling her to.

I slid the book into its place.

“Mrs. Dillon?”

It was Myrna. She had come up behind me with the flush of a teenager who has been working up to a thing.

“Yes, honey?”

“Is it all right if I check that one out?” She looked at the spine. “I know it’s not, like, a book for kids. I just. I’d kind of like to know how it ends. I know how it ends. I mean, I heard how it ends. I’d just like to read it myself. In my own voice. If that’s okay.”

I looked at her. She had a stud in her nose and braces and a Cornhuskers sweatshirt, and she was about the age I had been when Nan put a library card in my hand and told me not to lose it.

I took the book back down and put it in her hands.

“You’ll want a bookmark,” I said.

She grinned, and I took the little work slip out of my purse, my father’s handwriting with my mother’s line on the back, and I almost handed it to her. I stood there holding it.

“No,” I said. “That one stays with me. Nan, do you have any of those little paper ones?”

“Third drawer,” Nan said from the doorway. “With the rubber bands.”

Myrna got her bookmark. She took it to the desk, handed Nan her own card, and watched the date stamp come down. It made a sound I had known all my life: a small, flat, final sound, the sound of somebody being trusted with something.