The Last Stop on My Book Route

Mim did not say anything at all for so long that I said her name twice. Then she said, “I’ll think about it,” as though I had asked her something, and she hung up.

Wendell said, “Take care of your eyes, ma’am.” He is eighteen years younger than I am, and he has never once called me anything but ma’am.

I called Emil last. The phone rang eleven times, the way it does when he has to get up from the kitchen chair, and I counted every one.

I said my sentence. He didn’t answer. I could hear the clock on his wall, which was not running, which is to say that I could hear nothing.

“Thursday, then,” he said.

“No, Emil. I won’t be coming.”

“I heard you.”

And he hung up, and I stood in my kitchen with the receiver in my hand and thought, well, there is the end of that. I thought he was angry, or hurt, or both, and I thought I couldn’t blame him. I thought the last twenty minutes of a hard week had gone out of his life, and I was the cause.

I did not think anything else. If I had been a better woman I might have been curious about the way he said I heard you.

The first Thursday

So that was how I came to be sitting on the bench in the back hall in my driving shoes with the phone ringing at half past eight.

I got up, felt along the wall to the kitchen, and picked it up.

“Don’t say anything, Verna,” said Thelma Sevenker. “I have my glasses on and I have one page.”

I didn’t say anything.

She read it. It was a page from the cozy mystery with the cat, and she did every voice, the sheriff and the widow and the cat itself, who as far as I could tell was a Scotsman. It took her about nine minutes. When she was done she said, “That is all I’ve got, I’m ninety-two,” and then, “Thursday next,” and she hung up before I could thank her.

I stood holding the receiver. The kitchen clock said twenty to nine.

At a quarter to ten the phone rang again, and it was Ruby Ann Pesek, who read me two pages of a police mystery from the Cadillac and stopped twice to tell me that no detective in the world would pick up a weapon without gloves. I laughed out loud in my empty kitchen. I could hear her smiling.

At eleven it was Delmer Bonne, the oxygen hissing through the line behind him, reading three paragraphs of a cattle drive. He read as though the cattle might overhear. When he reached the end of the page, he said, “The horse lives, I checked ahead,” and hung up.

At noon it was Mim.

Mim did not read me a page of a novel. She had her big-print Bible open on the table, and I could hear it, the slick, soft sound of the thin pages. She read the hundred and twenty-first psalm, the one that begins with eyes lifted up to the hills. She read it in a voice that was flat and sure, the voice of a woman who has said it out loud at a lot of funerals.

When she had finished I said, “Mim, that was real clever.”

“I wasn’t being clever,” Mim said. “It’s the one I know by heart.”

“I know it isn’t.”