The Story Hour In My Front Room

Darla at my door

She came the next Saturday.

I heard a car I did not know on the gravel, and I looked out and it was Darla, sitting in it a minute the way I had sat in my own truck that first day, working up to the door. I knew that sitting. I did not go out. I let her have her minute.

Then she came up the walk and knocked, which about broke my heart, because you do not knock at a story hour, you just come in, and she did not know that yet.

I opened the door. There were nine children on my rug and three mothers on the folding chairs and the coffee going.

“I don’t want to interrupt,” Darla said. Her voice was not the folding-table voice. “I can go.”

“You can’t go,” I said. “You’re letting the heat out. Come in.”

She came in. She stood against the wall by Harold’s chair, holding her own elbows, a twenty-nine-year-old woman who had not, I understood right then, been welcomed one single time since she got off the moving truck in June.

I did not make a speech. I handed her the book I was about to read, which was The Little Engine That Could, and I said, “You’ve got a nicer reading voice than me. I’ve heard you up front. Would you.”

She took the book like it might break.

“You want me to read it?”

“They don’t bite,” I said. “Much. Watch the Tate twins, they’ll climb you.”

She sat down in Harold’s chair. Micah, who will warm to anybody with a book, scooted over against her knee without being told, the way he had scooted against mine the first Saturday, and I watched Darla look down at the top of his head and I watched something in her face come loose.

She read it slow and she did the engine’s voice and the children were rapt, and when she got to I think I can, I think I can, two of them said it with her, and over their heads she looked at me with her eyes swimming, and I just nodded at her once, the way you tell somebody keep going, you’re doing fine.

I never did spend that forty dollar gift card on myself.

It sat in my kitchen drawer for two months. And then one Saturday when we were about fourteen children deep and I was buying apples by the bag and saltines by the box and the barefoot boy from down 9 had graduated to a pair of shoes I found at the thrift in Clarksville, I took that yellow card to the Dollar General where the Holcomb girl’s mother works, and I spent every cent of it on books.

Little ones. Board books, the kind a baby can gum and not ruin. Four dollars and change at a time. I got nine of them.

I keep them in a basket by the braided rug, and when a new baby comes to story hour, too little for the real books, I let that baby pick one out of the basket to hold and gnaw and claim. That is how they join. That is their first thing that is theirs in this room.

Darla’s forty dollars bought those books. I never told her that. But I think she’d like to know, so maybe somebody will read this to her, and now she does.