The Porch Story Hour

Forty-one cars

When the book was done and the children had run for the cookies, Mr. Wilkins stood up out of the porch swing, slow, one hand on the chain to steady himself.

He did not stand like a man who was about to leave. He stood like a man who had been saving something up since breakfast.

“Amy, I counted the cars,” he said. “Forty-one, all the way down the drive to the cattle gap. I did it twice.”

“That’s a lot of cars,” I said.

“My daughter-in-law Cora works the circulation desk at the branch,” he said. “She says they had two children at story hour Thursday. Two. Down from nineteen in September.”

I had not known that. I had not wanted to know it, and I had been careful not to ask anybody who might tell me.

He tipped his seed cap toward the cedar benches along the rail, the ones Josh had sanded smooth on a half day he never mentioned.

“These don’t belong out here,” he said. “These belong where the whole county can see them.”

Josh was leaning on the porch post with his arms crossed. He looked at me across the heads of the children, and I looked at him, and neither of us said what we were both thinking.

Then he went out to the truck and came back with a roll of ratchet straps.

“It’s county property,” I said. “We can’t just show up.”

“Then somebody ought to ask the county,” Mr. Wilkins said, and he went to find his hat, which was on his head.

Beatrice

The county librarian is a woman named Beatrice Boettcher. She runs all four branches out of an office in Morrilton, and she has a voice like a sergeant and a laugh like a screen door.

Josh called her that evening from the garage. I stood in the kitchen doorway and heard his half of it, which was mostly “yes ma’am.”

“She wants to know what time,” he said when he hung up.

“What time for what?”

“Thursday. She says the front lawn of the branch is the county’s lawn, and a story hour on it at ten o’clock is a story hour.” He rubbed his neck. “She said she would rather count sixty than two.”

“Did she say anything about Nancy?”

“She said she had already heard.” He looked at the floor. “Cheryl Dunlap called her office twice about the humming. Once polite, once not.”

I thought of Nancy standing behind that desk squaring a stack of bookmarks. Scared people, I had said. Scared people can still be kind.

“Cora told her the rest,” Josh said. “That it was Nancy who said it to you, at the desk, with the door open.”

“That is a hard way to put it.”

“Beatrice is a hard woman,” Josh said. “It is why they gave her four branches.”

That night I did not sleep much. I lay there in the dark thinking about a lawn, and a row of tall windows, and every person in that town who drives past the library on a Thursday.