Chapter 2
Rhett
She walks ahead of me down Linden Street and I will tell you something I am not proud of admitting, even to myself: I cannot stop cataloging her.
I do it the way I have been trained to do it.
The way Knox taught me my first month on the road.
Look at what's in front of you. All of it.
Don't filter. Filter gets you killed. I have done this with men in parking lots and bars and gas station forecourts for six years and it has not, in all that time, ever once felt like this.
Like a hand reaching into my chest to inventory things I did not know were in there.
She smells like old books and lavender.
Her hair is in a braid that has come a little loose at the nape of her neck, and a single strand of it has gotten damp from the rain and is curled against her skin like the curl on the end of a fiddlehead fern.
There is a peony — a white peony with a pink throat — tucked behind her left ear, and from the way she touched her ear after we crossed the gate I am ninety percent sure she had forgotten it was there.
Her cardigan is the soft yellow of butter and it is buttoned wrong by one button at the bottom.
Her dress is white with little blue flowers on it, the kind of flowers I do not know the name of, and the hem ends an inch above her knee, and her shoes are flat and scuffed and have a bit of grass stuck to one heel.
She has ink on the side of her left thumb — a smudge of black ink — and a thin gold chain at her wrist with no charm on it, just the chain.
She is talking. She has been talking since the moment we hit the sidewalk and she has not, I think, taken a full breath.
"— I am so sorry to drag you out here, you were clearly in the middle of something, I would have gone to Mr. Cobb's nephew but he is out of state visiting his daughter, and I tried the high school shop teacher first, before the hardware store, but he said he could not in good conscience touch a load-bearing fixture in a public building without insurance, which is a fair point, although I think technically the shelf is not load-bearing, only the wall behind it is, but I did not want to argue with him because — and this is the thing, I never want to argue with anybody, ever, which is a problem I am aware of —"
"Ma'am."
She stops talking. She does not stop walking.
"You can stop apologizing," I say.
She makes a small soft sound. It is not quite a laugh. It is something gentler. "I am also aware that I do that. The apologizing. I am — I will try to stop. Sorry. I mean. I am not sorry. I am — okay."
"Okay."
She walks the next ten steps without saying anything. Then she says, "I do not know your name."
"Colt."
"Colt," she repeats. She says it the way she has said the other words she has said since we left the gate — careful with the consonants, like she is handling each one to make sure it does not chip. "I am Nora. Ashby. The librarian."
I almost say I know. I do not know her, exactly, but the way she walks tells me everything about who she is in this town — small, particular, careful with her footing — and the word librarian is so obviously what she is that it is like being told the river is wet.
I say, instead, "Pleasure."
She glances at me sideways. Quick. Bird-quick.
Her eyes are some color I cannot get a fix on — green, maybe, or hazel, or both depending on the light — and when she meets mine her cheeks go pink in two distinct round spots high up on each side, like somebody has thumbed a watercolor across her face.
Then she looks away again, and the spots travel down to her throat.
I do not know what to do with the information that I have just made her blush by saying the word pleasure.
I tuck my hands into the pockets of my jacket.
We walk the rest of the way to the library in silence.
It is not, I notice, an uncomfortable silence.
She does not seem to need to fill it back up once it has happened.
She just walks at her careful particular pace and I match it and the after-rain wet shine of the dogwood petals on the sidewalk makes the whole walk feel like we are crossing a stretch of glass.
—
The shelf is bad.
I see it the second she lets me through the side door of the library and I cross the carpet to the periodicals corner.
Eight feet of metal unit, three hundred pounds of paper on it, leaning forward at a slant I do not love at all.
The two top wall anchors have come clean out of the plaster, and the bottom bolts are starting to flex with the weight pulling forward.
Another nudge — somebody bumping it with a hip, a kid hanging off the lowest shelf — and it would come down.
I do a quick mental math on what it would hit on the way to the floor.
I look back at her.
She is standing with both hands clasped at her stomach, watching me look at it, the way somebody watches a doctor read an X-ray.
I say, "Whoever bolted this in 1962 used the wrong anchors."
She nods. She nods like this is the kind of thing she has suspected all her life.
I say, "It's going to need new hardware. Toggle bolts up top into the studs, with backplates. I want to drill all the way through to the framing. Also you've got a hairline crack in the plaster above the top crossbar that I want to look at."
"All right."
"Do you have power in this corner?"
"There is an outlet behind the magazine rack."
"I'll need to clear the shelves first. I do not want any of these to fall on me while I'm working."
"I will help. I —"
"Ma'am."
She stops.
"I can clear it," I say. "I am also going to ask you, very politely, to not stand under it while I clear it. Could you go to the desk?"
She does. She walks back to the circulation desk like a child who has been told to go sit in a chair, and she perches on the high stool behind it with her hands folded, and she watches me.
I clear the shelf in fifteen minutes. I work top to bottom, two and three magazines at a time, stacking them in neat orderly piles on the table behind me because I can tell from one look at her — the way her cardigan is buttoned, the way the books on the cart behind the desk are arranged by call number and not by size — that this is a woman who is going to want her Smithsonians back in chronological order, and I have decided, somewhere in the last ten minutes, that I am going to do this job the way she would do it if she were the one doing it.
I do not examine why I have decided that.
I go out to the bike for my toolkit. I come back. She is still on the stool.
I work on the shelf for an hour and a half.
I drill out the old anchor holes. I locate the studs with a stud finder I keep in the bottom tray of my kit.
I cut new openings. I sink toggle bolts into the framing with backplates an inch wide on each.
I check the crack in the plaster — it is cosmetic, not structural, and I tell her so over my shoulder; she says oh, good, in the small relieved voice of a woman who has been carrying the worry for a while.
I refit the unit to the wall. I tighten everything by feel.
I shake the shelf, hard, with the flat of my hand.
It does not budge. I shake harder. Nothing.
I climb up on the second shelf with my full weight on the front edge and I bounce. It holds.
I get down.
I put the magazines back in chronological order.
I take a guess at the order based on the cover dates and I get most of it right; she comes over once toward the end to gently move one National Geographic two slots to the left, and I say "Sorry," and she says "Oh, no, you got it almost perfectly," and I look at her and she looks at me and the spots come back into her cheeks.
I close my toolkit.
I say, "It will hold for the next forty years."
She says, "Thank you."
She says it twice. She says it three times. She says, thank you, thank you so much, I do not know how to — what do I owe you, please let me — how much —
I say, "Nothing."
She stops. She looks at me.
"Nothing?"
"Nothing."
"Mr. — Mr. Colt, I cannot —"
"It's just Colt." I hesitate. I do not say it often. I do not know why I say it now. "It is Rhett, actually. Colt is what the brothers call me. Rhett is the name my mother uses."
She looks at me for a long second.
She says, "Rhett." She says it the way she said Colt on the way over — carefully. She rolls the r a tiny bit on the front. She says it like she is filing it in a particular drawer in a particular cabinet only she has the key to. "Rhett."
I do not know what to do with my hands.
She comes around the desk. She walks past me to the new-arrivals display by the front window.
She runs her fingers along the spines for a moment.
She is doing something. She is making a decision about something.
Then she pulls a book down. It is a small hardcover with a green dust jacket and a single line drawing of a deer on the front.
She brings it back to the desk. She slides it across the counter to me.
"On the house," she says. "If you would like to. As a thank-you. You — you do not have to read it. But if you ever wanted to. It is one of my favorites."
I look at the book. Then at her. Then at the book.
"I don't have a library card," I say.
She says, "Well. We can fix that."
She fills out the application herself. She asks me my legal name and my address and my date of birth and she writes each answer down in careful blue ink in handwriting that is not handwriting — it is calligraphy, real calligraphy, the kind with the long-tail descenders and the careful little loops.
She hands me a temporary paper card. She tells me my official card will be mailed within ten business days.
I have never owned a library card in my life.
I take the temporary card. I fold it once. I put it in the inside pocket of my jacket. The pocket where my brothers keep their knives.
She slides the book across the counter to me.