Chapter 2 #2
"It is about a man," she says, "finding his way home." She hesitates. Her fingers are still on the cover. "I think you might like it."
She lifts her hand. The book is mine.
I pick it up.
I walk out into the wet afternoon with a green hardcover under my arm and a peony-yellow afterimage of a librarian behind my eyes that I will not, I am fairly sure, be getting rid of by sundown.
—
I do not go back to the clubhouse.
I do not entirely know where I do go. I ride. I take the long road out past the orchards and up the ridge and I sit on a turnout above the river with the engine off and the bike ticking and the smell of wet pine all around me, and I open the green book.
There is a note inside the front cover.
It is on a small square of cream paper, folded once. Her handwriting again, that calligraphy: I think you might like this one — it's about a man finding his way home. — N.
That is it. One sentence. One initial.
I sit on the turnout and I read it three times.
Then I open the book.
I read fifty pages without looking up. The protagonist is a Marine coming back from his second tour to a town in eastern Oregon that he left when he was eighteen.
He is not me. He is a different man. He has a different history and different scars.
But there is a line on page thirty-three where he stands in a kitchen that used to be his mother's kitchen and he says, I do not know how to live in a room where nobody is going to hit anybody, and I put the book down on my thigh and I look out at the river and I have to take a slow breath in through my nose and out through my teeth.
It is a strange thing to be seen by a book. To have a sentence reach up out of a page and put its hand on your sternum and say I know.
It is a stranger thing to be seen by the woman who picked the book.
She does not know me. I have been in her library for two hours of my life.
She has filed me in some drawer of her mind under biker or Iron Thorn or that man in the gravel yard with no shirt on and she has still managed, in the four minutes she spent at the new-arrivals shelf, to pick the one book on the table that was going to hit me where I live.
I do not know what to do with that. I do not have a box for it.
I read for another hour on the turnout. I get through ninety pages. The sun starts down behind the ridge. The light goes gold, then pink, then a soft heavy blue. I start the bike. I put the book in my saddlebag carefully, between two folds of the rag I keep for the engine, so it will not rattle.
I ride back into town.
—
I come back the next day. I tell myself I am coming back to check the shelf. I tell myself it is professional follow-up. I tell myself a lot of things on the ride into town.
I park around the corner. I walk in through the front door. The little bell jangles. She looks up from the desk and the spots come into her cheeks again and she says "Hi" before she has thought about whether she is going to say it.
The shelf is fine. I check it. I make a show of checking it.
I shake it. I lean my full weight on it.
I look up at the toggle bolts with a flashlight from my jacket pocket.
She watches me, and I can feel her watching me, and I take longer than I need to so that the watching can go on a little longer.
I come back the day after that.
This time I do not pretend to check the shelf. This time I come up to the desk with the green hardcover in my hand and I set it down on the counter and I say, "I finished it."
She looks at me.
She looks at me for a long beat, the way she has started to look at me, like she is reading me the way she reads books — slowly, taking notes in the margin.
She says, "What did you think?"
I do not know how to answer that.
I say, finally, "There's a line on page thirty-three."
She says, "I know the line."
I say, "I would like another one."
She tilts her head. The corner of her mouth lifts. It is the first real smile I have ever seen her make and it is small and slow and it goes all the way up into her eyes, and I will tell you the truth: I feel that smile in my knees.
She comes around the desk. She walks to the back of the stacks. She comes back with another small hardcover — blue this time, with a single white feather on the cover — and she sets it down in front of me with the same care she set down the first one.
"This one is about a man," she says, "who learns to be quiet."
I look at the book. I look at her. I look at the book.
I say, "Are you choosing these on purpose?"
She blushes so hard the pink goes down past her collar.
She says, very quietly, "Yes."
—
I read the second book in the reading nook.
I have, at this point in my life, never sat in a public library reading nook.
I am six-foot-two and two hundred ten pounds and I am wearing a leather cut over a white henley and motorcycle boots and I am sitting in a wingback chair meant for somebody half my size with a hardcover with a white feather on the cover, and I am, by any honest accounting, the most absurd thing in the building.
She is at the desk. She is helping an elderly man find a large-print mystery.
She is helping a young mother find picture books about firefighters because the boy is going through a phase.
She is helping a homeschool teenager find a biography of John Adams. She is, in the course of one afternoon, doing seven completely different acts of small careful kindness for seven completely different people, and not one of those people knows that she is the most precise, most attentive, most deliberately gentle person I have ever stood within twenty feet of.
I know.
I know because I have been watching her for two days.
I do not know what to do about it.
—
I take the book back to the clubhouse that night.
I am the last one in the common room. Hawk is sitting at the bar with a beer in one hand and his laptop open in front of him, doing whatever it is Hawk does in the evenings, which I think involves crossword puzzles and his wife and a deep abiding contempt for the spelling reform movement.
He sees the book.
His eyebrows go up.
He says, "Since when do you read?"
I sit down on the stool next to him. I put the book down on the bar. I look at the cover for a second. I look up at Hawk.
I say, "Since now."
He looks at me. He has the steady, patient look he gets when he is about to ask a question I am not going to answer. He does not ask it. He takes a long pull off his beer instead. He sets the bottle down. He looks at me again.
He says, "Huh."
He goes back to his crossword.
He says, after about a minute, without looking up, "She got a name?"
I do not answer.
He nods once. He says, "Yeah. Okay."
He turns the page of his crossword. He does not look at me again.
I sit at the bar with the book under my hand for another long minute. The clubhouse is quiet around me — somewhere down the hall I can hear Diesel's TV through his door, and the wind in the eaves, and the small clean tick of the clock above the bar — and I think about her.
I think about the spots in her cheeks. The peony behind her ear. The careful calligraphy of I think you might like this one — it's about a man finding his way home. The line on page thirty-three. The smile that went all the way up into her eyes. The way she said Rhett.
I think about the green book in my saddlebag and the blue book under my hand and the temporary library card folded into the inside pocket of my jacket next to where I keep my knife.
I think: she is the wrong woman.
I think: she is the most wrong woman for me there has ever been.
I think: she is so soft she should be standing somewhere I can see her at all times.
I pick up the book. I take it to my room.
I read in bed until two in the morning. The man in the second book stands at the edge of a field at dawn and listens to a meadowlark and decides that being still is a discipline and not a failure, and I close the book at three a.m. with my chest aching in the strange particular way it has started to ache, and I sleep without dreaming for the first time in eleven months.
I will tell myself, for another two weeks, that none of this means anything.
I will be wrong.