Chapter 3
Nora
He becomes a regular.
I do not know what else to call it. He comes in twice a week, sometimes three.
Tuesdays and Fridays without fail, and a third visit on a Saturday or a Wednesday depending on how fast he has finished whatever I gave him last. He arrives in the late afternoon — never the morning, never close to closing — and he returns the previous book to the circulation desk with both hands, the way you would return something fragile, and he stands at the counter and waits for me to choose the next one.
He never asks for a specific book. He never asks for a genre. He just sets the last one down between us and looks at me, those pale river-ice eyes patient and steady, and waits.
I have started to dream about this. I do not mean — I mean in a small way.
In the way you dream about a project that has gotten its hooks into you.
I lie in bed at night and I go through the shelves in my head and I think no, not that one, too cold, and not that one, the protagonist comes home with a wife and he does not need a wife yet, and not that one, the violence in chapter four would be a wrong note in a song I do not yet know how to write, and yes — yes, that one, that one is right, that one is going to land.
I am building him a reading list the way I would build a meal for someone whose constitution I do not yet trust, course by course, watching his color.
By the end of the second week he has read four books.
By the end of the third he has read seven.
He reads at a pace that should not be possible for a man who, by any reasonable expectation, has not been a reader for most of his adult life.
I do not know how he is making the time.
I suspect he is making it the way people make time for any first love — by giving up sleep.
He sits in the reading nook to read. He does not take the books home anymore, after the first two.
He chooses the wingback chair near the south windows, in the angle of light that I privately think of as the best chair in the building, and he folds his impossible body into it like he is trying to fit a horse into a footstool, and he reads.
He reads for an hour at a stretch. Sometimes two.
He does not check his phone. He does not look up.
The only thing in the world for those hours is the page in front of him, and when he turns a page he does it carefully with his thumb, and when he finds something good — and I have been watching, I have been watching for the last ten days — the corner of his mouth lifts, that quarter-inch tell that he does not seem to know he has.
The regulars adjust to him faster than I would have predicted.
Mrs. Halloran, who runs the homeschool reading hour, is the first. The Thursday after he reattached the shelf, I am setting up the children's mat for the four o'clock circle when she comes in with the twin grandsons and freezes in the doorway because Rhett is in the reading nook fifteen feet away, six-foot-something of leather and ink folded into the wingback.
She gives me a look. I give her a look back.
She is a woman who has run a homeschool co-op out of her living room for twenty-one years and she has not survived that long by being slow on her feet.
She comes over to the desk. She whispers, "Is he safe with the children? "
I do not even have to think about it. I say, "Yes."
She says, "You're certain."
I say, "Sandra. He sat at this desk yesterday for forty minutes helping me sort donated picture books because my back was hurting. He held a copy of Goodnight Moon the entire time and treated it like he was holding a baby. He is safe with the children."
She nods. She lets it go. She runs her reading hour ten feet from him without incident, and at the end of the hour, when the twins go over to look at the man in the chair — the way children always go to look at the most interesting thing in any room — Rhett looks up at them with the same careful blink he gave me in the gravel yard the day we met.
He says hi. The smaller twin, Bo, asks him what he is reading.
Rhett turns the book around and shows him the cover.
He says, "It is about a man who used to be a soldier and who is trying to learn how to be a farmer.
" Bo considers this. Bo says, "Why?" Rhett says, "Because being a soldier broke him a little and he thinks the farm might fix him.
" Bo nods like that is a reasonable enough answer for a Thursday. He goes back to his grandmother.
I watch this exchange from behind the desk. I will admit, freely, that I do not entirely breathe through it.
It is not just Mrs. Halloran. By the third week, Mr. Cobb has started giving Rhett a small nod when he comes in, and Rhett has started carrying Mr. Cobb's stack of westerns out to his car on his way back to the clubhouse.
By the fourth week, the senior book club has officially accepted him as a fixture — Mrs. Albright, who runs the club with the cheerful tyranny of a retired second-grade teacher, has begun asking him for his opinion on the month's selection, and he has begun giving her one.
He read East of Eden with them last week.
He came over to the desk afterward and stood with his hands in his jacket pockets and said, "Cathy is the most uncomplicated villain I have ever met in a book," and I had to put down the pen I was holding because I did not entirely trust my hand.
The children's reading hour has voted, by unspoken consensus, that he is a superhero.
I do not correct them.
—
I am curating him.
I have not used that word out loud, even in my own head, because the word frightens me a little.
It implies a project. It implies an outcome.
It implies that I have been quietly, patiently, deliberately handing this man book after book because I am trying to do something to him, and the something I am trying to do has gotten away from being a small kindness and has become something I do not have a name for yet.
The books I have given him in the last month, in order:
A novel about a man finding his way home.
A novel about a man learning to be quiet.
A short story collection about fathers and sons.
A memoir by a man who taught himself to read in his thirties.
A novel about a horse trainer in Wyoming who cannot speak about his grief.
A small book of essays about silence as a discipline.
A novel about a Russian dissident learning the names of birds. A book of Neruda's love poems.
I did not mean to give him the Neruda.
He had finished the dissident on a Friday afternoon.
He brought it back to the desk. I went to the back of the stacks to find the next one — I had a Wendell Berry novel in mind, the one about the river — and I passed the poetry shelves on the way, and I stopped, and I lifted down the small green-bound Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair without asking myself why, and I brought it back, and I set it down in front of him.
He looked at it.
He looked at me.
He said, "Poems."
I said, "Poems."
He said, "I have never read a poem."
I said, "These are the ones to start with."
I do not know what came over me. I am not in the habit of recommending love poems to motorcycle club members.
I am not in the habit of recommending love poems to anyone.
I have given the Neruda to exactly one person in two years and that person was Briar, on her wedding day, with a ribbon around it.
And here I was, on an ordinary Friday in May, sliding it across the counter of my library to a man whose body alone had not stopped making me misplace my own breath since the afternoon I walked into a gravel yard four weeks ago.
He took it. He did not open it in front of me. He tucked it inside his cut, against his ribs, and he left without saying anything else.
The next day he was back in the wingback.
I was at the desk. I was helping a young mother find a children's biography of Amelia Earhart.
I looked up by accident — I will say by accident, though I do not entirely believe myself — and I saw him in the reading nook with the small green book open in his lap and a look on his face I did not recognize.
He was not reading. He was just sitting with the book open.
His thumb was on a page somewhere near the middle.
His eyes were on the floor. He was, I thought with a small private inward gasp, embarrassed.
This enormous man, sitting in my reading nook in a leather cut, was embarrassed to be holding a book of love poems in public.
I went back to the Earhart biography. I did not look at him again for an hour.
When I finally did, the book was closed in his lap and his eyes were closed too, and he was breathing the slow steady breath of a man who has just felt something and is letting it pass without fighting it. He looked, for that one moment, ten years younger than the man who had walked in.
I did not say anything to him about it. I did not say anything to him about it the next day either, when he returned the book to the desk without comment and asked for the next thing. I gave him Berry's novel. I tucked the Neruda back onto its shelf. I did not mention it again.
But I had seen him. And he had seen me see him.
And neither of us said anything.
—
My sister calls on a Wednesday afternoon.
I do not realize, when I pick up, that it is her.
The library phone does not have caller ID — I have asked the council to upgrade it three times — and so when I lift the receiver and say Clover Ridge Public Library, this is Nora speaking, I am cheerful and clear and unguarded, and the voice on the other end is Pauline's, and the cheer goes out of me as if a window has been opened on a cold day.
"Lenora," she says.