he cooked, and he read to her while she folded clothes. They did a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle every weekend and the New York Times crossword every day. They smoked prodigious amounts of weed, including sharing a spliff in the car before they gassed themselves. My mother had memorably whipped up a pot-laced stuffing one Thanksgiving when I was nineteen that made me awesomely sick. I was never able to pick up the pot habit, a failing they accepted with a certain amused resignation.
My father umped over a thousand Little League games. My mother volunteered for Bernie Sanders, Ralph Nader, and George McGovern. No one has ever worked harder or with more optimism for so many lost causes. I told her she was allergic to winners, and my dad shouted, “Hey! Don’t knock it! If she wasn’t, I’d never have stood a chance!” They held hands on walks.
And they both loved the library. When I was little, we took family trips there every Sunday afternoon. The first Christmas present I remember receiving was a shiny blue wallet with showy stitching, my library card tucked in to it.
For some reason whenever I think about our weekend library visits, it’s always the first snow of the year. My dad sits at one of the scarred wooden tables in the periodicals room, reading the Atlantic by the light of a green-shaded lamp, beneath a stained-glass window that shows a monk inking an illustrated manuscript. My mother leads me to the children’s library, where there are oversize couches in bright primary colors, and sets me loose. When I need her, she will be reading Dorothy Sayers under the giant plastic statue of an owl in bifocals.
It was an important place for them. My parents met in a library. In a sense. My mother lived in the nearby town of Fever Creek, in a little brick vicarage, her stepfather being a humorless, neurotic Anglican priest. My dad wound up spending a summer down the Creek, working in his uncle’s scrapyard. They met waiting for the library’s Bookmobile, which did a weekly swing through Fever Creek. At that time you could borrow LPs as well as books—it was the Summer of Love, after all—and my not-yet-parents had an argument when they both grabbed for the lone copy of Portrait of Joan Baez at the same time. They reached a truce when she said that if he let her take it out, he could come by the vicarage to listen to it anytime he liked. They listened to Joan Baez together all summer long, at first on the floor of her bedroom and later up in the bed itself.
I DIDN’T ACTUALLY MEAN to become a librarian. When I walked in there, five weeks after I buried my parents, I didn’t have anything in mind beyond returning a grotesquely overdue book.
My parents had left behind a teetering pile of unpaid medical bills and still owed a hundred thousand dollars on the loan they took out to put me through college. Wasted money. I’d netted a bachelor’s in English at Boston University, but it had done less for me, in strictly financial terms, than the eight-week course that earned me a commercial driver’s license.
I had no job, about twelve hundred dollars to my name, and there was no insurance payout coming, not in the wake of what amounted to a murder-suicide. My father’s lawyer, Neil Belluck, suggested that my best option was to get rid of anything I didn’t absolutely have to keep for myself and sell the house. If I were lucky, it would pay their outstanding bills and leave me with enough to float on until I booked a job with another shipping company.
So I propped open the doors, bought a couple of boxes of heavy-duty garbage bags, rented a steam vacuum, and went to work. My parents had let the place go in the last year of their lives. It got away from them, and I hadn’t wanted to see it: the dust on everything, the mouse droppings in the carpet, half the lightbulbs out, and mold spotting the wallpaper in the dark hallway between the living room and the master bedroom. The house smelled like Bengay and abandonment. It came to me that in the last year I had abandoned them. I was glad to get rid of their stuff. Everything I unloaded was one less thing to remind me of their last unhappy months, facing blindness and dementia alone, making up their minds to take