anymore. There’d been other disconcerting moments before that. He’d tell me someone who’d been dead for ten years had asked him about a book, that kind of thing.”
“Ah, that’s too bad,” I replied, thinking about my mother, about dementia. “You positive he’d still know it if he saw it?”
Ralph returned my gaze with a blank stare. “Hm? Oh, yes. I’m afraid I’ve given you the wrong impression. Loren can be forgetful, but no more so than anyone else his age. He’s still sharp enough to beat me at rummy. We play the last Thursday of every month, and I usually lose to him. No, he’s still all there.”
“But . . . you said he was driving into town and didn’t know where he was?”
“Yes,” Ralph said. “He was very badly shaken. He couldn’t tell if it was 1965 or 1975 or what. Every block looked like a different decade to him. He was worried he wouldn’t be able to find his way home to the twenty-first century.” He looked at his watch and said, “I should get back to the library. My coffee break has been long enough. You’ll e-mail me with your details? My address is on the library Web site. I look forward to continuing our conversation very soon.”
I followed him out, waited while he locked the carriage house, and said good night. I stood there and watched him go, blue smoke spilling from his pipe and mingling with the blue fog that had started to drift out of the trees. The night had turned clammy while we were inside.
He’d disappeared back into the library before I realized I still had Another Marvelous Thing in my coat pocket.
I PROBABLY SAW A FEW without recognizing them for what they were—the ghosts. That’s what I thought they were at first. Now I know better.
Late returns . . . that was Loren’s term for them, although I wouldn’t hear it for months, wouldn’t meet him until a chilled, soggy day just after Christmas.
Once when I’d been driving the old Bookmobile for no more than a few weeks, I saw a little girl walking with her mother. The little girl wore a pair of Mickey Mouse ears and was skipping, jumping in shallow puddles left by a recent rain. Her mother had a flowered kerchief over her hair and carried a paper sack with twine handles. The sack said WOOLWORTH’S on the side. I remember thinking that odd, because there’d been a Woolworth’s in downtown Kingsward when I was a child, but it had been closed since 1990. When I pulled up to a stop sign, I looked for them in the passenger-side mirror, but they were gone. Were they late returns? I don’t know.
Another time two shrunken old ladies, sisters, entered the truck at St. Michael’s Rest, one of the old-folks’ homes on my Tuesday schedule. They browsed without speaking to me. Instead they talked about Ted Kennedy and the accident at Chappaquiddick. “The men in that family is all whoremasters,” said one of the women, and the other replied, “What does that have to do with going off the road?” It was only after they were gone that it seemed to me they’d been speaking in the present tense, as if Chappaquiddick had only just happened, as if Ted Kennedy were still alive.
It was early November, the first time it happened, and I knew it. The first time I encountered someone who had slipped forward, who climbed up into the truck from a different when.
On Thursdays my route took me through West Fever, a miserable tick of a town burrowed into one side of the county. It contains a bit of pastureland and a lot more marsh, a few gas stations, and a single shopping center known locally as the Man Mall. In the Man Mall there’s a shop that sells fireworks, another that sells guns, a liquor store, a tattoo parlor, and an adult-toy shop with a peep show in the back. With forty dollars in your pocket, you can hit the Man Mall on a Friday night, get shitfaced, get blown by a stripper, get her name tattooed on your arm, celebrate by launching a bottle rocket over the interstate, and pick up a .38 so you’ll have an easy way to kill yourself in the morning.
The Man Mall shares two acres of unpaved parking lot with a shabby, sprawling two-story efficiency-apartment complex. A fair number of single mothers with small children and some elderly dissolute drunks called