she gave me a bright, curious look. “Can I read the rest? You’re going to let me borrow it?”
“As long as you’ve got a library card,” I said, and she laughed. “I think you have one to return? One that’s past due? That’s part of how this seems to work.”
“Oh! Yes,” she said. She opened a black velvet flap on her purse and plucked out a copy of Valley of the Dolls. Her cheeks pinked up just slightly. “What trash,” she said, and burbled softly with embarrassed amusement.
“So pretty great, huh?” I asked, and her giggle turned to a shout of laughter.
I led her back to the desk. She followed on unsteady legs, glancing here and there.
“I see it now,” she said. “The books. Some of them are all right. But most of them are . . . shivering. Like they’re cold. And it’s hard to read the names on the bindings.” She laughed again, but it was a nervous, unhappy titter. “This isn’t happening, is it? I’m on the couch. I’ve been taking pills for my . . . well, I’ve had some discomfort. I must’ve passed out, and now I’m imagining this.”
“Can you talk to a doctor?” I asked. “About your condition?”
When she replied, it was a one-word whisper: “No.”
“It might not be too late, and it would mean everything to Brad Dolan if he could come home to his mother.”
The muscles at the corners of her jaw tightened, and it came to me that this small, frail, pretty woman was harder—tougher—than she’d seemed at first. “It would mean everything to me to be there when he does. But I don’t get to have that. I worked eight years on the cancer ward in Kingsward Hospital. I know the best-case scenario. I’m living it. Has treatment improved any in your time?”
“I think so,” I said.
“Well, then. I’m sorry I can’t hold on for fifty years. How’s my son doing in the next century?”
I felt a drafty, hollow feeling in my chest, but I think I was able to keep my face all but expressionless when I replied, “He’s never been more popular. They teach him. There have been movies based on the books.”
“Do I have grandchildren?”
I said, “Truthfully, I don’t know. I love his novels, but it’s not like I’ve ever Googled him.”
“Goo-gilled?”
“Oh. Uh. Looked him up. Google is like a twenty-first-century encyclopedia.”
“And he’s in it? He’s in the Google?”
“You bet.”
She looked very pleased at that. “My kid! Right there in the Google.” She considered me for a moment. “How is this happening? If it’s happening. I still expect to wake up on the couch any minute now. I doze off all the time these days. I get tired so easily.”
“It’s happening, but I couldn’t tell you how it’s possible.”
“And you’re not an envoy from the Lord? You’re not an angel?”
“Nope. Just a librarian.”
“Ah, well,” she said. “That’s close enough for me.”
And before I stamped her card, she leaned across my desk and kissed my cheek.
IT WAS DARK AND SNOWING briskly the night I knocked on a door marked 309 at Serenity Apartments. Voices murmured. Chair legs scraped across the floor. The door opened, and Ralph Tanner peered out at me. He had on a blue cardigan and a blue collared shirt and steel-colored denims—I assumed this was his idea of dressing down.
“What’s the password?” he asked.
I lifted the bottle in my right hand. There was a silver bow on the neck. “I brought bourbon?”
“Right the first time,” he said, and let me in.
He led me into a large room that served as kitchen, living area, and bedroom all at once. It was, I imagined, not so different from one of the efficiency apartments in West Fever, although of a better class. The TV was tuned to MSNBC, the volume turned down. Rachel Maddow, looking good in a close-cut jacket, spoke sincerely into the camera. In front of it, two old men sat at a table that looked as if it had been nailed together out of driftwood. One of them I recognized. His name was Terry Gallagher, and that evening he wore a floppy-brimmed fishing hat with a LOCK HER UP pin on it. I saw Gallagher every Thursday morning when I brought the Bookmobile around to Serenity Apartments. He would scuffle slowly through the library car, grousing at books by bleeding-heart lefties like Michael Moore, Elizabeth Warren, and Dr. Seuss, then check out something by Laura Ingraham. The other guy at the table I had never