Chapter 17 The Reading of the List

Glenna Culpepper spent the second week of September the way she had spent the last week of every August for eleven years: with the notebook open on the kitchen table and a pot of tea going cold, choosing. She had a method and the method had never changed. She read through the year's months and asked what each one had actually needed, which was not the same as what each one had said. She was not a clever woman in the way Annette was clever, and she did not read the books the way Annette read them, and she had never once apologized for the fact that she kept the list by feel. You could not find the right book for a person by looking at them. You found it by keeping them in the back of your mind for a month and letting the shelf do the work. This year's shelf had done this: a book about a company town for a town selling its last building. A book about a widow for the one who was grieving a man still alive. A book about leaving a country for the one who had left one. A book about a house for the one who was losing hers. A book about a gravedigger for the one who had been invisible. A book about a restaurant full of noise for the one who had spent five months with the sound turned off. And a book about two sisters and a farm for the new one, who was going to decide, in June, whether a place could be chosen on purpose. She wrote the cards on Thursday. Fourteen of them, because fourteen names, because the room would have fourteen chairs, and because there were people who had sat in that circle once in 2018 and never again and would still be given a card if they came, and Glenna had decided in August, folding a card in half at her own table, that if you are going to end a thing you should end it generously, and generosity in a reading circle is a title and a reason. She did not write reasons on the cards. She wrote only the title of a book on the front, and on the back, small, the year the first book had been for that person, and nothing else, because a reason is a thing a person should get to say out loud themselves. --- Vernon came by on Friday with the tote and two tomatoes from his neighbor's garden, and sat in the second chair while she made the tea, and watched her lay the cards out in rows on the table. "You've done all of them," he said. "All fourteen." He looked at the rows of cards without reading them, because he was the kind of man who did not read another person's mail. "Glenna," he said. "Have you got one for yourself?" "I've got the same list as everyone," she said. "What's mine is mine." "That's not an answer." "It's the answer you're getting on a Friday." He drank his tea and did not push, which was the thing she liked best about him, and after a while he said, "You know that woman who runs the library is retiring." "Miss Upham? She's been saying that since I retired." "She means it this time. She's got a date and a cake. First of November." Glenna looked out the window for a moment. "I should go to that," she said. "You should." "There's a thing about a woman who runs a small library for twenty-nine years," Glenna said, "which is that eleven years of my list wouldn't exist without her. She let me have the catalog before anybody else, every season. She kept the used copies in a box under her desk for me. I never once asked her to and she never once mentioned it." "Then you should go to the cake," Vernon said. "I'll go to the cake," Glenna said. She went to the library on Saturday morning, before it closed, and stood at the desk while Miss Upham finished with a woman returning four mysteries and a book on tape. "I hear there's a cake," Glenna said. "There is a cake, and I have told them no speeches, and they will make speeches anyway," Miss Upham said. "You came for the box." "I came for the box." Miss Upham took her to the back office and opened a drawer and lifted out a shallow cardboard box, the kind that holds a ream of paper, and set it on the desk between them and took off the lid. Inside were cards. Index cards, library cards with the old due-date stamps, halves of envelopes, a grocery receipt or two, and each one had a sentence on it, and each sentence was in the same small cramped hand, and there were forty or fifty of them, stacked and loose, going back two years. "Every one out of a returned book," Miss Upham said. "I find maybe two a month. I put them here. I thought at first they were yours, because your circle does the same thing, and then I read them and they weren't, and I couldn't throw them away, and I have never been able to explain why." "Because they're a conversation," Glenna said. "You don't throw out half a conversation." She stood at the desk and read three of the cards, and then a fourth, and then she stopped reading, because she had found what she had come for, and she did not want to find it twice. "Can I take one," she said. "Take the box." "I don't want the box. I want the one." Miss Upham looked at her, and then turned over the cards in the box, one at a time, until Glenna put her finger on the one she meant, and Miss Upham wrote the date on a slip and tucked it under the stack, because she had run a library for twenty-nine years and she did not give away a thing without recording that it had gone. Glenna put the card in her bag. "There's a name on the back," she said. "I know," Miss Upham said. "I read the backs too." He had left at four, and she sat a while with the cards and the cold tea, and then she turned to the last written page of the notebook, to the three words she had written under the September entry in August, and read them again. She had found the name in March, on the back of a card in a book she had taken out of the library — a card in a year's worth of them, in the returns box, in a novel that had been read by somebody who had the habit her own circle had, of writing on the back of a card the thing the book had said to them. She had recognized the habit because it was hers. She had copied the name down because she had spent eleven years watching what a room does to a person who has never had one, and because she was old enough and had money troubles enough to know that a relay is a real thing, and that a relay is the only kind of inheritance a poor woman has to give. She looked at the three words for a long time. Then she did not cross them out. She closed the notebook, and put the fourteen cards in her bag on top of it, and went to bed, and slept better than she had in a month. ---