Chapter 20 One More Name

The notebook stayed on the table for four days after the last Sunday, and then Sadie took it home, because she was the only one in the room who could not leave a thing unclaimed. She had wanted someone else to take it. She had stood at the end of that long afternoon and watched eight people walk past a spiral notebook on a table made of two doors, and every one of them had looked at it and none of them had picked it up, and Sadie had understood that this was not indifference. It was the same reason none of them had taken the last slice of coffee cake. Nobody wanted to be the person who reached. She took it on Thursday, and she did not tell anyone, and she put it on her kitchen table where she could see it while she made dinner, the way you put a letter you are afraid of. The October meeting was the second Sunday, at the Grange, and there were ten of them and the stove worked. They read a book about a woman who kept bees, and argued about whether the bees were a metaphor, and Annette said they were not a metaphor, they were bees, and won. Romy had put the ice in the freezer of the Grange kitchen and had cleaned the whole kitchen without being asked. Junie had brought coffee cake from the new storefront three doors down on Court, which was small and had bad foot traffic and a window she had painted herself, and which she had already begun, in the way of a person who cannot stop, to like better than the old one. Between the book and the coffee cake, they talked about the year, a little, in the way you poke a fire. Maeve said the bell on the front door had worked and had rung exactly twice, both times Howard, both times before he got his coat on, and that they had a meeting with a specialist in the county seat about the next stage, and that she was reading again, one chapter a night, which was more than she had managed in the spring. Katia said her writing class had given her an assignment to describe a room, and that she had described the Grange, and that the teacher had read it out loud to the class without telling anyone whose it was, and that she had sat there and listened to a room full of strangers hear about the west windows and had wanted to put her head down on the desk. Blythe said the first Saturday was holding. Cassie said she had gone back to teaching two mornings a week and had survived a room of fourteen-year-olds, which she said was harder than the first five months of motherhood and that she was not joking. Vernon said he had finally mended the tote bag. Annette said she had mailed the letter. Nobody asked her what was in it and she did not say, but she said it with her chin up, and Glenna, who was not in the room, would have been pleased, and everyone there knew it, and Romy filled Annette's cup without being asked. At the end, Sadie brought the notebook out and put it on the table. "Somebody has to make the list for November," she said. "I didn't take it thinking I was going to make the list." "It's a rotation," Junie said. "That's the only fair way. One person a month, one book, one Sunday. You start, because you've got it." "I'll start," Sadie said. "Good." "And I'll keep the copies," she said. "The spreadsheet. Everybody can see it. That part's mine." Nobody argued, and the meeting ended, and the ten of them stood around the long hall in the way Romy had said a room was for, and it got dark early the way it does in October, and Sadie went home with the notebook in her bag. --- She read the last page on Sunday night, after dinner, with the lamp on. She had read it once before, in June, when she had copied the pages, but she had copied the rows and the parentheticals and had not thought much about the last page, because the last page had been blank then. Now it was not blank. Under the September entry there was a line, and under the line there were three words in Glenna's upright hand, and Sadie looked at the three words for a while and did not recognize them. She went to the printout of the forty-two names and looked. She went through the list twice. She went through it a third time, running her finger down the column, and then she did what she had been avoiding, which was to admit that the name was not in the list at all. The name was a woman's name. It was not anyone who had ever sat in the back room or the Grange. It was not anyone Sadie had ever heard mentioned in Wellerby in a year of Thursdays at Denby's. Then she remembered the envelope. Glenna had handed it to Romy at the west windows, and Romy had put it in the apron pocket of the Grange kitchen and had told Sadie, in a sentence, at the door, *that's for the notebook, whenever somebody takes it,* and Sadie had forgotten it entirely, and it was still in the drawer under the tea towels in the Grange kitchen, where a person who had been cleaning would have found it four times and left it, because it was not hers. Sadie drove out to the Grange at nine o'clock at night with the notebook on the passenger seat, which was not a reasonable thing to do, and unlocked the kitchen with the key Junie had cut for her, and found the envelope in the drawer under the tea towels, because Romy had told her exactly where it was, which was its own kind of trust. She opened it at the long table, under the light, with the west windows black. Inside was a card, and a note, and a photograph. The photograph was of a shelf of books in a library, taken badly, in a hurry, at an angle, with a thumb in the corner of the frame. The card was blank on the front and had three words on the back, the same three words as the notebook, in the same upright hand. The note was one page. Sadie read it twice, and then sat for a long time with her hands on the table, and then read it a third time, and by the end of the third reading she was crying in a way she would have been embarrassed about in front of the others and was not embarrassed about alone. It said: *Somebody has been leaving cards in the library books. Little cards, in the back, with a sentence on them, the way our circle does. Miss Upham has been finding them for two years and putting them in a box under her desk, because she thought they might be mine and did not want to throw them out. They are not mine. They are written by one person who has never once come to a Sunday, and who reads at least four books a month, and who wrote on one of them, in March, that she did not know anybody who read.* *Her name is on the back of the card in this envelope. She works the counter at the truck stop out on the county road. She has never asked for company and she never will, and that is exactly why I am asking you.* *You do not have to do anything with this. But if the room is going to be a room, then the list has to have at least one page with a name on it that nobody in the room has ever met, or it is only a club. I have been the chair for eleven years and I could never work out how to do this part. So I am handing it over. That is the whole mechanism. Somebody else holds up the corner later.* *Tell Romy the teapot was not the important part. Tell Vernon the route is the important part. Tell Annette that Felix will write back when he is ready and that ready is not a date, it's a weather.* *And tell whoever takes the notebook that they can cross out my three words if they want. That is allowed. It is the only page in the whole book I never finished.* Sadie sat in the long hall with the card in her hand, under the light, with the stove ticking as it cooled, and turned the card over. On the back, in a small cramped hand that was not Glenna's, was a name. She read it out loud, once, to the empty room, the way you say a word in a new language to see whether it fits in your mouth. And then she put the card in her bag, and locked the Grange, and drove home along the Carding under a low sky, with the notebook on the seat beside her and one name in the book that nobody in the room had ever met, and on the road out to the truck stop the sign glowed the way a sign does when there is somewhere to go and all night to get there.