“I never turned it on. I guess I got distracted.” She tossed the book back onto the pile surrounding her. “Pity Dickens never came to Gatlin. We’ve got more than our share of shut-up hearts around here.”
I picked up a book. Richard Wilbur. I opened it, burying my face in the smell of the pages. I glanced at the words. “‘What is the opposite of two? A lonely me, a lonely you.’” Weird, that was exactly how I was feeling. I snapped the book shut and looked at
Marian.
“Thanks for coming to the meeting, Aunt Marian. I hope it didn’t make trouble for you. I feel like it was all my fault.”
“It wasn’t.”
“Feels like it was.” I tossed the book down.
“What, now you’re the author of all ignorance? You taught Mrs. Lincoln to hate, and Mr.
Hollingsworth to fear?”
We both just sat there, surrounded by a mountain of books. She reached over and squeezed my hand. “This battle didn’t start with you, Ethan. It won’t end with you either, I’m afraid, or me, for that matter.” Her face grew serious. “When I walked in this morning, these books were in a pile on the floor. I don’t know how they got there, or why. I locked the doors when I left last night, and they were still locked this morning. All
I know is, I sat down to look through them, and every single book, every one of them, had some kind of message for me about this moment, in this town, right now. About
Lena, you, even me.”
I shook my head. “It’s a coincidence. Books are like that.”
She plucked a random book out of the pile and handed it to me. “You try. Open it.”
I took the book from her hand. “What is it?”
“Shakespeare. Julius Caesar.”
I opened it, and began to read.
“‘Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.’
“What does that have to do with me?”
Marian peered at me, over her glasses. “I’m just the librarian. I can only give you the books. I can’t give you the answers.” But she smiled, all the same. “The thing about fate is, are you the master of your fate, or are the stars?”
“Are you talking about Lena, or Julius Caesar? Because I hate to break it to you, but I never read the play.”
“You tell me.”
We spent the rest of the hour going through the pile, taking turns reading to each other.
Finally, I knew why I had come. “Aunt Marian, I think I need to go back into the archive.”
“Today? Don’t you have things you need to be doing? Holiday shopping at least?”
“I don’t shop.”
“Spoken wisely. As for myself, ‘I do like Christmas on the whole…. In its clumsy way, it does approach Peace and Goodwill. But it is clumsier every year.’”
“More Dickens?”
“E. M. Forster.”
I sighed. “I can’t explain it. I think I need to be with my mom.”
“I know. I miss her, too.” I hadn’t really thought about what I would say to Marian about how I was feeling. About the town, and how everything was wrong. Now the words seemed stuck in my throat, like another person was stumbling through them. “I just thought, if I could be around her books, maybe I could feel how it was before. Maybe I could talk to her. I tried to go to the graveyard once, but it didn’t make me feel like she was there, in the ground.” I stared at a random speck on the carpet.
“I know.”
“I still can’t think about her being there. It doesn’t make sense. Why would you stick someone you love down in a lonely old hole in the dirt? Where it’s cold, and dirty, and full of bugs? That can’t be how it ends, after everything, after everything she was.” I tried not to think about it, her body turning into bone and mud and dust down there. I hated the idea that she had to go through it alone, like I was going through everything alone now.
“How do you want it to end?” Marian laid her hand on my shoulder.
“I don’t know. I should, somebody should build her a monument or something.”
“Like the General? Your mom would have had a good laugh about that.” Marian pulled her arm around me. “I know what you mean. She’s not there, she’s here.”
She held out her hand, and I pulled her up. We held hands all the way back to the archive, as if I was still a kid she was babysitting while my mom was at work in the back. She pulled out a thick ring of keys and opened the door. She didn’t follow me inside.
Back in the archive, I sank into the chair in front of my mom’s desk. My mom’s chair. It was wooden, and bore the insignia of Duke University. I think they had given it to her for graduating with honors, or something like that. It wasn’t comfortable, but comforting, and familiar. I smelled the old varnish, the same varnish I’d probably chewed on as a baby, and right away I felt better than I had in months. I could breathe in the smell of the stacks of books wrapped in crackling plastic, the old crumbling parchment, the dust and the cheap file cabinets. I could breathe in the particular air of the particular atmosphere of my mother’s very particular planet. To me, it was the same as if I was seven years old, sitting in her lap, burying my face in her shoulder.
I wanted to go home. Without Lena, I had nowhere else to go.
I picked up a small, framed photograph on my mom’s desk, almost hidden among the books. It was her, and my father, in the study at our house. Someone had taken it in black and white, a long time ago. Probably for the back of a book jacket, on one of their early projects, when my dad was still a historian, and they had worked together. Back when they had funny hair, and ugly pants, and you could see the happiness on their faces. It was hard to look at, but harder to put down. When I went to return it to my mom’s desk, next to the dusty stacks of books, one book caught my eye. I pulled it out from under an encyclopedia of Civil War weapons and a catalog of native plants of South Carolina. I didn’t know what the book was. I only knew it was bookmarked with a long sprig of rosemary. I smiled. At least it wasn’t a sock, or a dirty pudding spoon.
The Gatlin County Junior League cookbook, Fried Chicken and Sass. It opened, by itself, to a single page. “Betty Burton’s Buttermilk Pan Fried Tomatoes,” my mom’s favorite.
The scent of rosemary rose up from the pages. I looked at the rosemary more closely. It was fresh, as if it had been plucked from a garden yesterday. My mom couldn’t have put it there, but no one else would use rosemary as a bookmark. My mom’s favorite recipe was bookmarked with Lena’s familiar scent. Maybe the books really were trying to tell me something.
“Aunt Marian? Were you looking to fry up some tomatoes?”
She stuck her head in the doorway. “Do you think I would touch a tomato, let alone cook one?”
I stared at the rosemary in my hand. “That’s what I thought.”
“I think that was the one thing your mother and I disagreed on.”
“Can I borrow this book? Just for a few days?”
“Ethan, you don’t have to ask. Those are your mother’s things; there isn’t anything in this room she wouldn’t have wanted you to have.”
I wanted to ask Marian about the rosemary in the cookbook, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t bear to show it to anyone else, or to part with it. Even though I had never and probably would never fry a tomato in my entire life. I stuck the book under my arm as Marian walked me to the door.