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By Root 1292 0

trained us to become readers, and the town’s library had been the one place, other than church, that we visited every week. When we were young, we had three little red wagons that we would pull into town like a parade each Saturday morning, our mother at the head like the high-stepping grand marshal. Rose liked to go last, to keep an eye on the rest of us, particularly Cordy, who was usually in desperate need of it. Cordy would be eating a Popsicle, letting it drip along her arm, stopping to lick the sticky sweet slug trails off her skin. Or she wouldn’t have stacked her books well and they would fall over the sides of the wagon, Rose picking them up like a flower girl in reverse. Or she would halt, squatting down to stare at an anthill in the cracks of a sidewalk, mesmerized by the to-ings and fro-ings until Rose poked her in the behind and made her waddle on. Bean, who liked to arrive first, would be following our mother, peppering her with questions that she answered when she found the time between social conversations along the way.

The building smelled the same—dusty and damp, and Bean stopped inside the door and inhaled. With all the money the town got from the college, she would have thought they would have changed the library, but it had remained the same. The carpet was dirty marigold, step-worn. To her right was the adult fiction, in the back, by the wall of windows looking out on a spreading willow tree and an ill-tended batch of hedges, the children’s section. A woman browsed in the new fiction shelves, and two children, presumably hers, sat contentedly at the yellow plastic table in the back, studiously examining books too big for their hands. A man sat at one of the battered wooden study carrels, his head bent forward so Bean could see only the curl of his red-touched blond hair over his collar.

Mrs. Landrige, the librarian who had been here in the red-wagon days, had been white-haired and stooped even then, but Bean could see her at the desk, stamping library cards with a patient hand. Bean felt a rush of sweet nostalgia for the woman who had introduced us to E. Nesbit and Edward Eager and Laura Ingalls Wilder, and she found herself desperately wanting to give the old woman a hug, not that Mrs. Landrige would have trucked with that. Mrs. Landrige, as a point of fact, didn’t truck with much.

Bean strode over to the desk and leaned forward, her voice falling immediately to a whisper. We’d been well-trained. “Mrs. Landrige.”

The old woman’s head popped up, her eyes sharp, watery blue. “Bianca!” she said without a moment’s hesitation. Her recall amazed Bean. With the way professors and their families shifted in and out of this town, she wondered how many patrons this otherwise small-town place would have had, how many cards Mrs. Landrige could associate with a face. “How lovely to see you !”

“It’s good to see you, too,” Bean said honestly. “I thought you might have retired.”

Mrs. Landrige smiled. “I’m too old not to work. Keeps my mind off the inevitable.” She gave a wheezy little chuckle, the red and black checked bow of her dress trembling against her chest.

Bean didn’t quite know what to say, so she smiled back and cast her eyes around the room again, taking in the desk with the stacks of paper, the eroded rubber stamps leaning drunkenly against one another on the desktop. The children in the back squabbled for a moment about a book in the center of the table, and the man in the study carrel lifted his head for a moment, giving Bean a flash of his profile—strong cheekbones fading down into a goatee, his hairline crawling back genteelly from his forehead. Bean thought he could have been handsome. Pity about the goatee.

“Back for a visit?” Mrs. Landrige asked. She had gone back to her careful work, leaving a date in the future stamped, slightly askew, in a column of its relations. “Or to stay?”

“To stay,” Bean said, and then stammered it back in. “I mean—I don’t know how long I’ll be here. I might go back to the city after . . .” After what, exactly? After our mother dies? After no one wants to throw