“Fine, Richard. I’ll talk to Susan and call you this afternoon.”
Richard gathers up the papers on his desk and stands to see us out. He grabs his card and hands it to me. When I don’t take it, he offers it to Ana, and she takes it gracefully, tucking it into her back pocket.
“Thank you so much for your time,” he says as he opens the door for us.
“Fu—” I start to say to him as I am walking out the door. I plan on slamming it when I’m done. But Ana interrupts me and squeezes my hand gently to let me know I need to cool it. She takes over.
“Thank you, Richard. We will be in touch soon. In the meantime, please get back on the phone with the marital records people and sort this out,” she says.
She shuts the door behind her and smiles at me. The circumstances aren’t funny, but it is kind of funny that I almost told that man to fuck off. For a moment, I think we might both actually laugh—something I haven’t done in days. But the moment passes and I don’t have it in me to push the air out and smile.
“Are we going to talk to Susan?” Ana says as we are heading to the car.
“Yeah,” I say. “I guess we are.” At least this makes me feel like I have a purpose, however small. I have to protect Ben’s wishes. I have to protect the body that did so much to protect me.
JANUARY
At work the next day, my thoughts oscillated between focusing on tasks at hand and daydreaming. I had to promise Ana I’d drive over to her place after work to explain my absence, and I kept replaying in my head how I was going to describe him. It was always her talking to me about men and me listening. Now that I knew it would be me talking and her listening, I almost felt like I needed to practice.
I was physically present but mentally absent when Mr. Callahan cornered me. “Elsie?” he said, as he approached the counter.
Mr. Callahan was almost ninety years old. He wore polyester trousers every day in either gray or khaki. He wore a button-up shirt in some sort of plaid pattern with a cream-colored Members Only jacket to cover it.
Mr. Callahan kept tissues in his pants pockets. He kept ChapStick in his jacket pocket, and he always said “Bless you” whenever anyone within a fifty-foot radius sneezed. He came to the library almost every day, coming and going, sometimes multiple times a day. Some days, he would read magazines and newspapers in the back room until lunchtime, when he would check out a book to take home to his wife. Other days, he would come in the late afternoon to return a book and pick up a black-and-white movie on VHS or maybe some sort of opera I had never heard of on CD.
He was a man of culture, a man of great kindness and personality. He was a man devoted to his wife, a wife we at the library never met but heard everything about. He was also very old, and I sometimes feared he was on his last legs.
“Yes, Mr. Callahan?” I turned to face him and rested my elbows on the cold counter.
“What is this?” Mr. Callahan slid a bookmark in front of me. It was one of our digital library bookmarks. We had put them all over the library a week earlier to try to call attention to the digital materials we had. There was a big debate in the library about starting this initiative. We didn’t have much say, to tell the truth, as we were guided by the Los Angeles Public Library system, but still, some people thought we should be doing more, some people thought we should be preserving the past. I have to say I was leaning toward preserving the past. I loved holding books in my hands. I loved smelling their pages.
“That is a bookmark about our digital library.”
“What?” he said to me, asking politely but bemused.
“It’s a website we have that you can go to and download materials instead of coming to the library to get them.”
He nodded, recognizing what I was saying. “Oh, like if I wanted an i-book.”
“An e-book, right,” I said. I didn’t mean to correct him.
“Wait, is it e or i?”