His Library Books Are Twenty Years Overdue
The librarian waived the fine; I kept the borrowing.
For twenty years my father has been stealing from the public library, and he has an excellent excuse: he is dead. The three books were on the arm of his chair by the front window when he went into the hospital for what was supposed to be a routine bypass, and they were still there, bookmarks in place, when we came home from the funeral and nobody could figure out what you were supposed to do with a dead man's half-read books.
So we did what my family does with all impossible questions.
Nothing. For two decades.
The books stayed on the chair, then migrated to the shelf above it when my mother needed the chair arm for her tea. A Louis L'Amour western. A hardback about the building of the St. Lawrence Seaway. And a third book that none of us ever looked at closely, because looking closely at his things was a sport nobody in our house had the stomach for.
Then last spring my mother announced she was moving to a condo with, and I quote, "no stairs and no history," and it fell to me to empty the house. Which is how I ended up standing at the circulation desk of the Elmvale branch on a Tuesday morning, sliding three library books across the counter like a man turning himself in after a long time on the run.
"I need to return these," I said. "They are slightly overdue."
The librarian, a woman about my age with reading glasses on a beaded chain, scanned the first barcode. Her eyebrows went up. She scanned it again. "Sir, these were due in October of 2005."
"Yes."
"That is twenty years."
"They belonged to my father. He died that November. We kept meaning to bring them back." I heard how it sounded... Twenty years of meaning to. "I did the math in the car. At ten cents a day, I believe I owe you around two thousand dollars, and I want you to know I am prepared to negotiate."
She looked at me for a long moment over the glasses... Then she typed something, hit one key with a small decisive click, and said, "There. Deceased patron. Fines waived. We are not monsters, sir. Also, we capped fines at ten dollars in 2019, so your dramatic arithmetic was for nothing."
I laughed for the first time in that whole terrible month of bubble wrap and donation runs. Then she picked up the third book, the one nobody had ever looked at closely, and said the sentence that rearranged my entire understanding of the man who raised me.
"Oh, the Mary Oliver. He had this one out constantly. We used to hold the new poetry for him behind the desk."
I need you to understand who my father was. A furnace repairman. A man who communicated affection through checking your tire pressure. A man whose recorded opinions on poetry consisted of one remark, delivered when I took an English degree, that he hoped rhyming paid better than it looked like it did. That man, according to Denise at the Elmvale branch, had been quietly borrowing poetry for years. She printed his history for me, which I suspect broke several rules, and handed over four pages of a person I had never met. Oliver. Neruda. Al Purdy, over and over. A collection about memory he had renewed the maximum number of times, twice.
"He would sit right there," she said, pointing at a chair by the window, angled to the light exactly like his chair at home. "Tuesday mornings, mostly. He never checked the poetry out at first. Just read it here. I asked him once why, and he said if he brought it home... he would have to explain it."
He would have to explain it. To us.
We were the reason the poems lived at the library.
I sat in that window chair for an hour with the Mary Oliver he never returned, and I found his bookmark still in it, a punch card from Napoli Pizza, one punch away from a free slice. The poem on that page was about a grasshopper, and attention, and what you plan to do with your one wild and precious life. My father, ladies and gentlemen. Fixing furnaces all day and reading that at night with the reading lamp angled away from the hallway so the light would not invite questions.
The fine was waived. The borrowing, I kept. Some debts you do not pay back; you pay them forward, one renewal at a time.
Here is what I did not do: I did not keep his books.
I know that is the ending everyone expects, the shelf shrine, the untouched trinity of L'Amour, Seaway, Oliver. Denise offered, actually. Said she could mark them lost and let me walk out with them, no monsters, et cetera. But keeping a loved one's books in amber felt like doing to them exactly what we had done to his chair: preserving the object and losing the man.
He did not love those three books specifically. He loved the borrowing. The Tuesday mornings. The pizza card bookmark. The secret.
So I got a library card, my first since university, and I started working through his printout. Four pages, top to bottom, in order. Every Tuesday morning I can manage it, I sit in the window chair at Elmvale and read what he read. Some of it is dull... I will be honest. The Seaway book is a war crime of a text and he renewed it twice, which tells me stubbornness is genetic. But the Purdy knocked me flat, and the Neruda made me call my mother just to hear her answer the phone, and somewhere in month four I stopped reading to find my father in the poems and started finding myself in them, which I suspect was always the trapdoor grief had built under this whole project. One Tuesday I gave up pretending, went home, and wrote about the grief directly, twenty years late, like everything else in this story.
The piece I wrote was about the punch card. One punch away from a free slice. I posted it on a community wall for poets under my actual name, no explaining, hallway light be damned, and a stranger in another country commented that her mother had died with a coffee shop loyalty card one stamp from free, and now neither of us is the only one who knows what that particular unfinished business does to a person.
Last Tuesday, Denise waved me over to the desk. She had set something aside for me behind the counter, the way she used to for him: the new Purdy collected, just catalogued, my name pencilled on a hold slip.
"You are on his schedule now," she said. "Bring it back whenever."
I will... That is the difference between us, me and the old man. I bring them back.
But I renew. Twice, the maximum. Stubbornness is genetic.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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