The Library Shift

The job came to me through a guy at church named Dale, who said the community college out past the highway was desperate for a night custodian because nobody with any sense wanted to mop floors at midnight, and I said I had no sense, so here I was. I'm forty-four years old, I own six hundred acres and a hundred and forty head of cattle, and I spent that first Thursday night in September pushing a janitor's cart down the hallway of a building full of sleeping computers, and I will tell you plainly that I liked it. The quiet suited me. After forty-three years of noise, most of it my own fault, quiet felt like a raise.

I was married at twenty-five to a woman named Charlene, and we were divorced last year, and I don't have much to say about either of those facts except that the marriage lasted eighteen years and the divorce took eleven months, which tells you something about which of us was working at it. Anyway, the job. Dale had explained the layout, the library on the second floor, the break room in the basement with a vending machine that ate dollars, and the trick, he said, was to do the library last because the night librarian liked the doors locked at a certain time and didn't like to be bothered before it.

So of course I did the library last, and of course I was bothered.

I came up the stairs at about eleven with my cart squeaking behind me, and the big room was mostly dark, just those little sconce lamps along the walls they dim to half power at night, and behind the circulation desk there was a lamp on and a woman sitting under it reading. I knew her before I knew I knew her, the way you know a shape from a long way off, and I actually stopped the cart and thought about turning around and doing the library another night, some night, any night, for the rest of my natural life.

It was Shay Poole. She was forty-four now, same as me, and the last time I had seen her face it was twenty-two years ago and we were both twenty-two and she was telling me, in the parking lot of a diner in town, that maybe we should see other people, and I had said something I've spent twenty-two years regretting, and then she moved to her aunt's place in another state and that was that, no call, no letter, nothing.

She looked up. She saw me. There was no turning around now, not without being the kind of man who turns around, and I'm enough other kinds of man already.

"Anton Goldman," she said, and she said it slow, like she was checking the word for holes.

"Evening, ma'am," I said, which is what I say to everyone, and I heard how it sounded the second it was out of my mouth.

"I'm not ma'am, I'm the night librarian, and I'm Shay, and you're mopping my floors now." She stood up and came around the desk and I got a good look at her, gray starting in her hair, glasses she didn't used to wear, the same level chin she always had. "Dale told me they'd hired somebody from outside. He did not tell me it was you."

"He probably doesn't know," I said. "Nobody out there knows me except my cows, and they keep it to themselves."

She laughed at that, one short laugh, and then pressed her mouth flat like she hadn't meant to let it out. "Well," she said. "Twenty years, give or take."

"Twenty-two," I said, because I had done the math years ago, on some night when I couldn't sleep, and I regretted saying it the second it was out too, because it told her I'd been counting.

"Twenty-two," she agreed, and looked at my cart, and looked at the floor, and said, "Well, it's all yours. Don't wax the east wing, the finish is new."

I did the library that night in record time and felt like a burglar the whole while. The thing about the place is it echoes, you know, a big room with nobody in it, and every squeak of the mop bucket came back to me like an accusation. The shift ended at two. I clocked out, drove the twenty minutes home in the dark with the windows down, and lay in bed till five doing the arithmetic again, twenty-two years, ten weeks when we were twenty-two, and wondering what kind of God arranges a thing like Thursday nights.

The next Thursday I told myself it was fine, it was a big building, we'd pass in the halls, we'd nod, adults do this all the time. I brought a thermos of coffee because Dale warned me the vending machine in the break room was a thief, and I got to the break room at midnight for my lunch, and she was in there standing in front of the vending machine shaking it, gently, the way you shake a machine you've already made peace with.

"It ate my dollar," she said, without turning around. "It does this. It's the only machine on campus that's been here since before I worked here, and it has eaten a dollar a night for six years and I keep feeding it because I keep hoping."

"Try the third button," I said. "Dale says C3 works even when it doesn't light up."

She pressed C3 and a candy bar dropped like a miracle, and she turned around with it and said, "You've been talking to Dale about vending machines. That's very intimate."

I sat down at the table with my thermos because I didn't know what else to do with my hands, and she sat across from me, and for a while we ate in silence like two people at a bus stop. The machine hummed and flickered its little light, and outside the one window there was nothing but the parking lot and the one lamp that works.

"So you're a rancher," she said finally. "Dale says six hundred acres. And you mop floors at night."

"It fills the hours," I said. "The house is quiet. The divorce was final last year. I found out I can only look at a sunset so many evenings before you want to hear another human voice, even if it's just somebody telling you the mop needs replacing."

"That's a sad sentence, Anton."

"It's an honest one. Those got harder to find in me for a while."

She looked at me then, really looked, and said, "I remember you being honest. I remember it being the problem." And I didn't know what to say to that, and she didn't take it back, and we finished our lunches and she said good night first and I let her go first, which I didn't used to let her do, back when losing her was still a theoretical exercise.

The third Thursday she wasn't in the break room, and I told myself that was a relief, and it was, in the way that a dry summer is a relief right up until you check the wells. I did my halls, and I saved the library for last anyway, because apparently I had become a man who saves the library for last, and when I got up there the desk lamp was on and she was at a shelf in the far stacks with a cart of her own, putting books away, and she didn't see me and I didn't announce myself, I just started on the floors, and the room did its echoing thing, and it was almost peaceful.

When I brought my cart up toward the front to leave, there was a book sitting on it. Laying right there on the mop rags, a hardback with a paper band around it, and I stood there a minute because I thought I was losing my mind.

"It's a recommendation," she said from behind the desk, not looking up from her screen. "You said you only wanted to hear a voice. That book has a good voice. Read it and tell me Thursday if you hated it."

I picked it up. It was a novel about a man who runs a failing orchard, of all things, and the paper band was one of her overdue slips folded over, and written on the back of it in pencil was one line, you owe me a review.

"I don't read much," I said. "I didn't used to, anyway. Charlene watched television and I listened to the radio."

"Well, the television's gone and the radio only has so much weather in it," Shay said, and now she did look up. "Two hundred and forty pages, Goldman. Even a man with a hundred and forty head of cattle can find that many evenings."

I took the book home. I read forty pages that first night, and I'll admit the voice was good, and I read another sixty the next night, and by Sunday I'd finished it, which for me was like running a marathon, and all week I thought about what I'd say Thursday, whether I'd hated it or loved it, and which answer would be true and which would be some kind of move.

Thursday came around, gray and windy, a day the cattle spent at the far fence hollering about it. I loaded my cart, I made my thermos, and I drove out to the college in the dark with the book on the passenger seat and my heart doing things a forty-four-year-old man in work boots has no business feeling.

I parked in my usual spot near the one working lamp and sat there a minute with my hands on the wheel, and I told myself that a book review was a book review and nothing more, and then I went in and clocked and started on the east wing, which has that new finish Dale warned me about on my first night, don't wax it, just dust mop it, and I did that, and I thought about the orchard man the whole time, how he kept pruning trees nobody was going to buy fruit from.

When I got to the library it was a little after midnight and the lights were dimmed the way she keeps them, and Shay was standing on a chair trying to reach something on top of a shelf, and she had a stack of folding chairs behind her that the events guy had left in a crooked row by the study tables. "You're tall," she said when she saw me. "Come be tall over here. This atlas wants reshelving and it wants to be on the top shelf where the tall students can't mangle it."

I took it from her hand, and our fingers touched for about half a second, and neither of us made anything of it, or we made nothing of it out loud anyway, and I put the atlas up there and got down and looked at the chairs. "Want me to stack those?"

"Please. He leaves them like he was chased out of the building. Every single Thursday."

So I stacked chairs and she pushed her cart and we worked in the same room for maybe twenty minutes, and it was easy, is the thing I keep coming back to, it was easy in a way I hadn't expected and didn't have a plan for. When the last chair was nested she sat down on top of the stack like she was twenty-two again, which she is not, she is forty-four with gray coming in at her temples, and I sat at a study table across from her because sitting on a chair stack felt like a young man's gamble with my knees.

"So tell me the review," she said. "You finished it. I can tell you finished it because you have the face of a man with an opinion."

"I liked it more than I wanted to. The part where he keeps pruning anyway, that got me. I know that part. There's a stretch in September when the cattle are sold and there's nothing to do but fix fence and wait, and that book understood the waiting."

She nodded like I'd said something worth nodding at. "Charlene?"

"What about her."

"You were going to say her name the whole time you talked about that book. I could hear the space where it went."

I looked at her. Twenty-two years is a long time and it took her about four minutes to get to it. "We were married eighteen years. Divorce took eleven months, which I'm told is fast. It didn't feel fast. She's remarried now, lives in Billings, seems happy, and I don't mean that bitter, I mean it like a fact about the weather." I turned my thermos lid in my hands. "We married when I was twenty-five. Young. I don't know that I ever learned how to be somebody's husband. I learned how to work, and I worked, and somewhere in there I stopped saying things out loud, and she filled the quiet with a television, and then with other things, and by the end neither of us was surprised."

"That's a sad sentence too," Shay said.

"It's an honest one."

"You told me you'd gotten worse at those."

"I've been practicing. A few weeks of mop water helps."

She laughed at that, a real laugh, and then she went quiet and pushed her glasses up, and I knew she was deciding something, the same way she used to decide things in front of me at that diner we both loved, with her chin level first. "My turn then, since you paid up. I married a man named Gary when I was thirty. Lasted six years. He wasn't bad, that's the stupid part, he was just certain, certain about everything, what I should read, what I should want, and I spent six years being agreeable, and then one day I looked at myself and I couldn't find the wanting anywhere in me. I left. He took it fine, which was somehow worse. He'd already replaced me in his head, I think."

"Where is he now?"

"Denver, last I heard. I don't check." She swung her feet a little, like the chair stack was a porch rail. "Do you know what I did after you, Anton? After us. Ten weeks and I went and got sensible about everything. I told myself I was bad at picking, that I picked with my whole chest and it blew up, so I stopped doing it. For years I dated men who asked nothing of me and wanted nothing from me, and I thought that was peace. Turns out it was just quiet, the bad kind."

"That's an honest sentence," I said, and she pointed at me like I'd passed a test.

The Thursday after that she had two paper cups on the desk when I came up, and a little thermos of her own, and she said, "It's terrible coffee, I made it in the staff room, but it's free," and we took it out to the front steps of the library, the inside ones, the wide ones by the second-floor railing, because she said