The Bookmobile That Only Came at Dusk

The bookmobile came only at dusk, and only if you were the last person left waiting. Everyone in Ardell knew this, the way they knew the water tower leaned three degrees east and the grain elevator hummed a G-flat when the wind came right.

Marguerite Voss had been the last person waiting for four Thursdays in a row.

She stood at the crumbled edge of what used to be the library parking lot, holding a canvas tote and a list she'd written that morning on the back of an unpaid electric bill. The library building itself had closed in 2011, its windows now milky with dust, its front steps furred with volunteer grasses. But the concrete pad where the bookmobile used to park every second Thursday — that, apparently, remembered its job.

The sky above the wheat was doing its slow purple trick. A meadowlark, unseen, tried three notes and gave up. Marguerite shifted her weight; her left knee had been complaining since April and was now filing formal grievances.

Headlights, low and yellow, wobbled up the county road.

The van was the color of old butter. It had a hand-painted swallow on the side, tail feathers streaming toward the back bumper, and above it in careful serif letters: Prairie Regional Bookmobile — Serving You Since 1962. Marguerite had ridden in it as a child. She had ridden in it as a young teacher, borrowing picture books for her second-graders. She had ridden in it, once, to cry privately between the biographies after her husband's diagnosis. It had not run since 1998.

It pulled up now with a wheeze that was almost polite and stopped exactly where the yellow line used to be.

The door folded open. Warm light spilled out, smelling of paper and cedar and a faint, impossible whiff of the mimeograph fluid they used to use for library newsletters.

"Evening, Miss Voss," said the librarian inside. He was younger than she was now — perhaps forty — with a soft brown cardigan and the kind of moustache that had gone extinct sometime around the moon landing. She did not recognize him, and yet she did.

"Evening," she said. "I brought a list."

"You always did."

She climbed the two steps. Inside, the shelves curved along both walls, and the ceiling was low enough that a taller person would have to stoop. A green-shaded lamp burned at the tiny desk. There was no computer. There was, instead, a small wooden box of index cards and a rubber stamp resting on an ink pad the color of pond water.

Marguerite handed over her list. The librarian read it without expression.

• A gardening book for zone 4b
• Something funny, not too clever
• The novel about the sisters and the lighthouse (can't remember title)
• A book my mother liked

"The last one's vague," she said.

"They usually are." He tucked the list into his cardigan pocket. "Give me a moment."

He moved through the narrow aisle with the ease of a man who had memorized every spine. Marguerite waited by the desk, resting her hand on the counter. The wood was warm. Outside the little windows, the town of Ardell was doing what it did in the evenings now: going quiet, going darker, letting the coyotes have the fields back.

He returned with four books stacked neatly.

The gardening book was on top, sensible and green. Beneath it, a slim novel with a cartoon dog on the cover. Beneath that, the sisters-and-lighthouse book, whose title Marguerite recognized the instant she saw it — of course, how had she forgotten. And on the bottom: a hardback the color of a bruised plum, no dust jacket, the title stamped in faded gold.

The Winter Kitchen, it read. Recipes and Remembrances. By a woman named Ilse Voss.

Marguerite's mother.

"She never wrote a book," Marguerite said. Her voice came out thinner than she meant.

"Didn't she?" The librarian was already sliding the little checkout cards from their pockets, stamping each with a firm, satisfied thunk. "Due back in two weeks. Or whenever. We're flexible now."

"She always said she was going to. She had a notebook. Blue cover. She kept it under the bread box."

"Mm." Thunk. Thunk.

Marguerite picked up the plum-colored book. It was heavier than it looked. She opened it at random and found her mother's handwriting — the very loops of it, the careful capital Ks, the way she crossed her sevens like a European — describing how to render goose fat, how to know when the plum jam had reached the setting point ("it will pull away from the spoon like a shy child from a stranger"), how to comfort a daughter who has failed a spelling test ("warm milk, no lecture, and let her win at cards").

Marguerite made a small sound and covered her mouth.

The librarian looked politely at his ink pad.

"How," she began, and stopped. She tried again. "How is this here."

"The bookmobile carries what people meant to write," he said gently. "Along with what people did write. We've always had a small section for it. It gets bigger every year."

"Can I keep it?"

"It's a library, Miss Voss. But you can renew."

She nodded, because she did not trust her voice. She held the book against her ribs and let the librarian slide the others into her tote.

At the door, she paused. "Will you come next Thursday?"

"If you're the last one waiting."

"I always am, now."

"Then yes."

She stepped down onto the concrete pad. The van's door folded shut behind her with a soft accordion sigh. She did not turn to watch it go — she had learned, in seventy-one years, which moments preferred privacy. She only heard the engine catch, the tires whisper, and then the meadowlark, braver now, trying its three notes again and this time finishing them.

Marguerite walked home along the shoulder of County Road 12. The sky had gone from purple to that deep prairie blue that isn't quite any color at all. Her knee complained. Her tote bag bumped her hip. The plum-colored book rode against her chest like something newly hatched.

At the kitchen table, under the yellow ceiling light, she opened it again. She read the recipe for her grandmother's noodle soup. She read the entry titled For Marguerite, on her wedding day, which she had never received because her mother had died the winter before. She read it twice. She read it a third time and did not cry, exactly, but something inside her that had been held very tightly for a very long time finally, quietly, set down its bag.

Outside, the town of Ardell kept its slow business of ending. Inside, Marguerite Voss turned another page and found she was not, after all, the last one waiting.