Chapter 21: Ruth

Park Hill Cemetery lay on the slope above the harbor, white and still under a sky the color of slate.

We went at dusk the next day, in his old Volvo, with a bunch of grocery-store tulips on the back seat.

Emlyn had not spoken since the car door.

He walked the rows ahead of me with his hands in his coat pockets and his head bent against the wind.

Section D was a long hillside of old stone and new, and the snow had been shoveled from some of the paths and not others.

Row nine ran along a fence.

The stone was grey granite, plain, with a book cut into the top, open, its pages carved.

RUTH ALBRECHT.

1938 to 2019.

Under that, in smaller letters: REFERENCE LIBRARIAN. FORTY-ONE YEARS AT THE DESK.

Emlyn stopped three feet from it.

I stayed back by the fence.

I know when a man needs the whole hill to himself.

He stood there so long that the lamps in the lower rows came on.

"Eighty-one," he said at last.

"Yes."

"She'd have been twenty-four, in the library, with her glasses on a chain."

"She used to look at me over them and tell me to be quiet." His mouth shook. "I was never quiet."

He went down on his knees in the snow.

"I thought I had killed you," he said to the stone. "In my mind, for sixty-four years, I had."

"I counted the days of your lifetime and I thought, she is lucky, I let her go in time."

The wind took his hair.

"And you went on without me. Forty-one years at a desk. Fifty-seven more, after I left. I never looked."

"Emlyn."

"I never looked, Vinnie. I could have found her in a morning."

"I could have stood at the back of a reading room and watched her stamp a card."

He put his palm on the carved book.

"I'm so sorry," he said. "I'm so sorry."

"I was told you would die, and I believed it, and I took what was left of your life away from you anyway."

I came up beside him and knelt, and set the tulips against the base of the stone.

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