Should Have Known Better

“Again,” she said, playfully cutting her eyes at me. “I ain’t been nowhere near such a bus, and I don’t plan on getting directions.”

“You get back to me when you finally fall in love,” I replied. “When you find a man you love and he breaks your heart, you get back to me about that bus.”

I sat and watched Sharika attempt to walk away, readjusting her too-tight yellow skirt as it rode up with each step. When she first came to the library, after the last co-librarian—a white woman from Athens who’d burst into tears one day when one of the teens called her a cracker—quit quite expectedly, I thought little of Sharika. She seemed too flashy and too loud to really be interested in being a librarian. But after just days of working beside her, I saw that Sharika, who was just three years younger than me, might have been more qualified for the job than me. While “business” and “acumen” and “customer” and “service” were words that seldom came together in her mind, she was a voracious reader who coveted knowledge from words like soap-opera fans do the story lines of their favorite characters. She was one of those people who could read Giovanni’s Room in one evening and come back to work the next day talking about it as if it were the most interesting thing she’d ever read. The most interesting thing about that, though, was that she was always doubting her skills. She’d been talking about going back to school for her doctorate in library science for years, but she could find every excuse in the world not to: the programs were racist, the best ones were too far away . . . But I thought she was just scared of something. Of someone seeing what I saw every day and not being able to look past it to see who she really was. Yeah, she needed some polish, but the passion was there already.

I clicked on my computer screen and looked at my desktop photo, a picture I’d taken with my husband during a camping trip to DeSoto Falls a month before. His head leaned into mine. I was peeking over at his silhouette and smiling. I could see the sun setting in his sunglasses. Reginald had taken the picture with his cell phone, and since I still hadn’t picked up the prints we ordered from our digital camera, this was the only shot I had. He kept begging me to go to Target to get them, but I never had time.

Except for the hot teenagers, hours in our little library were unpredictable. Sometimes they were unacceptably slow since the only thing to do was watch people argue over computer terminals and fall asleep as they pretended to read a book about screenplay writing or starting a marijuana garden. And other times, time ticked like a bomb as the drama of simply having different kinds of people crammed into the only remaining library in Augusta’s poorest neighborhood promised full frontal action: a lovesick girl might discover her boyfriend making out with his ex-girlfriend in the reference section; Mr. Lawrence might decide to take a long afternoon nap and snore so loudly that it sounded like a demon was about to climb out of his mouth.

“So, you think she should’ve killed herself?” Sharika asked as we ushered the last few stragglers out of the library before closing.

“No. I didn’t say that,” I said. “I just pointed ou

t that I know how hurt she must’ve been. Love is an amazing thing. And when you’ve been married for a long time, divorce is like . . . it’s like failing at what everyone said will be the most major thing you do in your life. So you don’t want to let go.”

“Then why are so many people getting divorced?”

“Lack of focus. Forgetting what they signed up for. It can be any number of things,” I answered, helping her stack a few books people had left on a table onto her cart. I pulled the keys to the front door from the pea green cardigan I kept at my desk for afternoons when the air-conditioning in the library got a little nippy. “I’ll lock up out front,” I added before leaving Sharika to tidy the rest of the floor.

On my way to the front door, I decided to check out the bathroom to make sure none of the teens had been left behind; we’d unknowingly locked a couple in the library for the night once before. When I went to pull the swinging door, it flew out quicker than I’d expected and I could tell someone was pushing from the other side.

“Oh, shi—” I groaned, feeling the corner of the door scrape the top of my penny loafer. I looked down at the damage and was ready to scold the fast cheerleader and her boyfriend with the short, raggedy dreadlocks that I’d seen sneaking off earlier, but when I looked up, instead there was Mrs. Harris standing in the doorway. “I’m so sorry,” I apologized, embarrassed that I’d almost cursed in front of her. “I didn’t know you were in here. We’ve closed. You can come back in the morning at—” I stopped myself, noticing that Mrs. Harris hadn’t said a word and she looked even more surprised than I did. “Is everything OK?”

“Sure, honey,” she said, her voice more sweet than usual. She flashed a bright smile, but didn’t move and held the door only half opened. Her shirt was misbuttoned.

After a second, I tried to push the door open, but she held it steady.

“Are you sure everything is OK?” I asked again.

Her smile quickly dissipated.

I pushed the door again, this time with much more force, and it swung back so hard, it should’ve slammed against the wall inside of the bathroom, but it stopped short.

“Ouch,” a male’s voice cried.

With equal surprise and concern, I stepped into the bathroom to see who was behind the door.

“Mr. Lawrence?” I looked from him to Mrs. Harris and back. His shirt was completely unbuttoned. “You two?”

“No, no, not that, honey,” Mrs. Harris tried to reassure me with her smile.

“Not that? What do you mean, Maggie?” Mr. Lawrence asked.

“I mean, it’s not what she’s thinking,” she answered.

“The hell it’s not,” Mr. Lawrence said. “It’s everything she’s thinking!”

“Chuck!” Mrs. Harris looked down and suddenly desired to rebutton her shirt.

“Look, I don’t really care what it is,” I said sternly, “as long as it doesn’t happen in the library. You two are too old for this.”

“I know,” Mrs. Harris agreed shamefully. Her shoulders sank and she went and stood beside Mr. Lawrence as if they were teenagers.

“I mean, do I need to take away your bathroom privileges like I do some of the kids from the school?” I asked.

“No,” they answered together.

“Good,” I said, and it was all I could offer in such an off situation. There were no parents to call. They were the grandparents.