Bookman's promise

“Mike’ll do.”

I shook his hand, said, “Cliff Janeway,” and gave a small bow in her direction. “Welcome to East Colfax.”

* * *

The phone rang and I had a brief rush of business. The old woman sat still through it all, her balance eerily stable in what appeared to be a light sleep. Occasionally I made eye contact with Ralston, arching my eyebrows and cocking my head in her direction, but he shrugged and waited for the calls to subside. When it got quiet again I motioned him over to the end of the counter. “So…Mike…what’s this all about?”

“Beats me. I think she just got to Denver last night.”

“Just got here from where?”

“Back East somewhere. I don’t know how she made it all alone. You can see how shaky she is, and she’s got almost no money. That had to be one helluva trip.”

“What’s your part in it?”

“Let’s call it my good deed of the month.” He smiled, a humble man embarrassed by his own kindness. “Look, I’m no professional do-gooder, but this woman’s at the end of her rope. She’s staying in a tacky motel not far from here. My wife works there and I can tell you it’s not a place you’d want your grandmother to stay. Or your wife to work, either…not for long.”

“So?”

“So Denise calls and tells me she’s got a lady there who needs some help. Denise is my wife.” He said her name so lovingly that I could almost feel some small measure of the affection myself, for a woman I had never met. “You married, Janeway?”

I shook my head.

“Well, this is one of those things you do when you are. As the line goes, to ensure domestic tranquillity. You’ll understand it someday.”

I laughed and liked him all the more.

“All I can tell you right now is, this lady came a long way to see you, and she almost made it. The least I could do was get her the last few miles over here.”

I liked Mr. Ralston but I sure didn’t like what I was hearing. The arrival of an ancient and penniless woman at my door charged me with responsibility for her welfare. Maybe I owed her nothing—that was the voice of a cynic, and I am the great cynic of my day. I can be a fountain of negative attitude, but from that moment she was mine to deal with.

“I wonder if I should wake her.”

“Up to you, friend. I’m just the delivery boy.”

It was unlikely but she seemed to hear us. Her eyes flicked open and found my face, and I had a powerful and immediate sense of something strong between us. I knew that in some distant past she had been an important part of my life, yet in the same instant I was certain I had never seen her. Her face was almost mummified, her eyes watery and deep. Her hair was still lush and striking: now I could see that it was pure white, not gray, swept across her forehead in a soft wave that left her face looking heart-shaped and delicate in spite of the deeply furrowed skin. I pulled up a stool, said, “What can I do for you, ma’am?” and her pale gray eyes, which had never left my face, struggled to adjust in the harsh late-afternoon sunlight from the street. Suddenly I knew she couldn’t see me: I saw her pupils contract and expand as she lowered and raised her head; I saw the thick glasses in her lap and the lax fingers holding them but making no effort to bring them up to her eyes. The glasses were useless; she was blind. It was impossible but she had come across the country alone, trembling and unsteady…virtually sightless.

I couldn’t just shake that off, and I still felt some vague sense of kinship between us. It was probably simple chemistry, one of those strong and instant reactions that certain people have when they meet, but it had happened so rarely in my life that its effect was downright eerie. And this was doubly strange, because I now began to sense that her reaction to me was almost a polar opposite. Her face was deeply apprehensive, as if I had some heaven- or-hell power and she was finally at the time in her long life when the accounting had to begin.

“Mr. Janeway.”

Another surprise: her voice was steady and strong. She put on her glasses and squinted through the heavy lenses, confirming my original guess. She could make out colors, shades of light and dark, shapes moving past on the street; she could assess enough of my appearance to see a fierce-looking, dark-haired bruiser straddling a stool before her; she could find her way along a sidewalk if she didn’t stumble and fall. But by almost any legal definition, she was blind.

“My name is Josephine Gallant. You have a book that belongs to me.”

I thought at once of that mysterious City of the Saints that had dropped in my lap from St. Louis. This was actually going to be good news: I could pay her a thousand dollars for that copy; hell, I could give her two thousand and sell it at cost. Maybe that would make a small difference in her life and I could go back to my own life knowing I had given her my best. Then she said, “My grandfather was Charles Warren,” and at once I remembered that phone call from the crazy woman, surrounded by spooks in Baltimore. This is how quickly good news can turn into oh shit in the book business.

Before I could gather my thoughts she said, “What I meant was, it once belonged to me. Even after all these years I still think of them as my books.”

“Them?”

“There were more where that set came from.”