“This is as far as I go,” Marvin says. “My library’s in my room—comes complete with keyboard.”
Marvin rides on while I chain up my bike.
So I’m standing in the middle of the main room, deciding how to kill the hour, when I hear, “Hey, girl.”
I turn around. “Walter! What are you doing here? Is Nancy . . .”
He snorts. “You think it’s unusual running into me in the library. . . .”
“Yeah, what was I thinking?”
He waves his hand in a wide circle. “My sanctuary,” he says. “Come here to get away. . . .”
“From Nancy?”
He smiles. “From everything. But you’re right, she’d never look for me here. I tell her I’m going to the Corner to play some cards.”
“I’ve got a mother who’d rather have her boyfriend in a bar than a library.”
“Your momma doesn’t want me getting too smart.”
“How would she know?”
“Stop it. You gotta give her a break ever so often.”
“Every so often I do.”
“You here for your book club?”
“I am.”
He looks me over, closes one eye. “You don’t always strike me as the literary type.”
“It’s not like we read Shakespeare,” I say.
“Oh yeah? What dost thou read?”
“Lotta stuff—stuff that’s recommended by other kids, or that’s just popular. Sometimes it’s fiction, sometimes real stuff—nonfiction—that just makes us smarter about the world; you know, events that a lot of people don’t know about or just about unusual people. Like big guys with small brains who cover themselves in tats and ride Harleys.”
“So,” he says, “like real heroes.”
“Yeah, like that.”
“You’re a funny girl.”
“So,” I say, “we both like books.”
He nods toward a couple of overstuffed chairs, so I follow him over, where he sits. “Naw,” he says. “You like books. I love books.”
I sit, too. Walter’s been around off and on for a long time, though in different capacities at different times. He knew Nancy and Rance back in their major drug days, and he’s way older than they are. But in recent times, he’s been the only guy I’ve seen Nancy with. Their relationship has changed, though I’m not sure exactly how.
“Does Nancy know this about you?” I ask. “Your thing with books?”
“What possible good would that serve?” he says.
“What kind of stuff do you read?”
He glances around the cavernous room, waves a hand over it all. “Perty much anything,” he says. “Ever’thing. Didn’t get a chance to finish college but hey, almost any book you’d find at a university is one you can find here.”
“You went to college?”
“Don’t look so surprised. When you get there, look around. There’ll be plenty of scurrilous dudes.”
“How come you didn’t finish?”
“War.”
“Really? Which one, like, World War Two?”
He laughs. “How are you at math?”
“I get by. Cheat when I have to. Why?”
“Bet you cheat a lot. If I’d fought in World War Two, I’d be in my nineties. I get that I haven’t kept myself up, but I sure as hell don’t look ninety. It was Vietnam. ’Nuff said.”
What I get is the “’nuff said.” Walter’s an enormous man who you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley, but if there’s a side of him that’s like that, I’ve never seen it. However, it’s pretty clear he doesn’t want to talk about the war, and “’nuff said” is all I need to let it drop.
ChapterSix
The book club is a different world for me—different from my Hatfield-and-McCoy existence with the Howards and the Boots, and different from my jock world, though we do have some jocks.
Books are my escape into reality. In case you haven’t figured it out, my life is like some dark fantasy. It’s impossible to predict. I take my friends through the losers bracket when they beg me not to, just so I can have an extra shot at spending time with people who likely won’t show anyway, and if they do, we’ll squabble. I lie to people who have gone far out of their way to take care of me because the truth of my motives seems crazy and I’d be embarrassed telling it. Half the time I lie to myself because it’s . . . it’s just easier. I’m too smart for my own good, I guess, because I know all that—and have the vocabulary to describe it—and it causes huge arguments inside me, which probably means I shouldn’t read so many books. How’s that for circular thinking?
But I’m not about to stop reading books.
It’s funny how I got in here. I saw the sign over by the teen section about three years ago, walked over to the desk, and said, “So how do I get into this book club?”
Sharon the Liberrian, as we call her, looked me up and down and said, “Show up.”
Let me tell you about Sharon. This chick is hot—flaming red hair, close cropped on the sides and styled on top, a couple of really cool piercings, and you can see the edges of tats next to the top button on her blouse. And her face is, like, gorgeous.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.” She moved around the desk, put a hand in the middle of my back, and guided me toward a neon sign reading “Tattered Pages,” where she ordered a cup of black coffee for herself and a hazelnut latte for me. “It’s not a very big group, but every member is a lover of the tome, as I like to say. And it’s not just a reader’s club. We also write.”
“Works for me.”
“Good. Tell me about yourself.”
“Do I have to?”
She laughed. “No. I can figure it out.”
“How are you gonna do that?” I don’t know why I was feeling confrontational; that part of me rises up on its own, whenever.
“By the books you like,” she said. “And the books you don’t.”
Of course.
“One rule,” she said. “What’s said in book club, stays in book club. Cool?”
“Like, no rats. That’s all?”
“Unless there’s anything you want to know.”
“How old are you?”
“I’m thirty-five.”
“Are there boys?”
“In the club? Of course.”
“How do you know they’re not in there just because . . . you know, how you look.”
“I couldn’t care less why they’re
