As he walked through the door marked Administrative Offices, Earl tried to hide the annoyance he was feeling. Pulling his face into a reasonably pleasant expression, he approached the front desk and asked, “Is this Mr. Whisenant’s office?”
The woman behind the desk looked up. “Yes, it is, but I’m afraid he’s tied up right now. Can I help you with something?”
“I need a copy of the yearbook from seven years ago.” He hesitated a second, then, remembering Annie was already seven, corrected himself. “Make that eight years ago.”
“My goodness, that would be 1952, or did you want ’53? It really doesn’t matter, because I doubt we have any that far back.”
Trying to sound affable, which wasn’t all that easy since he was already in a foul mood, Earl softened his voice. “Would you take a look? It’s kind of important. Sort of like a gift I promised her.”
She smiled and gave a knowing nod. “The year your daughter graduated, right?”
The pissed-off expression slid right back onto Earl’s face.
“Wife,” he snapped. Suzanna wasn’t his wife or daughter, but to get that yearbook he had to say something.
The woman’s face blushed crimson. “Oh. Of course. Why, you’re much too young. I wasn’t thinking… I hope you don’t think I meant—”
“You wanna go check on that book?” Earl cut in, his patience growing thinner by the second.
Scurrying off like a frightened rabbit, the woman disappeared into the back office and was gone several minutes.
As he waited, Earl paced back and forth across the room. He didn’t like being here anymore than he did when he’d quit coming 20 years earlier. Just being in the building gave him the willies, made him feel like a loser. Having to back down to some smart-ass kid was like running a buzz saw up his back, and the thought of this old crow suggesting Suzanna might be his daughter made his skin crawl. He felt a rash rising up on his neck and was on the verge of walking out when the woman reappeared.
“I’m sorry to be gone so long,” she said. “I called over to the school library to ask if they had any, but unfortunately they don’t. Mr. Whisenant has eight copies from 1958 and three from ’59, but that’s it. Nothing older.”
“You know where I can get one?”
“Not really,” she said apologetically. “You might try the county library. I can’t say for sure whether or not they keep the yearbooks, but it’s worth checking.”
Anxious to get out of there, Earl gave a nod of thanks and was gone. As he made his way back to the door, he kept an eye open for the big kid but the hallways were now as empty as they’d been earlier.
By the time Earl made it to the library, he was feeling a bit discouraged and starting to wonder if maybe there wasn’t some other way to find Suzanna. He walked up to the desk and asked if they kept copies of the Sun Grove High School yearbooks.
“We have archive copies,” the librarian said.
Earl’s face brightened. “Do you have 1952 or ’53?”
“Yes. All the way back to 1942.”
Figuring that if he didn’t find Mr. Football in one book, he’d surely be the other, Earl asked to borrow both the ’52 and ’53 books.
The librarian gave a tolerant smile. “As I said, they’re archive copies. We don’t lend archived reference books. You can read them here, but they can’t leave the library.”
“What kind of dumb rule is that? Isn’t the whole idea of a library to lend books?”
With her eyes fixed in an unflinching glare, she repeated, “Not reference books.”
It was obvious to Earl that he was not going to get around this woman and her no-borrowing-reference-books rule, and it was almost as obvious that looking through the books on his own was not going to be of much help. The whole idea had been to get Suzanna’s dad to point out the guy she was dating; then he’d have something to go on.
A feeling of frustration started picking at him, and his stomach churned. “Look, this is kind of an emergency. If I can’t borrow the books, then at least let me buy them.”
“We do not sell our reference books,” she replied crisply.
“I’m not gonna keep the damn books. Think of it this way: you sell them to me today, I show them to the guy who’s supposed to point out somebody, then tomorrow I give them back. You keep the money. Everybody wins. No harm, no foul, right?”
“Wrong. I will repeat this one last time. Reference books do not leave the library. Not for you, not for anyone.”
“You ever thought of sometimes making an exception?”
“No, I have not. If you wish to look at our archived books, I will take you back to that section. If you do not, then leave. But if I see you trying to sneak one of those books out of here, I will call security.”
Given no alternative, Earl begrudgingly said he’d go ahead and look at the yearbooks. He followed the librarian back to the archive room and sat at the table as he waited for her to give them to him.
Once the books were in front of him, he started leafing through the pages of the 1952 book. He was looking for something but had no clue what it might be. Twelve pages in, he came across a picture of Suzanna. Younger, her face a bit fuller, her smile even more beautiful than he remembered.
As he sat looking at her, the ache inside of him grew more fierce. It hurt as nothing before had ever hurt. More than the knee that had once been shattered, more than the time his daddy had taken a baseball bat to him, more even than the mama who’d walked off and left him with
