Forever, Interrupted(21)

“Yeah,” I say. “I guess we are.” At least this makes me feel like I have a purpose, however small. I have to protect Ben’s wishes. I have to protect the body that did so much to protect me.





JANUARY


At work the next day, my thoughts oscillated between focusing on tasks at hand and daydreaming. I had to promise Ana I’d drive over to her place after work to explain my absence, and I kept replaying in my head how I was going to describe him. It was always her talking to me about men and me listening. Now that I knew it would be me talking and her listening, I almost felt like I needed to practice.

I was physically present but mentally absent when Mr. Callahan cornered me. “Elsie?” he said, as he approached the counter.

Mr. Callahan was almost ninety years old. He wore polyester trousers every day in either gray or khaki. He wore a button-up shirt in some sort of plaid pattern with a cream-colored Members Only jacket to cover it.

Mr. Callahan kept tissues in his pants pockets. He kept ChapStick in his jacket pocket, and he always said “Bless you” whenever anyone within a fifty-foot radius sneezed. He came to the library almost every day, coming and going, sometimes multiple times a day. Some days, he would read magazines and newspapers in the back room until lunchtime, when he would check out a book to take home to his wife. Other days, he would come in the late afternoon to return a book and pick up a black-and-white movie on VHS or maybe some sort of opera I had never heard of on CD.

He was a man of culture, a man of great kindness and personality. He was a man devoted to his wife, a wife we at the library never met but heard everything about. He was also very old, and I sometimes feared he was on his last legs.

“Yes, Mr. Callahan?” I turned to face him and rested my elbows on the cold counter.

“What is this?” Mr. Callahan slid a bookmark in front of me. It was one of our digital library bookmarks. We had put them all over the library a week earlier to try to call attention to the digital materials we had. There was a big debate in the library about starting this initiative. We didn’t have much say, to tell the truth, as we were guided by the Los Angeles Public Library system, but still, some people thought we should be doing more, some people thought we should be preserving the past. I have to say I was leaning toward preserving the past. I loved holding books in my hands. I loved smelling their pages.

“That is a bookmark about our digital library.”

“What?” he said to me, asking politely but bemused.

“It’s a website we have that you can go to and download materials instead of coming to the library to get them.”

He nodded, recognizing what I was saying. “Oh, like if I wanted an i-book.”

“An e-book, right,” I said. I didn’t mean to correct him.

“Wait, is it e or i?”

“E.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake. This whole time I’ve been thinking my granddaughter, Lucia, was saying iPad.”

“No,” I said. “She was. You read an e-book on an iPad.”

Mr. Callahan started laughing. “Listen to yourself,” he said, smiling. “You sound a little ridiculous.”

I laughed with him. “Nevertheless,” I said. “That’s what it’s called.”

“All right, so if I get an iPad, I can read an e-book on it that I download from the library.” He emphasized iPad, e-book, and download as if they were made-up words and I was a toddler.

“Right,” I said. “That’s actually quite impressive how quick you got that.”

“Oh, please. I’ll forget tomorrow.” He touched my hand and patted it as if to say good-bye. “Anyway, it sounds like I don’t want anything to do with it. Too complicated for me. I much prefer the real thing.”

“Me too,” I said. “But I don’t know how much longer the real thing will be around.”

“Long enough for me,” he said, and I was struck by the sadness of realizing your own mortality. He didn’t seem sad, and yet, I still felt sad for him.

My boss, Lyle, came by and told Mr. Callahan we were closing.

“Okay, okay! I’ll leave,” he joked, putting his hands up in surrender. I watched him walk out the door, and then I tidied up and sped away to Ana’s house.





What the hell happened?! Start at the beginning. Who is this guy?” Ana said to me. I was lying on her couch.

“Ana, I don’t even know how to explain it.”

She sat down on the ottoman next to me. “Try.”

“On Saturday night I ordered a pizza—”

“Oh my God! He’s a delivery guy? Elsie!”

“What? No, he’s not a delivery guy. He’s a graphic designer. That’s not . . . Just listen. I ordered a pizza but they said it would take too long to get there. So I went down to pick it up and there was this guy waiting too. That was him. That was Ben.”

“Ben is the guy?”

“Ben is the guy. So I notice him, he’s really cute, like too cute for me cute, you know? But he starts talking to me and it’s, like, when he starts talking I just . . . Anyway, I gave him my number; he called me yesterday morning and picked me up for lunch at twelve thirty. It was the best date I’ve ever had. I mean, it was one of the best days I’ve ever had. He says all the right things and he’s so sincere and cute and . . . ”