Book Lover, The (32 page)

                            
36

R
UTH STARED AT THE BROWN LEATHER COVER IN DISBELIEF. How ironic to see this book again, today of all days, after she’d sat up most of the night thinking over the years of her life; how nothing ever quite turns out the way you expect it to.

She’d gazed out the window for hours at the town below, picturing herself going back and forth from her house to the store, day after day for the past thirty years. Or years ago, driving the kids to school each morning. And even before that, leaving her parents’ farm on a school bus into town. Nearly her entire life had existed within a few miles’ radius of where she sat in this hospital.

And yet she’d never felt confined or deprived. The world came to her through her books, or the stories her customers brought to her of their lives and travels. She had her children and grandchildren so she’d never been lonely, really. Until lately. Because lately she’d had a taste of possibility—of a different kind of life she could have if only she dared.

Now, here in her hands was proof of why she shouldn’t. This book she’d once loved, a symbolic reminder of her failure as a woman, her guilt as a wife.

“Ruth, are you all right?”

She looked up. Lucy’s face was filled with concern.

“I’m sorry, Ruth. It’s such a beautiful book, and I thought Whitman might be a good diversion while you’re here. And I found—”

“No, it’s fine,” Ruth interrupted. “I love Whitman, too. And this book, well, I haven’t actually seen it in decades. It’s just such a surprise.” She pulled it to her nose and a mixture of scents rose up to her—rich leather, musty pages, the tang of old ink. “My mother gave me this book for my sixteenth birthday. I knew it was expensive by the soft leather and the gold leaf on the cover. She must have saved for it a long time. To me it was a treasure. It made me think of what it must’ve been like when books were a rare thing, and people cherished them. I imagined it would become an heirloom in my family one day.”

Lucy smiled. “I figured it had happy memories for you. Especially when I saw the rose pressed in the pages. I could almost see you all dressed up for the prom with a beautiful corsage pinned on your gown.”

“I never went to a prom. I never got asked.” She opened the cover and the pages parted to the crumbling flower. She remembered the moment she had pressed it so carefully into this book. Her two most precious possessions at the time. “Bill gave me this rose. It was one of our first dates. We were just going out to dinner for my birthday, but he was always so romantic.”

“You’ve never really told me about your husband.”

Ruth looked out the window, hesitating. It was nearly dark again, rain still trickling down the glass. “I know I never really spoke about my husband. That was deliberate, to you and to everyone else. The truth is I couldn’t stand to. Because to talk about it would be to think about it and…oh, Lucy, I feel like a liar of grand proportions.” She shook her head. Why was she doing this now? Why didn’t she just keep her mouth shut?

She pulled the book to her nose again, inhaling deeply, wondering at the power of a scent, the visceral feeling of a moment in time it could evoke.

“I gave this book to Bill on our fifth anniversary. When I still had a bit of hope that we could make things work. When I was still…trying.”

“Listen, Ruth, you don’t have to go into this now, maybe it’s not—”

“No, I want to. I think it’s time.” Then she added with a little laugh, “And after all, Lucy, haven’t we told each other pretty much everything?”

Lucy looked uncomfortable for a moment and Ruth hesitated, wondering if perhaps she was taking their honesty too far. Maybe Lucy didn’t really want to hear all this. But then Lucy gave her a kind smile, pulled her chair closer and put a comforting hand on her arm. And Ruth continued.

“It wasn’t until months after Bill and I were married that I realized he didn’t read. At all. I couldn’t believe it, you know? To be honest, when we were dating, I hadn’t even noticed, we were always so busy doing things. But at night, I was always buried in a book, especially if he was working late. And he worked all sorts of odd hours on the railroad.

“Saying it out loud, it doesn’t seem so awful. Big deal, he didn’t read, except maybe the sports pages. I kept telling myself that no other woman would care about such a thing. I was a lucky girl to have him. But I began to realize more and more as time went by and then children came, that we had nothing in common, really. That without the excitement of dating, in the day to day reality of marriage, we were horribly mismatched. And Bill was bored. Bill needed a lot of fun, a lot of stimulation. Once I was his, I guess I wasn’t so much of that anymore. So he would go out at night when he was off, to see his friends at the bars, play pool, who knew what else. Pretty soon, he didn’t come home much. It wasn’t long before I started hearing the rumors.”

The hurt, the shame, she could feel it even now, roiling inside of her, turning her stomach.

“We started to argue, terrible fights. He’d promise to stop. He’d say that if I gave him half the attention I did to my books…” She closed her eyes, leaning back against the pillow at the force of those cruel memories.

You’re frigid,
he’d yell when she wouldn’t respond to him. And if she couldn’t give him what he needed, he’d just keep getting it elsewhere. Frigid, a word from another era. A label that had scarred her. Who ever heard it now? Looking back at herself, so young, navigating the difficult waters of motherhood, betrayed and exhausted, she thought now: of course you couldn’t respond, he was cheating on you. Of course you began to hate him, who wouldn’t?

But she couldn’t say those things out loud, even now, not even to Lucy. For so long she’d been afraid he was right. That she wasn’t enough of a woman and failed him somehow.

She lifted the rose from the book and bits of petal disintegrated onto her lap. “Today it would be so easy to walk away from a marriage like that, you know? People would think you were crazy if you stayed. But back then, I didn’t work. I was a mother, with young children. There weren’t many jobs for women anyway, it was all so different. Besides, I kept thinking if I tried harder, somehow I could get it to work. Because I just felt like I wasn’t enough for him.”

“Please, Ruth, don’t…”

“One night I was so distraught, I couldn’t take it anymore. It was this time of year, and he was supposed to be getting everything ready for a big bonfire up at the lake before the kids went back to school. He didn’t come home and I finally got my neighbor to come over and sit with the kids. I drove up to the lake, shaking all the way, knowing in my gut what I would find. And I did. It was awful, the worst moment of my life. She ran out in a hurry, half dressed. I stood there and I swear I thought my heart would explode with rage. I screamed at him over and over, that I wished…he was dead.” There, she’d said it out loud. She looked up at Lucy, who was looking at her not with horror, but with a look of such sadness.

“Stop, Ruth, please.”

“He actually started to cry,” she went on, unable to stop now. “And it threw me. I expected him to defend himself, like he usually did. To yell and make excuses. But he knelt at my feet, wrapped his arms around my legs and told me he never deserved me. Then he got up and left.”

“Look, Ruth, I know what it’s like to be cheated on, maybe not in this same way, but I was so full of rage at times it scared me.”

“But he did die.” She saw Lucy’s eyes widen. “I went home and three hours later the police were at my door. His car hit a tree and he died instantly. So did she. She was Hannah’s older sister.”

She could hear Lucy’s soft gasp. Ruth’s body shook now as it had when she’d opened the door, the kids asleep upstairs, their world changed forever. Her knees had buckled and she’d slid to the floor, unable to get up.

“The police knew us. This is a small town, you know, and everyone loved Bill, he was so full of life. They stood in my house with tears in their eyes. The condolences over the coming days were heart wrenching. The worst, though, was the children.”

Lucy took both of her hands and held them tightly.

“He wasn’t all bad, of course. He loved the children and was always doing fun things with them when he was home. They had lots of campouts at the lake. I began to realize he was so much like them, always wanting to play, to find the fun in life and I…I was so serious.”

Lucy handed her a tissue. Silent tears were spilling from Ruth’s eyes and she hadn’t even felt them. She wiped her face then blew her nose.

“Afterward, I thought I would die of the guilt, every time I tucked my kids in bed at night. Every time they cried. I felt like I was to blame.”

“But you don’t still think that, do you?”

She shrugged. “After a while, I just refused to think about it. It was easier that way. I buried my memories with him. Now over these past months, it seems like everything’s been coming to a head. Maybe it’s my age. Maybe it’s sitting here wondering just how many days I have left on earth. None of us knows, really. And I keep thinking about what Jenny says, that I’ve been hiding in the store. I wonder if she isn’t right.”

“You know what I think? I think you held this in for too long and it had to come out. Come on, Ruth, you’re not a hateful or vindictive person. Anyone who knows you knows that. You didn’t mean what you said.”

“But do we ever really know another person? I thought I knew Bill. You thought you knew your husband. I never imagined I was capable of the things

I said to Bill. How do we ever trust again?”

“Are you talking about Thomas?”

She turned and looked out the window again. One by one the houses and stores and street lights came on, as they had last night. Already there was a rhythm to this, and she wondered if a new phase of her life had begun.

“I never told you, but a while back Thomas came to see me at my house.”

“He’s out of prison?”

“Yes. And he told me why he was in there. He was trying to get back money that was stolen from his mother. What he did was stupid, crazy and…I think I believe him. But could you imagine Jenny finding out I’m seeing an ex-convict? And who knows what my sons would say?”

“Ruth, I don’t think this is about your kids or anyone else. This is about what you want.”

“I’ve thought about almost nothing else since I’ve been in here. I’m not sure I have the courage to try again. Maybe it’s been too long. Lucy, I haven’t been kissed, much less intimate with another man since I was married to Bill. As much as I want to…I’m not sure I can. It’s not just that. This sounds so shallow, but what if…I’m ashamed of him in public, you know? Oh yes, this is my new boyfriend, who spent the last ten years in prison. I’m not sure I can completely get beyond that. And the funny thing is that it made me realize some of what Gloryanne went through. The stigma of being with a man who people will always look at differently.”

She paused a moment, exhausted suddenly.

“But Ruth, didn’t you say yourself a little while ago that just because Colin is different doesn’t mean he doesn’t deserve to be loved? Maybe the same could be said for Thomas.”

She looked at Lucy for a long moment. Then she held out the leather bound book of poetry.

“Here, put this back on the shelf in the cabin. That’s where it belongs.”

JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT THERE WAS A HUGE COMMOTION as a drug addict was admitted in the bed next to hers. When the night nurse came in, Ruth was surprised to see it was Larry Porter’s girlfriend, Angela, who apologized, explaining it was the last bed and they had no choice. While the woman moaned and thrashed, Angela sat in the room, and she and Ruth chatted for a while about books, reminiscing about how she and Larry had met in the store by chance. Ruth lamented the shift change, when Angela said goodbye.

She alternately slept and wrote until the sun rose over Warwick and by then, as her breakfast tray was wheeled in, she’d come to two decisions. She was going to sell the store. If she couldn’t-which was highly possible—she’d shut it down after the anniversary.

And as soon as she got home, she was going to call Thomas.

She left the tray untouched, got dressed, and then signed herself out of the hospital, stopping to mail her essay, “Why I’m a Bookseller,” on her way home. She couldn’t come up with just one explanation, so instead she’d spent the night listing all of the reasons she had loved what she did for the past thirty-five years. It seemed like a fitting farewell.