Neighborhood Watch by Cammie McGovern Page B

think of this one, Bets?” he’d say, assuming I’d read everything, though, like many librarians, I’d become someone who talked about books more than I read them. I could tell you which writers had the longest wait lists. I could recommend books I’d never read based on the request slips I’d processed. Geoffrey changed all that, reminding me of the books I loved as a girl. When he asked me what my favorite book of all time was and I told him Middlemarch, he included it in that day’s stack of books. That night I opened my copy for the first time in years, reread a few passages, and wondered why I’d named this book so quickly, and if it wasn’t all just a little depressing: Dorothea with all her do-gooder sincerity and her terrible marriage to Casaubon, the phony writer and academic. Now I wonder what Geoffrey had thought when he read it. Did he see pieces of himself in that character? Apparently not if he passed the book on to Trish, but why would he have done that?
    I remember how nervous I was to discuss the book with him. In college I’d wept over it, how Dorothea with her good intentions ended up with so little, and in the end, dead. Rereading it, it seemed more frightening than sad: a childless woman filling the emptiness at the center of her life with gossamer plans and projects to help the poor. What would Geoffrey know about me and my delusions of importance—my dream that what I did at the library mattered to people, mattered to anyone —after he read it? I felt embarrassed about the whole thing until the day I looked up from my desk at work and saw him standing there with tears in his eyes. “Oh, Bets, what a book,” he said. “I cried at the end and I never do that.”
    After that, we tried to have something we were both reading at the same time. His favorite book was Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey, and I did what you never see a librarian do: I sat at the front desk with a book open, reading it. I wanted to love it—he’d loved my suggestions—and in the end I did, or pretended I did, anyway. Geoffrey said reading books with me took him back to the time before they’d become a complicated pleasure. Reading new ones now meant he knew the writer or the writer’s agent, and inevitably those threads of connection made him uneasy; not with jealousy, I didn’t think, but with a self-consciousness I could hardly believe the first time I saw it.
    “Sometimes I wonder if I’m just a copier,” he said. He didn’t say any more and I didn’t ask what he meant, though now, of course, I understand.
    At the trial, witnesses reported seeing him at the library as often as three times a week. His library records put it closer to once a week, though naturally there were days he came in without checking books out. Gretchen, another assistant librarian, bitter about my promotion over her, described Geoffrey as almost constantly standing at my desk or walking beside my shelving cart. This was a dig, too, as any librarian will tell you. Shelving should have been my lowest priority, a job easily relegated to students or volunteers.
    “What did you think, overhearing their conversations?” the DA asked Gretchen.
    “I felt embarrassed mostly,” Gretchen said. “They were a little sophomoric, the way they went on about books. I wondered how much she was trying to impress him.”
    “Can you define sophomoric ?” The DA sounded annoyed. First rule for witnesses: Don’t talk above the jury’s heads.
    “When someone tries to sound smarter than they are.”
    I don’t think Gretchen hated me all those years we worked side by side before Geoffrey came along to interrupt the quiet and skew the balance. I think she hated her life, which included a husband she didn’t seem to like and a live-in mother-in-law. Geoffrey represented a pleasure most of us had long ago stopped imagining. A man stopping by to say hello, to lean across our beige desk and make a joke. Of course I sounded sophomoric at times.