Forever, Interrupted

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

  “I don’t know if I can go back,” I say at first, meaning it.

  “Okay,” she says, turning back to the stove. The batter doesn’t fall off the spatula until the last minute, until I have almost given up on it falling to the floor. It makes a small splatter at her foot, but she’s oblivious.

  “I know I need to, though,” I add. “If only because I’m not exactly rolling in dough.” Being a librarian meant that when I graduated, my starting salary was higher than the rest of my peers’, but it didn’t grow as quickly and I am now merely making a decent living. I’m certainly not in a position to quit my job.

  “What about Ben’s . . . ?” Ana can’t finish the question. I don’t blame her. I can barely ask it myself in my own head.

  “He had a good amount of money saved,” I say. “But I don’t want it.”

  “Well, wouldn’t he want you to have it?” My pancake is done, and she delivers it to me on the table with containers of butter, maple syrup, jam, and confectioners’ sugar. I push them aside. The thought of tasting something sweet right now makes my mouth sour.

  “I don’t know, but . . . I think it puts me in a weird position. We weren’t married long. None of his family has ever heard of me. I don’t want a windfall of cash right now,” I say. “Not that it’s a windfall, it’s just more than I had saved. Ben wasn’t a big spender.”

  Ana shrugs. “So, then maybe you should call your boss and work out when you’re going back? Assuming you’re going back?”

  I nod. “You’re absolutely right. I should.” I do not want to. I wonder how long I could go before they fired me. It would be so indelicate of them to fire a widow, to fire a grieving woman, and yet, I’d leave them no choice.

  “And speaking of calling people . . . ” Ana flips what I hope is a pancake she’s making for herself. I said I’d eat, but I’m not eating two huge pancakes. I can barely stomach this piece of shit in front of me.

  “Wow, you’re really going for it this morning, aren’t you?” I say.

  She plates the pancake, which I think is a pretty good sign she’s going to eat it herself. If it was for me, she’d put it on my plate, right? “I don’t mean to push you. I just think the longer you put this off, the more uncomfortable it will be. Your parents, no matter how difficult your relationship is, they need to know what has happened to you in the past few days.”

  “Okay,” I say. She’s right. Ana sits down next to me and starts on her pancake. She loads it up with butter and maple syrup. I am astonished that she can have an appetite during a time like this, that things like taste and pleasure are on her mind.

  I wipe my chin and set down the napkin. “Who do you want me to call first? Let’s just get this shit over with.”

  Ana puts down her fork. “That’s my girl! You’re taking life by the balls.”

  “I don’t know if that’s the case. I’m merely getting this bullshit out of the way so I can go in my room and cry for the rest of the day.”

  “But you’re trying! You’re doing the best you can.”

  “I guess I am,” I say and grab the phone. I look to her with my eyebrows raised and the phone tilted in my hand. “So?”

  “Call work first. That’s an easier conversation. It’s just logistics, no emotion.”

  “I like that you think the conversation with my parents will contain emotion.”

  I dial the phone and wait as it rings. A woman picks up; I can recognize that it’s Nancy. I love Nancy. I think Nancy is a great woman, but as she says, “Los Angeles Library, Fairfax Branch, Reference Desk, how may I help you today?” I hang up.

  JANUARY

  The library was technically closed for Martin Luther King Day, but I agreed to work. We’d had a group of people, most likely high school students or fancy little rebels, come in and place the entire World Religions section out of order over the weekend. They threw books on the floor, they hid them in other sections, under tables. They rearranged the titles in no discernible order.

  My boss, Lyle, was convinced that this was some sort of terrorist act, meant to make us here at the Los Angeles library really think about the role of religion in modern government. I was more of the mind that the act was harmless tomfoolery; the World Religions section was the nearest to the back wall, the furthest from view. I’d caught a number of couples making out in the library in my few years there, and they had all been in the World Religions section.

  No one else was working that day, but Lyle told me that if I chose to come in and re-sort the World Religions section, he’d give me a day off some other time. This seemed like great currency to me, and since Ben was going to have to work that day anyway, I came in. I tend to like alphabetizing, which I realize makes absolutely no sense, but it’s true nonetheless. I like things that have a right and a wrong answer, things that can be done perfectly. They don’t often come up in the humanities. They are normally relegated to the sciences. So I’ve always liked the alphabet and the Dewey decimal system for being objective standards in a subjective world.

  Cell phone reception is terrible at the library, and since it was empty, I had a spookily quiet day, a day spent almost entirely in my own mind.

  Around three, as I found myself pretty much done piecing together the World Religions section like some three-dimensional puzzle, I heard the phone ring. I had been ignoring the phone the few times it rang that day, but for some reason, I forgot all that and ran to answer it.

  I don’t typically answer the phone at work, I’m often with people or filing or working on larger projects for the library, so when I answered this time, I realized it completely slipped my mind what I was supposed to say.

  “Hello?” I said. “Uh. Los Angeles Fairfax Library. Oh, ah. Los Angeles Public Library, Reference Branch. Fairfax Branch, Reference Desk.”

  By the end of it, I’d remembered there was no need for me to answer the phone in the first place, making this that much more of a needless embarrassment.

  That’s when I heard laughing on the other end of the phone.

  “Ben?”

  “Uh, uh, Fairfax. Reference. Uh,” he said, still laughing at me. “You are the cutest person that ever lived.”

  I started to laugh too, relieved that I had embarrassed myself only in front of Ben, but also embarrassed to have embarrassed myself in front of Ben. “What are you doing? I thought you were working today.”

  “I was. Working today. But Greg decided to let us all go home a half hour ago.”

  “Oh! That’s great. You should come meet me here. I should be done in about twenty minutes or so. Oh!” I said, and I was overcome with a great idea. “We can go to a happy hour!” I never got out of work in time to go to a happy hour, but the idea had always intrigued me.

  Ben laughed. “That sounds great. That’s kind of why I’m calling. I’m outside.”

  “What?”

  “Well, not outside exactly. I’m down the street. I had to walk until I could get service.”

  “Oh!” I was thrilled to know that I’d be seeing Ben any minute and drinking two-dollar drafts within the half hour. “Come down to the side door. I’ll open it.”

  “Great!” he said. “I’ll be there in five.”

  I took my time heading to the side door, passing the circulation desk and front door on my way back there. I’m glad that I did because as I passed the front door, I heard a tapping on the door and looked up to see Mr. Callahan standing sad and confused, with his hands cupped around his eyes and fixed against the glass.

  I walked up to the door and pushed it open. It was an automatic door turned off for the holiday, so it gave great resistance, but I got it open just enough to let Mr. Callahan in. He grabbed my arm with his shaking, tissue paper–like hands and thanked me.

  “No problem, Mr. Callahan,” I said. “I’m going to take off in about ten minutes and the library is closed, but is there something you wanted?”

  “It’s closed?” he asked, confused. “What on earth for?”

  “Martin
Luther King Day!” I answered.

  “And you still let me in? I am a lucky man, Elsie.”

  I smiled. “Can I help you get anything?”

  “I won’t be but just a minute, now that I know you’re in a hurry. Can I have a few minutes in the Young Adult section?”

  “The Young Adult section?” It wasn’t my business why, but this was out of character for Mr. Callahan. The fiction section, sure, new releases, definitely. World Wars, Natural Disasters, Sociology. All of these were places where you could find Mr. Callahan, but Young Adult was never his style.

  “My grandson and his daughter are coming this week and I want to have something to read with her. She’s getting too old to find me particularly entertaining, but I thought if I got a really good yarn to her liking, I could convince her to spend a few minutes with me.”

  “Great-granddaughter? Wow.”

  “I’m old, Elsie. I’m an old man.”

  I laughed instead of agreeing with him. “Well, be my guest. It’s over to the left, behind the periodicals.”

  “I’ll only be a minute!” he said as he headed back there, slow like a turtle but also just as steady.

  I headed to the side door to find Ben wondering what the hell I’d been doing.

  “I’ve been here for two minutes and twenty-seven seconds, Elsie!” he joked as he stepped in.

  “Sorry, Mr. Callahan came to the front door and I had to let him in.”

  “Mr. Callahan is here?” Ben’s face lit up. He had never met Mr. Callahan but had heard me talk about him, about how I found his devotion to his wife to be one of the more romantic real-life sentiments I had ever witnessed. Ben always said when he was ninety, he’d treat me the same way. I had only known Ben for about three weeks, so while it was a sweet thing to say, it was also foolhardy and arrogant. It was naïve and intoxicating. “Can I meet him?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Come help me put a few last books in order and we can go find him.” Ben came with me to finish up, contributing in no way to my reordering of the books. He hung back and read the spines as I told him all about finding Buddhism: Plain and Simple stuck up in a nook of the ceiling.

  “How did you get it down?” he said, only half listening to me. His attention seemed focused on the stacks.

  “I didn’t,” I told him. “It’s right there.” I pointed above us to the thin, white book stuck precariously between the metal grid and the popcorn panel. He walked toward me, standing right over me. Our bodies were so close that his shirt was touching mine. The skin on his arm just barely touched mine. I could smell his deodorant and his shampoo, smells that had become sensual to me because of how often I smelled them in sensual situations. His neck was craned upward, checking out the book in the ceiling.

  “Those tricky bastards,” Ben marveled, then he turned back to face me. He could now appreciate how close we were. He looked at me and then looked around us.

  “Where’s Mr. Callahan?” he asked. He asked it in a way that clearly let me know he was asking something else entirely.

  I blushed. “He’s a few walls over,” I said.

  “Seems pretty private back here,” he said. He didn’t move toward me to grab me. He didn’t need to.

  I giggled, girlishly. “It is,” I said. “But it would be—”

  “Right,” he said. “That would be . . . ”

  Was it getting hotter? I honestly thought maybe it was getting hotter. I thought it was getting hotter and quieter, as if the air itself was becoming more intense around us.

  “It would be crazy,” I said, matter-of-factly, doing my best to stop this before it started. He wouldn’t. I knew he wouldn’t. Right there in the library? I was certain that I was the only one actually considering it. And so I put my foot down. I stepped away slightly, put the book in my hand into its place on the shelf, and announced that we needed to go check on Mr. Callahan.

  “Okay,” Ben said, putting his hands up in surrender. He then put one arm out as if to invite me to lead us there. I walked in front of him, and when we were almost out of the World Religions stacks, he teased me.

  “I would have done it,” he said.

  I smiled and shook my head. I had never felt so desirable, had never realized how feeling that desirable made me feel like I could do anything in the world.

  We found Mr. Callahan right where he’d said he’d be.

  “What is all of this?” Mr. Callahan said to me as he saw us coming up to meet him. “I thought there would be a few books back here. This section is bigger than the new releases!”

  I laughed. “There are a lot of young adult books lately, Mr. Callahan. Kids love reading now.”

  He shook his head. “Who knew?” Mr. Callahan already had a book in his hand.

  “Mr. Callahan, I’d like you to meet Ben.” I gestured to Ben, and Mr. Callahan grabbed Ben’s outstretched hand.

  “Hello, son,” he said and took his hand back. “Strong grip on you, good to see.”

  “Thanks,” Ben said. “I’ve heard a lot about you and I wanted to meet the man behind the legend.”

  Mr. Callahan laughed. “No legend here. Just an old man who forgets things and can’t walk as fast as he used to.”

  “Is that for you?” Ben asked, gesturing to the book.

  “Oh, no. My great-granddaughter. I’m afraid I’m a bit lost in this section. This book takes up a whole shelf, though, so I figured it’s pretty popular.” Mr. Callahan held up a copy of a supernatural franchise. The kind of book that gets the kids reading in the first place, even if it is insipid, so I couldn’t knock it. He had the third book in his hand, and I had a hunch he couldn’t tell that the whole shelf was actually four different installments with similar covers and motifs. His fine vision probably was not what it used to be, and they probably all looked the same.

  “That’s actually the third one,” I said. “Did you want me to find the first one?”

  “Please,” he said.

  Ben gingerly grabbed the book out of his hand. “If I may, Mr. Callahan.” He put the book back in place and stopped me from picking up the first of the series.

  “I’m categorically against all books about vampires in love with young women. Those books always make it seem like being bitten to the point of death is a form of love.”

  I looked at Ben, surprised. He sheepishly looked back at me. “What?”

  “No, nothing,” I said.

  “Anyway,” he continued, focused on Mr. Callahan. “I’m not sure it’s the best influence for your great-granddaughter. I can only assume you want her to grow up believing that she can do anything, not just sit around lusting for the undead.”

  “You’re exactly right about that,” Mr. Callahan said. When Mr. Callahan was a child, he was probably raised to believe that women were made to follow men, to stay home and darn their socks. Now, he was an old man who had changed with the times, who wanted to reinforce for his great-granddaughter that she should not stay home and darn socks unless she wanted to. It occurred to me that you could see a lot in a lifetime if you stuck around as long as Mr. Callahan. He had lived through times I’d only read about.

  Ben grabbed a bright blue book from the display. “Here you go. Just as popular, ten times more awesome. It’s got love in it, but the love is secondary to actual character development, and you really love these characters. The girl is a hero. I don’t want to spoil anything, but bring tissues.”

  Mr. Callahan smiled and nodded. “Thank you,” he said. “You just saved me a tongue-lashing from her mother.”

  “It’s a really good book,” Ben said. “I read it in two days.”

  “Can I check it out, Elsie? Or . . . how does that work if you’re closed?”

  “Just bring it back in three weeks, Mr. Callahan. It will be our secret.”

  Mr. Callahan smiled at me and tucked the book into his coat, as if he were a criminal. He shook Ben’s hand and walked away. After he cleared the front door I turned to Ben.

  “You read young adult novels?�
�

  “Look, we all have our idiosyncrasies. Don’t think I don’t know that you drink Diet Coke for breakfast.”

  “What? How did you even know that?”

  “I pay attention.” He tapped his temple with his pointer finger. “Now that you know my deepest, most embarrassing secret, that I read young adult novels written mostly for thirteen-year-old girls, do you still like me? Can we still go out, or have you just about had enough?”

  “No, I think I’ll stick with you,” I said, grabbing his hand. The phone rang again, and Ben ran and picked it up.

  “Los Angeles Public Library, Fairfax Branch, Reference Desk, how may I help you?” he said arrogantly. “No, I’m sorry. We’re closed today. Thanks. Bye.”

  “Ben!” I said after he hung up. “That was unprofessional!”

  “Well, you can understand why I didn’t trust you to do it.”

  JUNE

  What was that all about?” Ana says as she finishes her pancake.

  “I . . . I got a little overwhelmed there. I just wasn’t ready for it.” I pick up the phone and dial again.

  “Los Angeles Public Library, Fairfax Branch, Reference Desk, how may I help you?” It is still Nancy. Nancy is round and older. She’s not a professional librarian. She just works the desk. I shouldn’t say “just.” She does a lot of work and is kind to everyone. I can’t imagine Nancy saying an unkind thing about a single person. She’s one of those people that can be sincere and neighborly. I’ve always found the two to be at odds, personally.

  “Hey, Nancy, it’s Elsie.”

  She lets out a blow of air and her voice deepens. “Elsie, I’m so sorry.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I can’t even imagine—”

  “Thank you.” I cut her off. I know that if she keeps talking, I will hang up again. I will roll into a ball and heave tears the size of marbles. “Is Lyle around? I need to talk to him about coming back in.”

  “Absolutely. Absolutely,” she says to me. “One second, sweetheart.”

  It’s a few minutes before Lyle answers, and when he does, he steamrolls the conversation. I can only assume it’s because he’s more loath to have this conversation than I am. No one wants to be the person telling me of my responsibilities right now.