The microphone squealed when Della took it, and she laughed the way she laughs at other people’s mistakes.
“Sorry. I’m not used to being handed things.”
The county board chairman laughed hardest. I laughed too, for about four seconds.
“When I donated this building,” Della said, “I did it for the children of Pell Street. Nobody asked me. Nobody had to.”
Fourteen months. That was how long the branch had been on the closing list and how long I had chaired the pledge drive. Spaghetti suppers, pledge cards in every mailbox on six blocks, Tuesday nights counting quarters until my thumbs were black. The board had scheduled us to close in March. We did not close.
And now Della was at the microphone saying she had saved us, and my face was doing something I didn’t want it to do.
“And my niece Corinne,” she said, “who was a very good helper with the pledge cards.”
Helper.
The chairman shook my hand and said it was wonderful that Della had such a helpful niece. I said thank you. I am forty-three and cannot be rude to a man in a necktie.
I went to put my cup down by the refreshment table. The donor wall is right there beside the sugar packets. A brass plate for every family or business that gave more than five hundred dollars, and at the top, in its own frame, the plate that went up in 1997 for my grandmother.
Ruth Vance co-founded the reading room in 1994, when it was two rooms above a vacuum repair shop and the whole collection fit on nine shelves.
Her plate was gone.
Not crooked. Not moved down the row. Gone, leaving four screw holes and a rectangle of paint a shade darker than the rest of the wall. That rectangle was the color the whole room used to be.
Della was at the reception table with a plastic glass of punch. I waited until the woman from the historical society moved off, then stood in front of her.
“Where’s Grandma’s plate?”
She didn’t blink. That’s the thing about Della. She has never once blinked at the wrong moment. “It’s in storage.”
“Storage where?”
“The wall had limited space, Corinne. We had to make choices.” She smiled at somebody over my shoulder. “It’s a nice problem to have. Too many donors.”
“There’s an empty rectangle up there right now.”
“Don’t make a scene at an event.”
“I’m asking where the plate is.”
“And I told you.” She picked up her purse, and I noticed her coat was already on. “We’ll talk another time. Richard has a thing.”
They left before the cake. It had the reading room printed on it in sugar, a little white building with tiny windows, and Della walked past it with her chin up.
Priya Raman, our branch librarian, found me stacking chairs. When the parking lot emptied she said, “Come back to the office a minute.”
In the back office she pulled the accession ledger off the shelf, the big green one with the taped spine, and opened it to 1997.
14 Pell Street. Lease to county library board. One dollar per year. Lessor: Pell Street Reading Room Trust.
“One dollar,” I said.
“One dollar a year, renewed every ten years.” Priya ran her finger down the column. “The county doesn’t own this building. It never did.”
“But Della said she donated it.”
Priya held the ledger against her chest with both arms. “That’s what I keep thinking about,” she said.
I didn’t sleep that week. I told myself I was being petty. Then I thought about the four screw holes and got angry in a way that felt like swallowing a coin.
The deeds office still uses a microfilm reader, a gray machine that hums like a refrigerator. Marcus Bell runs the desk and has never made me feel stupid for not knowing what to ask for.
