She’d never friended me on Facebook. I didn’t blame her. Not all of us need our pasts as urgently as I apparently needed mine. Her mother was a librarian who enjoyed recommending volumes of classic literature to me when I was a kid. Most afternoons after school I’d read there seated at a shadowed back table away from chattering students busy writing term papers or figuring out how to cheat at English exams. She’d just gotten her daughter a job at the library and the three of us would sometimes discuss novels at length, drawn together to form our own little book club. When they worked late I’d help them clear the carts and put magazines and newspapers back on the racks. They sometimes invited me out to dinner. My childhood love and I would share ice cream sodas and platters of french fries. Her father was dead and she didn’t have any siblings. I had somehow wormed my way into her life and she seemed to consider it both an amusing interlude and a slight imposition. We shared our first kiss together, in her back yard, at fifteen.
