At three in the morning, in his one-bedroom apartment, surrounded by a small library of occult texts, Apollo Kagwa, thirty-four years old, realized his biological clock had gone off.
APOLLO HIT LIBRARY sales less regularly than estate sales, or used bookstores, but he’d been in Washington Heights anyway—for a fruitless estate sale—so he stopped at the Fort Washington branch of the NYPL.
Library sales were usually a mix of old books the branch hoped to sell off rather than recycle and books that locals had donated. You weren’t going to find something like the D’Agostino haul at a library, but you could buy a book for fifty cents, then sell it for five dollars. Almost any small business succeeded or failed by such margins. It wasn’t romantic, but reality rarely is. Apollo tended to come to library sales for things like large print editions of crime novels, the kind of stuff he sold to retirees who’d found his website and wanted the stuff shipped. Selling those books reminded him of his first business model—People magazine to Mrs. Ortiz in apartment C23.
The Fort Washington branch stood three stories tall, but the sale was being held in the basement, in a nook off the reading room. One of the librarians had to cover both the sale and her desk. Apollo reached the basement to find her helping a mother with two kids pick through shelves of well-worn picture books. The younger kid had taken on the vital task of pulling every third book to the floor. The mother didn’t seem to notice, or had decided not to notice, so the librarian now had a third job—cleanup crew. Then, from the reading room, a man’s voice called out loudly. Because the space had been so quiet, it sounded as if he was using a megaphone.
“Hello! Hello! I am in distress!”
The librarian shuttled from the book sale back into the reading room, where an enormous man stood at her desk. He wore a bulky old backpack and carried crammed shopping bags in each hand. A one-man pack mule.
“This is dire!” he shouted. “I am in need of a toilet!”
The librarian made her way around the man, and his bags, to the other side of her desk. She stood narrow at the shoulders, fuller at the hips. The man had a good two feet on her. From a distance you’d have thought you were watching an ogre and an elf square off.
The other patrons, mostly elderly, looked up from their newspapers and magazines but seemed wary of doing more. Apollo moved closer, ten more steps, and he’d be there to help.
“Listen to my voice,” the librarian said to the big man. “Can you hear me?” The librarian smiled when she said this, but her volume and her posture suggested something more commanding.
“I got ears, don’t I?” He leaned forward, as if he was going to throw himself across the desk, right at her.
“Well you see, I have ears too,” she said, not stepping back. “So why are you yelling?”
The man wobbled, as if the bags in his hands had become heavier. Or maybe he just felt confused. A man that size isn’t used to being barked at. Least of all from a woman who stood only an inch or two taller than five feet.
The librarian opened a desk drawer and revealed a wooden two-foot ruler with a single key attached by a string at one end.
“I need a piece of ID before I give you the bathroom key,” she said.
The woman never dropped her smile, but by now everyone—even the big man—could tell this lady was no joke. Slim as a crowbar and just as solid. Maybe a woman that small had to learn how to assert herself early, a survival technique to keep from being overrun or ignored. It worked. Everyone in the basement had been spellbound.
“I don’t have ID,” he said, now sheepish.
The librarian used the ruler as a pointer. “Leave all your bags here with me. I know you’ll come back for them.”
Instead of setting the loads down, he clutched them close, a pair of oversize purses. “These contain secrets.”
She nodded, opened the drawer again, dropped the ruler inside, pushed the drawer closed, crossed her arms, craned her head back, and looked the man directly in the eye.
Apollo made it to a count of ten before the man set the bags down. He looked hypnotized. “The backpack too?” he asked.
“All the bags,” the librarian said.
At that moment, if she’d gestured to Apollo, he would’ve handed over his bag as well. The big man set the large pack down with the others, and the librarian opened the drawer, handed him the key.
“Thank you,” he said softly.
“My pleasure,” she said, smiling warmly this time.
The whole reading room waited in silence, listening for the key fumbling in the lock, the squeak as the wooden bathroom door opened. When it slammed shut, everyone in the reading room shuddered as if they were waking up from a dream. All except the librarian, who’d already come around the desk, moved past Apollo, and returned to the mother with two kids. They bought four books for a dollar.
The librarian then turned to Apollo, who’d been standing there dumbstruck.
“Do you need something?” she asked.
Apollo pointed toward the man’s bags, gathered by her desk. “I was going to help you with that guy.”
The librarian looked at the bags, then back to Apollo.
“But you handled it yourself,” he said.
“That’s my job,” she said.
He asked her to dinner, and as she rang up his three books, she politely declined. The library sales in the basement nook were held every Friday, so Apollo returned the week after, and the week after that. Eventually she told him her name. Emma Valentine.
Five months after they met, she finally agreed to go out on a date.
TRYING TO IMPRESS, Apollo took Emma to a tiny sushi place on Thompson Street, where they had to wait outside on a line. The season—late fall—made waiting on the sidewalk feel like standing inside a fridge, so they were shivering by the time they got seated. They downed a bottle of hot sake before any food came.
He learned she’d been raised in Virginia, a tiny town called Boones Mill. She had a sister, Kim, eleven years older. Her parents had died when she was only five, but she wouldn’t say any more about it than that.
Kim became Emma’s legal guardian when she turned eighteen, got work locally, and raised her sister instead of going to Jefferson College of Health Sciences in Roanoke, where she’d been accepted. It wasn’t until Emma graduated high school—and matriculated at UVA—that Kim finally went to Jefferson, for nursing. Emma remembered her life after her parents died as time spent in only three places: home, school, and the South County Library, twenty minutes away in Roanoke.
“My favorite librarian there was a woman named Ms. Rook,” Emma said. “She helped raise me almost as much as Kim.”
They were halfway through dinner, onto their second bottle of hot sake, and leaning toward each other across the small wooden tabletop. The customers crowded close all around, and the waiters had so little room to move that Apollo got bumped every time they passed by, but he hardly noticed. He only listened to her.
“Ms. Rook used to sit me down with a movie if Kim was late coming for me. That way she could start closing up. I watched everything they had for kids. Then one day, when I was twelve, I picked up something almost at random. I just liked the picture on the front. A couple of black people half naked