Mrs. Lowry laughed, a bright clear laugh for a woman of ninety-three. “The board meeting in 1987. Oh, I remember it like it was Tuesday. Gloria Whitcomb. My husband came home from that meeting and said there is a young teacher who is going to be trouble in the best possible way. What has the new man done?”
I told her. The computer lab. The books donated or recycled. The sign coming down Friday. And him telling me the district owned everything, that I had no record.
“No record,” Mrs. Lowry said. “Dear, I was at that meeting, and so were the minutes. In 1987 you offered to start a library with your own books, and the board was so moved that they passed a formal resolution. The books remain your personal property, placed on permanent loan, and the room was to be known as the Whitcomb Library for as long as it held your collection. It is in the official minutes, voted and recorded. The district accepted those terms in writing.”
I thought of Hals old filing cabinet, and the folder marked GLORIAS BOOKS, and every receipt since 1987.
The new superintendent told me I had no record. I had a bookkeeper husband who kept every receipt, and a board resolution older than he was.
Mrs. Lowry had her nurse dig out her own copy of the minutes from a box in her closet, and she sent them to me with a note in a shaky but certain hand. Between those minutes and Hals thirty-eight years of receipts, there was no question whose books those four thousand were, and no question about the name over the door.
The superintendent did not recycle one single book. The resolution was valid, the receipts were ironclad, and the current school board was more than a little embarrassed that a retired teacher and a ninety-three-year-old widow had to remind them of their own history.
They built the computer lab in the old supply room instead. The library stayed.
Every book still carries the stamp, From Mrs. Whitcombs Room. The little sign over the door still says Glorias Library. And on the first day of school this fall, they asked me to come back and read to the fourth graders, in the room full of books that were always, every single one of them, mine to give and mine to keep.