PART 2 — THE LIBRARY CARD
Mrs. Combs handed her baby to her husband, walked across the fellowship hall, and laid a water-stained library card on the table in front of Darrell.
Two summers ago, during the flash flooding, she said, my family was trapped up our holler when the water came. The road washed out. We had nowhere to go and the creek was rising toward the house.
Then a big white library bus came grinding up that washed-out road. The woman driving it loaded us in, eleven of us, neighbors and children, and she kept us dry and warm inside that bookmobile for two days until the National Guard finally got through. My baby was three weeks old. That bus is why she is alive.
The woman Darrell mocked for hauling picture books had driven a bookmobile up a flooding mountain road and turned it into a lifeboat for eleven people.
This is the first library card she ever gave my children, Mrs. Combs said, the day she pulled us out. Then she looked at Rhonda. We started coming to this church to be near the woman who saved us. We did not know she was your cousin, Darrell.
The hall went silent. Darrell, with his lifted truck and chrome rims, set down his sweet tea.
Rhonda just set out the stack cake and said she only did what the bus was good for. But Mrs. Combs held up that card and said nobody reads anymore, as he put it, and yet that library on wheels saved her whole family.
My daughter hauls picture books, her nephew had joked. During a flood she drove them up a mountain and kept eleven people alive inside. That is the bookmobile.