Page 31 of Finders Keepers

Even though the special collections room is supposed to be open from noon to four on Fridays, when I arrive at half past twelve, the door is locked and no one seems to be inside.

A sign that I am not supposed to be doing this?

a tiny guilty voice in my brain suggests.

Just as I’m about to go to the circulation desk and ask if they know what’s going on, Mrs. MacDonald appears from the direction of the elevator, breathing heavily and moving slowly.

“I’m here,” she says.

It takes a while for her to dig through her bulging leather purse to find the key, and even longer for her to fit it into the lock and turn it. What her hands lack in steadiness, her pride more than makes up for, and she refuses my offer of help.

“Back again, huh?” she asks as I finally follow her inside. “Where’s your little boyfriend?”

My cheeks go hot. “He’s not my boyfriend.”

“Whatever you want to call him, then. I’m not hip to the current slang,” she says.

It’s probably easier to answer her question than to both find and explain a label that fits the strange friends-but-not-but-yes-but-there’s-definitely-chemistry situation Quentin and I have found ourselves in. “He’s busy today.”

“Probably sticking gum places it doesn’t belong,” she mumbles with a sneer.

I press my lips together, trying not to smile. “I don’t want to bother you too much,” I start.

Mrs. MacDonald gives me a look that says I’m already failing.

It’s the same one she used to give me when I would ask her research questions or about archival practices when I was here as a teen.

And I suddenly understand that it’s all bluster.

She’s never once actually been put out by my curiosity or requests.

This has been her job for decades, and despite her hard demeanor, she must love it immensely to have continued doing it all this time. Lord knows it can’t pay that well.

“I was hoping to look at the Fountain materials again,” I say as she lowers herself into the chair behind her desk.

She pauses. “Of course you were.” I wince, knowing she’s now going to have to get right back up. But to my utter shock, she says, “You know where they are. Help yourself.”

“What?”

“It’s going to rain tonight,” she says by way of explanation.

“Uh…”

“My arthritis. Feels like someone’s kicked me all over while wearing steel-toe boots.”

“That’s…a vivid description,” I say. “I’m sorry that you’re dealing with that.”

She waves off my sympathy. “I finally made it here, and I’m not getting up for nobody. Especially not when I know you’re perfectly capable.”

Mrs. MacDonald calling me perfectly capable rivals the first time my PhD adviser called me Dr. Hunnicutt after I passed my defense. An actual tear wells in my eye. “Thank you,” I say, omit the I promise to make you proud that nearly follows, and head into the stacks.

Once I’ve brought the boxes to the table in the center of the room, I reexamine our amateur finding aid.

I start with the photos again, searching them for anything we may have missed last time around while we were focused on the Whale portrait.

An hour later, when picture after picture of Sprangbur starts blending into a bunch of black-and-white blobs, I switch over to the Fountain Seltzer administrative and governing documents.

I pause for a moment when I reach a parenthetical note at the bottom of typed meeting minutes that Julius Fountain’s opinions on the matter at hand had been primarily shouted from an adjoining room while he watched the proceedings via strategically placed mirrors.

Louisa Worman must have been an absolute saint to put up with him for as long as she did.

By three o’clock, I decide that if I read another conversation about bottling logistics or wholesale marketing strategy I will scream. I stand and stretch toward the ceiling, my neck clicking as I finally look up after hours of looking down.

“I’ll be right back. I’m just going to the bathroom,” I tell Mrs. MacDonald, who, as promised, has not moved from her chair since taking her place in it.

“Do you want a medal or something?” she snaps as she slowly rubs her right hand with her left. I pause outside of the special collections room, listening to her sigh heavily and mumble to herself about “these damned fingers” and “that damned doctor” not sending in a refill for her pills.

“Can I get you anything? Do anything for you?” I make sure to ask when I return. I know it’s a long shot, but considering she let me grab the materials on my own, maybe she’s in enough discomfort to say yes.

“Yeah,” she surprises me by saying. “You can take this godforsaken job so I can finally retire.”

I blink at her. “I’m sorry?”

“You’re an archivist.”

“I’m not…I mean, I was, or I’m technically qualified to be, but I—”

She waves away my bumbling protest with a slightly clawed hand. “I’ve been doing this job for sixty years,” she says.

Sixty?! I knew she’d been here a good long time, but sixty years?!

“I thought about retiring back in 1999. All that Y2K bullshit. Didn’t want to deal with it. But then there was talk about closing down the special collections room completely if I left. Deaccessioning everything. I couldn’t let that happen, could I?”

“Of course not,” I say.

“So I stayed. And stayed. And stayed. And now it’s 2024, and—”

“2025,” I correct. She frowns. “Happens to the best of us,” I assure her.

“Whatever year it is, I shouldn’t still be here. I should be in Arizona with my great-grandchildren. Now that you’re here, you can take over. I don’t have to worry.”

My first emotion at her words is elation. Like Santa Claus has hand-selected me to be his successor. Quickly, though, it dissipates as I remember I can’t accept. “But Mrs. MacDonald, I’m not here. I don’t live in Catoctin. I’m only visiting for—”

“You got a job back wherever you came from?” she asks bluntly.

“No.”

“You got a husband there? Kids?”

“Um. No.”

“A house?”

“Ha. Definitely not.”

“And your parents are here?”

“They are.”

“So what’s the problem?” The way she says this, it’s as if she thinks it’s all very simple.

And maybe it would be, if I were the person I was when I first discovered this room and everything it held.

Or even the person I was when I considered archives as a career.

But so much has happened since then that taking over for Mrs. MacDonald would feel like a step backward.

Settling for something I told myself wasn’t worth wanting.

If that was a lie, if I didn’t really mean that, then the last few years of my life were a waste.

That’s a bit too much to swallow right now.

“I am extremely flattered that you think I’m a good choice.

Really.” Mrs. MacDonald has always held a place in my heart as the first person to introduce me to the world of archival research.

Everything I decided to throw myself into later might not have ever been an option if Quentin and I hadn’t spent time with her in this room in the summer of 2008.

Her wanting me to be her successor is truly an honor I would never have expected. “But I’m sorry, I can’t.”

“Can’t, can’t, can’t,” she says dismissively.

“Don’t talk to me about can’t. There’s a difference between can’t and won’t.

I can’t run a marathon. I can’t talk to my dead husband.

I can’t live on my own much longer. Lots of things you can’t do when you’re my age.

And lots of things you can do but won’t when you’re young. ”

I try to absorb the lesson while also figuring out the best way to counter it.

Before I come up with my response, Mrs. MacDonald lowers her voice to something gentler.

“Let me know if you change your mind. But don’t take too long.

Don’t want to get to my granddaughter’s house in Tucson only to croak on her doorstep. ”

“I don’t think you need to worry about that,” I say with a small smile. “I have it under good authority that you’re never dying.”

“Well, you will, one day,” she says bluntly. “So figure out what it is you want in life before the real ‘can’ts’ come to get you.”