Jackline Marshal has worked at Ada Merritt Junior High for thirteen years.
Thirteen.
She counts them sometimes, late in the afternoon when the building goes quiet and she can only hear the fluorescent lights hum their one flat note.
The staircases have the same iron railing as always, rusted with age. She has watched hundreds of children run their hands along it. Sticky fingers. Book bags swinging on one shoulder. In her memory, she goes to call after them:
Don’t run!
But she won’t have anyone to call after anymore.
The courtyard fills every morning and empties every afternoon. The knowledge that it will never again fill with small pattering feet and shrieking laughter sits heavily in her chest. From the second-floor window, she watched the sun set over it. Thirteen years of that particular slant, the way it falls through the trees.
She knows which floorboards creak.
She knows where the spring showers drip through the ceiling in April.
She knows things no one will think to ask her before they close the doors for good.
She has not always been old, people forget that.
The children see the glasses, the greying roots, the slow way she moves between the shelves now, and they think she has always been old.
They call after her:
Miss Marshal! Miss Marshal!
And they ask for things, experiences, knowledge that they can’t yet name. But still she finds it for them; places hardcovers, paperbacks, comic books and magazines into their small, awaiting hands.
She always goes back to her first day here. When she was still creeping into middle-age,
When she stood in the doorway of her library and felt certain she was exactly where she was supposed to be.
She holds that memory now how you hold a book you just finished, a good book, that you know you are about to set down forever.
You know you will never be the same again, but you wouldn’t give up that experience for anything.
The card catalogue is gone now. That was the first thing.
Then the big reference encyclopedias. Then the newspapers. Then something else she can’t remember. Then something else.
Packed away into boxes.
Sent away with the children to Booker T. Washington and Shenandoah. Empty shelves, empty halls.
She could have gone with them, taken the pay cut or the demotion,
but she knew deep down there was no place for her there. This school will be the final resting place of her career.
She will still dust the shelves one final time. She will check the return cart. She will stand at the window and look at the courtyard, the trees, the children rushing through the dimming light like they have somewhere important to be.
And they do. They still do.
She will step out of her creaking library door and walk down the iron-railed staircase and she will not look back.
Not because it doesn’t matter, but because it matters too much,
and she is tired,
and she is ready,
and she has given this place everything left she had to give.
That’s enough, she thinks.
That’s enough.
