The Geographer's Library

Jon Fasman
“Guff back? Use my secret antiguff ring?”
Donna looked at me like I had just sprouted a second head—I worried
that I had offended her straitlaced New England sensibilities—and then she
laughed even louder. “You need to GET OUT OF HERE! Go find some
other young people, go get into trouble! Really, Art loves having you here,
doesn’t he?”—she didn’t even look to him for confirmation; still I saw the
nod, followed by a less perceptible eye roll—“but you should be staying out
all night at your age. We’ll survive just fine without you, you know.”
I did know, in fact; Art and Donna could survive pretty much anything.
They had lived in more countries than most people ever visit, and their nagging
wife/henpecked husband routine was just that—a comfortable, light
comedy routine that concealed a deep and tested love. My own parents had
not been in the same room with each other for more than ten years; these two
had barely spent a night apart in four decades. Donna’s family had lived in
Lincoln for almost two hundred years, and as much as she joked about selfreliant
Puritanism and the stoic frostiness of New Englanders, when I first
moved here, she cooked me dinner every night for a month, and I had never
left empty-handed from any sort of encounter with her, even if it meant she
stole her husband’s lunch and gave it to me.
“Did you tell him?” she asked Art. He shook his head.
“Should I be concerned?” I asked.
“Yeah, kid, you’re fired. My only working reporter”—he rolled his eyes at
me and talked to Donna—“and he thinks I’m about to can him and let Austell
turn the paper into Carrier & Stream. No, no reason to be concerned. Donna
and I were talking about your obit last night, and—”
“I have never met this fellow,” Donna interrupted, “and I think I know
almost everyone in town by now. Well, everyone except the weekenders,” she
said, pronouncing the last word the way most people would say “cockroaches.”“But
I think I’ve heard of him.”
I reached for my notebook. “How? Who from?”
“Our new music teacher.” Donna was the librarian at the Talcott Academy,
the local prep school. “She rents the first floor of Mary DeSouza’s
house over on Orchard Street. Did your guy live on Orchard?”
I looked at my notes and nodded.
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