A Bedtime Story

“Why would anyone do that?” Piglet asked.

The man at the other end of the table was reading aloud in a soft girlish voice.  He wore an old army jacket and a watch cap, and his gray beard was stained with nicotine. His lips shushed the sibilant letters as he read.

“'Oh bother,' said Pooh.”

The sweet little voice was barely audible over the hum of the library's fluorescent lights and whoosh of the air blowing through heating vents.

A pink-skinned Goth guy in a long black jacket and his female counterpart – a chubby, pale teen in a short skirt and torn black stockings – shared our table. He tapped furiously on a laptop festooned with World of Warcraft stickers while she inked sketches of battling dragons and warrior princesses in an artist's notebook. 

A few serious students nosed through the shelves of reference books nearby, but on this bitterly cold day, most of the library's clients were homeless people in need of a  refuge. The ones that couldn't read went through the motions anyway to avoid being hassled: leaning over a book, turning pages, staring at pictures surrounded by incomprehensible symbols.

The man with the little girl's voice studied the children's book in front of him patiently, mouthing each word. When he'd deciphered a full sentence, he took a shallow breath and spoke it in the girlish voice.

“That's what Tiggers like best of all!”

He caught me looking and smiled, his eyes sparkling.

“I have a granddaughter,” he said. “I'm practicing so I can read her a story.”

“She's a lucky girl,” I said.

He smiled at me for a second or two more, then turned his concentration back to his book. He was quiet for a long time.

When I looked back at him, he was looking at me, still smiling, but a tear crept down his cheek.

“When my daughter was a little girl, I couldn't read, so I pretended – I'd make up stories from the pictures in her story books.”

He brushed his fingers through his beard. “But I lost my job and I got to be a drunk and I guess my stories weren't very good anymore so she and her mother run off.”

He looked down for a moment and composed himself. “A while later I found out my little girl had a baby. I looked and I looked and I finally got to talk to her on the phone. She was still living out here somewhere and she said she'd let me come read a story to my granddaughter if I stopped being a drunk.”

“And you went out and learned how to read?” I said.

“Yeah and, I swear to God, I didn't drink nothing stronger than water for a whole year. But the hell of it is, I could never find her again. Nobody'll tell me where she is.”

There were tears in his eyes, but he chuckled and smiled his toothless smile. “So, I guess the joke's on me then isn't it? Hell, she's probably too old for bedtime stories by now anyway. But if I find her, I want her to know that I wanted to . . . ”

He looked back down at the book and faded back into his own world.

“Oh bother!” said the little girl's voice.