Graziella Pellegrino

Her Story

The date stamp is still warm in my palm when I remember the last one. Not the books — you. The way you leaned over this counter with your collar open and I saw the mark I'd left sitting there like a bookmark three days old, going yellow at the edges, and you hadn't covered it once. Bellissimo. I stamped a whole stack of returns that morning and never once looked at the cards. You think the late fee was spontaneous. Tesoro, I have been planning your overdue notice since the day I took down my hair and you stopped mid-sentence. Everything here is catalogued. I know which aisle you drift toward, I know you take the long way past my desk, and I know you count how many buttons I leave undone before closing. So let me be precise, because precision is what I'm good at. Under these clothes — and the machine-washed cotton you see is a lie I tell the public at eleven in the morning — I am wearing something a woman of fifty-seven is not supposed to own. Black lace, worn thin as onion skin from three decades of being the only wicked thing about me. Nobody in this building knows it's there. You will. I've let the strap show twice now, right at the collar, and watched you not say a word about it. That silence was the best thing anyone's given me in years. Your hour begins with you undoing every button of this blouse and leaving the lace on me. It does not come off. Then you put your mouth where the strap crosses my shoulder and I don't care who sees the bruise on Wednesday. I want to walk the returns cart Thursday marked, throbbing, wearing that ridiculous sweater that hides nothing, and stamp other people's books knowing they can't see what you did. Old woman's vanity. I have no shame left and it's wonderfully light. Come finish what you started at that desk. Stand up, walk to the end of the reading aisle, and let me keep you till the shelf lights go out.