The shipping and logistics company I was working for fired my ass. When the cops called my cell, I turned the truck straight around without delivering my freight. A couple midwestern Walmarts didn’t get red grapes for their produce section, and my supervisor went batshit and told me to take a walk.

My folks got to die the way they wanted, and they lived the same way. It didn’t look like they had so much from the outside: a one-floor ranch in a New Hampshire podunk, a twenty-year-old Caddy, and a heap of debt. Before they retired together, my mother taught yoga and my father was a long-haul trucker. They didn’t get rich, they didn’t get famous, and they lived in their house for twenty-five years before they could say they owned it.

But she read to him while he cooked, and he read to her while she folded clothes. They did a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle every weekend and the New York Times crossword every day. They smoked prodigious amounts of weed, including sharing a spliff in the car before they gassed themselves. My mother had memorably whipped up a pot-laced stuffing one Thanksgiving when I was nineteen that made me awesomely sick. I was never able to pick up the pot habit, a failing they accepted with a certain amused resignation.

My father umped over a thousand Little League games. My mother volunteered for Bernie Sanders, Ralph Nader, and George McGovern. No one has ever worked harder or with more optimism for so many lost causes. I told her she was allergic to winners, and my dad shouted, “Hey! Don’t knock it! If she wasn’t, I’d never have stood a chance!” They held hands on walks.

And they both loved the library. When I was little, we took family trips there every Sunday afternoon. The first Christmas present I remember receiving was a shiny blue wallet with showy stitching, my library card tucked in to it.

For some reason whenever I think about our weekend library visits, it’s always the first snow of the year. My dad sits at one of the scarred wooden tables in the periodicals room, reading the Atlantic by the light of a green-shaded lamp, beneath a stained-glass window that shows a monk inking an illustrated manuscript. My mother leads me to the children’s library, where there are oversize couches in bright primary colors, and sets me loose. When I need her, she will be reading Dorothy Sayers under the giant plastic statue of an owl in bifocals.