It was an important place for them. My parents met in a library. In a sense. My mother lived in the nearby town of Fever Creek, in a little brick vicarage, her stepfather being a humorless, neurotic Anglican priest. My dad wound up spending a summer down the Creek, working in his uncle’s scrapyard. They met waiting for the library’s Bookmobile, which did a weekly swing through Fever Creek. At that time you could borrow LPs as well as books—it was the Summer of Love, after all—and my not-yet-parents had an argument when they both grabbed for the lone copy of Portrait of Joan Baez at the same time. They reached a truce when she said that if he let her take it out, he could come by the vicarage to listen to it anytime he liked. They listened to Joan Baez together all summer long, at first on the floor of her bedroom and later up in the bed itself.

I DIDN’T ACTUALLY MEAN to become a librarian. When I walked in there, five weeks after I buried my parents, I didn’t have anything in mind beyond returning a grotesquely overdue book.

My parents had left behind a teetering pile of unpaid medical bills and still owed a hundred thousand dollars on the loan they took out to put me through college. Wasted money. I’d netted a bachelor’s in English at Boston University, but it had done less for me, in strictly financial terms, than the eight-week course that earned me a commercial driver’s license.

I had no job, about twelve hundred dollars to my name, and there was no insurance payout coming, not in the wake of what amounted to a murder-suicide. My father’s lawyer, Neil Belluck, suggested that my best option was to get rid of anything I didn’t absolutely have to keep for myself and sell the house. If I were lucky, it would pay their outstanding bills and leave me with enough to float on until I booked a job with another shipping company.