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though led by a brass quintet.
    The charming Mrs. Winters slips on her comfortable beige raincoat…

Wherein
    I T IS LATE AFTERNOON , early October, the sky darkening, and the lights in the old Orangetown Library already on. The smell of waxed floors is particularly sharp at this hour; it must be the heating system that triggers it.
    Today, as always, the librarians, Tessa Sands and Cheryl Patterson, are helpful. I’ve dropped by to pick up Dennis Ford-Helpern’s The Goodness Gap . I am not, by the way, unaware of the absurdity of believing one can learn goodness through the medium of print. Bookish people, who are often maladroit people, persist in thinking they can master any subtlety so long as it’s been shaped into acceptable expository prose.
    I could easily have bought the Ford-Helpern book last week when I was in Toronto. But no, if I am sincere about achieving genuine goodness in my life and thereby finding a way to reconnect with Norah, this means dealing with issues large and small, or else shifting my finite dispersal of goodness to goodish places such as the public library. At the moment I am attempting to be a good citizen who supportsher local library, which is dramatically underused by the community and in danger of closing.
    Aside from a part-time custodian, these two librarians, Tessa and Cheryl, are the only full-time employees of the Orangetown Library; everyone else got the boot a year ago when the town council announced the library cutbacks.
    Tessa and Cheryl have known our family for years. I’ve been a member of the Library Board forever, and Tessa remembers Norah from when she was four years old, attending Saturday-morning story hour, able to sit cross-legged and absolutely still, wearing only a nametag, not a sign saying GOODNESS. She was capable at that age of an exquisite shiver when listening to the adventures of Bluebeard and ready to shed tears over the fate of the twelve dancing princesses, a story that Tessa always reshapes for her young audiences. Happy endings are her specialty.
    Tessa, in her fifties—married to a classical guitarist, mother to one adolescent child—is big, starchy, and pedagogic and getting more so every year. She possesses several lolloping chins, which shift as she talks, each one a millisecond out of sync with the movement of her surprisingly small mouth. She was a biologist before she decided to get her librarian’s qualifications. Her voice is clear and elocutionary.
    Cheryl, divorced, in her late thirties, leans toward me today with both elbows on the desk, her chin cupped in her hands; her look is hunched and quizzical and surprisinglychic. Today she has a stick-on bindi in the middle of her forehead; I find it hard to avoid staring at this little colourful spot, which is in honour, I can only suppose, of the man she is currently seeing, a dentist trained in Bombay who has hung up his shingle at the Orangetown Mall, a shy young bespectacled man whose Indian wife couldn’t deal with small-town Ontario and went back to her parents after six months.
    They are great friends, Tessa and Cheryl—colleagues—and they have the good sense to be proud of the generation-stretching bond they’ve devised. Snobbishness of a particular kind attends them, a case of old-style womanhood kissing up with the new—they’ve actually done it. It’s almost like love. They’re each so proud of the other, and like to express this reciprocal pride aloud. She knows exactly where to find things. Well, she’s the best there is when it comes to following up on the Internet . What they share is their dominion over this granite building, whose brown stones hint at the colour of the earth beneath, that good rich agricultural land so wisely set aside for the public good. Another serious budget cut, though, and this place will be a tea room-slash-gifte shoppe.
    Tessa and Cheryl are united in their passion for books, books like Ford-Helpern’s, which they are happy enough to provide,