Free Things that Fall from the Sky (Vintage Contemporaries) by Kevin Brockmeier Page B

Woodrow, she thinks, and she fills first with a sense of relief, then with a sense of surprise at her relief. She opens the flier and reads:
    Annual Red Cross Blood Drive
October 2–8
At the Fletcher County Hospital
     
    Beneath this is an illustration of a smiling red blood drop holding a yardstick, followed by the line:
    Every Drop Counts!
     
    When she looks around, she sees these squares of paper beneath the blades of every car in the parking lot, like rows of white headstones in a cemetery. Katherine has never been comfortable with needles; in fact, they terrify her. She folds the leaflet in half, tosses it toward the open lid of a trash basket, and watches as it goes maple-leafing to the ground.
    At home, there is another message from her son waiting for her on the answering machine: “Hey, Mom. Peter again. You’re probably working, so we’ll talk some other time. I’ll be busy for a few days, so don’t bother to call. Bye.” She erases the message as she slips from her shoes, then drops wearily onto the bed and closes her eyes. She listens to the arms of the ceiling fan splitting the air— whup, whup, whup. After a few minutes she rises and walks to the window. The weather has broken and it is showering outside, fine particles of rain that she can only detect because of a slight tapping motion in the leaves. The relaxation in the air and the slow darkening of the room calls up a spell of old recollections. She remembers, all at once, many things, and these things seem both free-floating and particular, clear and disconnected, as if the strings between them have come unfastened. She remembers biting the inside of her cheek when she was a little girl: she was stepping onto a school bus, and the thin taste of blood in her mouth was buttery and familiar. She remembers counting to seven and jumping from a staircase, the tingle in her feet when she hit the floor. She remembers her grandmother calling her “my little drop of sunlight.” She remembers kissing her college boyfriend on a spring day, squeezing his knee by the fountain in back of the student union. She remembers the black chocolate cake she made for her mother’s sixtieth birthday, Tanner and Peter chasing each other with plastic swords, the chop of water against a boat pier. She remembers yellow leaves falling in an autumn wind. She remembers her house on Christmas morning. She remembers her husband boxing his books away and her children leaving for college and her dad in white sheets in a hospital bed. She remembers these things as if no one memory is connected to any other—as if each makes known a different place and life, a thousand different places and a thousand different lives. She presses her forehead to the glass and looks outside, wondering how all these many places came to be this one room and this one window, how all these many people came to be just her, her alone, the woman who wouldn’t give her blood away.
    And so, on Tuesday, though Katherine is sitting before a mahogany desk in the office of Mr. Ridling, and though he is dressing her down for her lack of good judgment, she does not hesitate to leave when the moment arrives.
    “So what do you propose we do about this?” Mr. Ridling is saying. “I know that from your perspective it might seem somewhat unorthodox to suggest such a thing—that we should reserve certain materials for our patrons who are, shall we say, of age —but then again, we can’t have our librarians just blithely violating the basic rules of polite society, now can we?”
    That’s when Katherine hears the sound: the double bang of falling books. She stands to leave.
    “Where do you think you’re going?” says Mr. Ridling.
    She hesitates in the doorway, her hand on the brushed metal knob. Mr. Ridling is tapping at his desk. “I’ll be right back,” Katherine says.
    The library is quiet and still, and the sunlight shimmers through the high windows. As she walks from room to room, Katherine can hear her