We kept a little scrap of paper with Ethel’s husband’s number on it taped to the main circulation desk, right next to the phone. On my first day at the library, I picked at the curling edge of the scotch tape and asked who Ethel was. 

“Oh, she lives nearby. She’s not allowed out on her own anymore, but her husband is getting on in years and she slips out sometimes. When you see her, just come straight here and call him,” said Marion. She was the Head Library Page, and she was training me to do all the important Library Page duties I would need to do, like picking up books and moving books around and sliding books in between two other books in the exact right spot on the shelf. 

“What does Ethel look like?” I asked. 

“You’ll know her when you see her.”

“I doubt it.”

I knew Ethel when I saw her. She had celery-green eyes and a big poof of white hair and she was taking her pants off in front of a shelf of Maeve Binchy novels in the Adult Fiction section. 

“Excuse me, are you Ethel?” I asked her.

She paused and turned to me with her pants halfway down her thighs. 

“Oh, you’re that sales girl!” she told me. 

I had gone into library work specifically to avoid ever having to sell anything to anyone, but this did not seem like the right time to discuss my particular role as a cog in the grand machine of capitalism. 

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but we have to wear pants in the library.” I don’t know why I included myself in this statement of library dress code, except that perhaps I wanted to reassure her that I was also bound by the tyranny of mandatory trousers. 

“Oh, is this the library?”

“Afraid so.”

“This isn’t the Eaton’s department store?” A frown creased the lines on her forehead. “But I need to get my dress for the party.”

None of my training on picking up books or moving books around or sliding books between two other books in the exact right spot on the shelf had prepared me for this situation. 

“Well,” I said, “how about we go downstairs and call your husband? I bet he knows where you can find a dress.” 

“Bill’s here?” She paused. “Well, alright then.”

Bill picked up on the third ring. He had a voice like a rocking chair, creaking and groaning under the weight of what he was trying to tell me. 

“I put a bell on the back door, but I must not have heard it,” he said. “Let me get my shoes on and I’ll be right there.”

I’d never really spent enough time around old people to guess Ethel’s age, but when Bill arrived fifteen minutes later, I could tell by the hunch of his shoulders and the shuffle in his step that he was several years older than his wayward wife. I walked over to meet him just inside the electronic security gates at the front doors. 

“She said she needs a dress for a party?” I asked, my voice low even by library standards. I had parked Ethel in an armchair near the General Circulation Desk, and Bill and I watched her happily flipping through a book of knitting ideas that I had fished out of the return bin. 

Bill made an expression that was just about halfway between a smile and a grimace.  “Yes, for her eighteenth birthday party. Taking her an awful long time to decide, as you can see.”

“Is she…” I suddenly realized I couldn’t think of a polite way to ask a complete stranger if the person he loved most in the world had begun a slow and irreversible decline into someone whom he no longer recognized and who no longer recognized him. 

He nodded. “She is.”

Ethel looked up from her book, and Bill gestured for her to come and join him. 

“We’d best get you home,” he said, linking his arm through hers. He nodded at me. “Thanks for calling. I’d like to tell you that this won’t happen again, but my hearing is going fast and she’s getting slipperier. You’ll be seeing us again soon, I’m sure.”

I saw them again very soon. It was two weeks later, and Ethel was unbuttoning her relaxed-fit khaki pants next to a display of Nora Roberts novels. 

“We talked about this, remember?” I said. “We have to wear pants in the library.”

She narrowed her eyes. “You can’t tell me what to do, Sarah.”

The name Sarah did not have a single letter in common with the name printed on my official staff name badge, but this hardly seemed the time for a game of name tag Scrabble. 

“That’s the rule, I’m afraid. Nothing I can do about it,” I said. 

“But I still need to find a dress for the party.”

“I’m afraid you’ll need to do that with pants on,” I said. 

She buttoned her pants and continued to scowl in my direction. 

“How about we go call Bill?” I asked. 

“Who’s Bill?”

“You haven’t met Bill? Oh, you’re going to love him,” I said, gesturing toward the elevator that would take us down to the General Circulation Desk. “He’s real handsome. And he’s already crazy about you.”

The fourth time I found Ethel, skirt puddled around her ankles in the back of the Adult Reference section, I noticed she had begun to blur around the edges. I couldn’t tell if it was a trick of the light or a trick my eyes were playing on me, but the contours of her cheeks and shoulders had gone soft and translucent.  

I did not mention this to Ethel, as this did not seem like information that she had any ability to process. Instead, I asked, “Don’t you think you’ll get awfully cold with no bottoms on?” 

She turned to face me. The lines in her face and neck looked superimposed, as though I was looking at her through a crack in a stained glass window. 

“You can’t tell me what to do,” she said. She stuck her tongue out at me; it too was blurred and nearly see-through at the edges. 

“Oh, but I can,” I told her. “You’re going to put that skirt back on and I’m going to go call Bill.”

“You’re no fun at all,” she complained. 

“Thank you,” I said. “I work hard at that.”

The sixth time I found Ethel, swaying in the Adult Mystery section with her blouse open, it was hard to look directly at her. She was doubled somehow, one version of her hunched under the other, as though I was looking cross-eyed through 3D spectacles. 

“Oh, there you are,” she said, her voice free from its usual croaky quality. She giggled. “Could you be a doll and get me the next size down? I want to show off my figure.”

Ethel twirled, and her faint double image stood just a little straighter and flung her arms just a little wider as she spun. 

“Sure thing. You stay right there, and maybe do up some of those buttons so you don’t catch a chill. I’ll be back soon,” I said, and headed for the phone. 

It took Bill a little longer than usual to come to her rescue. 

“I’ve strung up old cans in the doorframes so I’ll hear when she gets out, but she keeps slipping past them,” he confided. “Or maybe I just don’t hear them rattling and jangling around as well as I used to.”

“Maybe you just need to put up a few more cans for next time,” I said. 

He looked at me. 

“I don’t have a lot of ‘next times’ left in me, I’m afraid.”

The last time I saw Ethel was just two weeks later. I was shelving a cart of cookbooks in the 600s section of Adult Nonfiction when someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around to find a young woman who had either attended the University of British Columbia or been gifted a hoodie from the university bookstore by someone who had. 

“Um,” she said. “There’s an old lady in one of the aisles…”

There could be only one old lady in the aisles worth mentioning. 

“I’ll handle it,” I said. 

I heard Ethel before I saw her. She was down at the far end of an aisle of Thriller and Suspense novels, blocked from view by a shelf of densely-packed James Pattersons. She was humming a song that sounded like something you’d listen to on one of those big, old, wooden radios that took up a whole corner of a living room.

She stopped humming as I approached. 

“Is that the sales girl?” she called.

“Is that Ethel?”

I was honestly asking. The voice calling out to me was young and strong and clear, the voice of someone who can run fifteen laps in gym class and then dash off to fourth period math without even being winded. 

“Oh, I believe I’ve finally found the one. And it’s just my size,” called Ethel. “Do come and see it and tell me what you think.”

I came around the corner and stopped. There was a girl at the end of the aisle, no more than seventeen years old, and she had celery-green eyes and a cascade of red hair and she was twirling in front of a department store mirror in the most beautiful dress I had ever seen.

I