Lydia’s father, a horn-rimmed librarian named Tomas, was a quivering wreck from the moment his infant girl entered the world. Only minutes before Lydia had taken her first breath, he’d been pacing the waiting room at St. Joe’s and worrying about his wife, a flush-faced bookworm named Rose, who was down the hall in labor. When an overeager candy striper asked if he was ready to meet his new baby girl, Tomas rushed toward the delivery room so energetically that he’d barely gotten his mouth covered with the surgical mask before barging in. It turned out that the candy striper, still a full hallway behind him, had mistakenly beckoned the wrong new daddy, so Tomas arrived in the cold delivery room during the worst moments of Rose’s emergency cesarean. One of the more experienced nurses lunged in front of him and tried to spin him back to the hall, but she’d been too late to prevent him from seeing his newborn daughter get cut from the womb of his dying wife.
At the nurse’s insistence Tomas turned away and faced the door, but he refused to leave the delivery room. Behind him the anesthesiologist whispered that someone should take off Rose’s wedding ring before the corpuscular swelling made it impossible to remove without cutting, and Tomas found himself wondering if he’d meant cutting his wife’s finger or cutting his wife’s ring. A minute later a different nurse taped the ring into a square of gauze and buttoned it into his jacket pocket while he stood there like a mannequin being readied for display. The ring itself held a dainty silver rose with ruby petals and an engraving along its inner wall. A rose for my Rose.
In a dark fog Tomas watched one of the nurses pull a sheet over Rose’s body and roll her gurney toward the basement. He wanted to follow the gurney, but the doctor placed his newborn daughter into his arms and told him in a gentle voice that right now his girl needed her daddy. Tomas felt her squirming inside her blanket and began to understand. He held her close and her eyes, oily black, opened up his world.
During those first months, Tomas had nightly deliveries of casseroles and condolences, but one by one, as he returned baking dishes and stuffed bereavement cards into drawers, what little comfort these gifts had brought him began to fade. Because he was ashamed to expose his own ignorance of child rearing, he never asked anyone for help with Lydia, and with the exception of a single parenting book he found on Rose’s nightstand, he was determined to figure out all this baby stuff on his own. He scalded Lydia’s tongue with overboiled formula. He fed her nibbles of rice cereal long before she could lift her head. In the middle of the night he leaned over her swaddled form and listened to her irregular breathing and had no idea if she was freezing to death or choking on upchucked paste or simply as tuckered as he was.
When the time came for Tomas to go back to work at the local library, he tried placing Lydia with day-care providers all over the neighborhood, but none lasted more than a few days: this one’s playground had a rusty swing set and low fences; this one’s shelves held hardly any books; this one’s staff looked as if they came straight from the Screw Farm. As far as he was concerned none was up to snuff, so he did what he’d secretly hoped he’d have to do: he brought her with him to work. Where it was safe.
Lucky for Tomas, the tiny branch of the Denver Public Library that was under his watch serviced such an old and forgotten community that its patrons were well schooled in bendable rules. No one would complain about the constant presence of a child because low expectations had trained them not to complain. Volunteers sometimes helped with story hour and shelving, but most of the time Tomas sat behind the circulation desk alone, keeping one eye on his library, one eye on his daughter.
For those first few years, Lydia dawdled behind the desk, rode through the aisles on the bottom shelves of roller carts, and dozed in Daddy’s lap as he cataloged. The elderly patrons seemed to stay longer with Lydia around and books were read to her by the dozen. Her learning thrived even more when kindergarten approached and Tomas sent her to Little Flower Elementary, a small Catholic school close enough to the library and their bungalow home that they could walk between them without enduring the expense of a car. Though it was rougher than most private schools, Tomas’s fears were assuaged by the Madeline-like image of Lydia huddled in a yellow raincoat at the knees of towering nuns, on the safe side of a chain-link fence.
As Lydia grew, Tomas learned to braid her hair and polish her shoes and dress her up in plaid skirts and sweaters. With few exceptions—mainly during the terrible twos, which lasted for one month when she was three—he was pleased with his decision to keep her around the library. She kept herself busy after school by spinning through the records and filmstrips, building bean bag forts, and exploiting the Popsicle sticks and cotton balls of the craft room. Though he’d always believed in the value of solitude—Tomas felt himself like its lonely ambassador—each afternoon when he showed up at Little Flower to pick her up he began to notice that she was always alone, dragging her fingertips along the chain links with rarely a classmate in sight. The other kids swarmed the playground like ants on a pile, and even the nuns smoked in laughing clusters on the steps, but Lydia was always on her own. He began to worry about her solitude, and to wonder if he was somehow to blame.
So it was something of a big deal when they were walking home on a wintry afternoon in first grade and Lydia, kicking pucks of ice along the shoveled sidewalks, pointed at the neon doughnut that rose high into the sky above Colfax Avenue and asked if they could stop there, at Gas ’n Donuts, the bustling gas station/doughnut shop on the corner up ahead.
—For a doughnut?
—for a friend.
—What friend?
—he’s waiting for me. with a doughnut.
Tomas looked around as if the street they walked every day had just been unpeeled.
Tucked into Denver’s boot like a straight razor, Colfax Avenue was the longest street in America and the most dangerous street in town. It was the place to get a vacuum fixed or eat ethnic foods, to buy secondhand slacks or a bicycle pump, but it also held the city’s highest concentration of gun shops, prostitutes, strip clubs, drug dealers, dive bars, and hot-sheet motels. In the single mental snapshot he took while holding Lydia’s mittened hand, Tomas counted a dark cocktail lounge, a used auto dealership, a nail salon, a pawnshop, a fabric store, a motorcycle parts outlet, and a nightclub advertising nude Jell-O wrestling.
And a doughnut shop. Slash gas station.
—he’s waiting for me.