Violet Langford never remarried. She has only around fifty Facebook friends, most of them female and most of them, like her, use photos of their pets as profile shots. Like me, she leads a solitary life, in a house too big for just one person, a house full of memories of the dead.
How does she do it? I wonder, as so many of my “friends” must wonder about me. How does she go on living like this? I must focus on what’s important, though, and that is just one item of information: Violet Langford lives in Havenkill. And that’s only a forty-five-minute drive from my house.
HAVENKILL IS ONE of those picturesque Hudson Valley towns—full of historic plaques and statues of men on horseback and window boxes and white Colonial buildings with lacquered black shutters. Matt and I used to love to spend long weekends at Havenkill bed-and-breakfasts when we lived in the city, daydreaming about moving to the town （which I believe is technically a hamlet）。 We can be just like George and Mary Bailey, we’d say. But they really were just daydreams. The truth is, there’s something we both found slightly off-putting about Havenkill—a judgy, insular quality behind the Bedford Falls veneer. The big, unapologetic cross in the town square at Christmastime; the hardness in the eyes of some of the smiling store owners—especially when you’d mention you were visiting from the city; the enormous historic mansions at one end of town and the tiny tract houses on the other, never the twain shall meet. It gave both Matt and me a hinky feeling, so that when we decided to move to this area, we steered clear of Havenkill and the neighboring towns on the east side of the river and opted instead for the more rugged terrain of the west.
We might have been over-suspicious, but I do recall one incident, years after we moved to Mount Shady. Matt and I were having dinner in Havenkill when a couple of burly young cops rousted a drunk from outside a neighboring bar in the middle of a rainstorm, one of them using so much force that I thought he might dislocate the guy’s arm. It was around the same time as the town made headlines over a high school hit-and-run case, in which the rich people involved behaved just as disturbingly as those cops. I don’t recall the details, but I do know that Matt and I spoke then about having made the right decision in putting the river between us. And I still feel that way as I stop at a red light on Havenkill’s main drag, allowing a picture-perfect family to pass in their matching Canada Goose coats.
The library is located at the end of a side street, in one of the more modest areas of town. It’s a boxy brick building with ionic columns out front that seem a little too important for such an unassuming-looking place, and when I see it, I remember that I’ve been here before, with nine-year-old Emily, when she was researching a paper about the Hudson Valley and the Revolutionary War. Violet Langford could have easily been there that day, but if she was, we didn’t speak to her. Emily didn’t like to ask for help, even back then. She preferred to discover things on her own.
I park my car and walk into the building. As mentioned on its website, the Havenkill Library is open seven days a week, but it isn’t a large library at all—just two small wings, the adult one to the left, children’s to the right, and a small bank of computers at the center, in the area in front of the checkout desk. I start toward the adult area, but then I hear a young voice saying, “Thank you, Mrs. Langford,” and I spot her in the children’s section, replacing a picture book on one of the higher shelves and then turning. “Of course, Charlie.” She smiles at the boy, and I’m surprised at how strong she looks, how healthy. She’s wearing a fuzzy red sweater and pressed jeans, and when she dusts her hands off on them and says goodbye to Charlie and his two friends, I’m aware of how much taller she is than I thought. Her posture is perfect.
She goes back to the shelves, and I head over to her, aware of my surroundings, my steps light and unobtrusive. When I speak to her, it’s in a voice that’s barely above a whisper. Libraries intimidate me. They always have. “Excuse me, Mrs. Langford? Can I speak to you for a few minutes?”
Violet turns. Looks me up and down. She wears her reddish hair in the same short, curly style as she had at the courthouse thirty years ago, and she doesn’t seem to have aged much since then. Of course, that’s hardly saying anything, frail and spent as she’d looked in the black-and-white photo. Violet Langford in the flesh is quite vibrant, her eyes a striking pale green, like sea glass. Her smile is tentative, but still warm and inviting. She smells faintly of vanilla cookies. I imagine she must be a hit at story hour. “Are you looking for a book?” she says.