The Library Book Fell Open to the Answer

After my father died I got obsessed with one small mystery he left behind. He never told anyone exactly where he was born. He came to this country as a young man, alone, and was cagey about the village, changing the subject whenever it came up. After he passed I wanted, badly, to know the name of the place, to visit it someday.

I spent weeks on it. Records were thin, the spelling of our family name had changed at the border, and I hit wall after wall. One afternoon, frustrated, I went to the big central library just to sit somewhere quiet and think, wandering the old local-history stacks without a real plan.

I was standing in an aisle, not even reaching for anything, when a book slid off the shelf above me on its own. It was a tightly packed shelf, no reason for it to move, but it tipped out and fell, and it landed open on the floor at my feet, pages splayed.