Jeronimo Smith, a 77-year-old retired janitor, and Emily Parsons, also retired and a cultured, recent widow, meet at the Santa Barbara public library. Jeronimo has come for the Collected Poems of Yeats. He needs the book, since "only Yeats could get him through a really bad time, and this one was bad. His forty-seven-year-old son had run away from home. Again. And this time he'd taken the Yeats with him." Unable to find the book on the shelf, he discovers that Emily is in the process of checking it out, and won't give it up. So Jeronimo posts himself on the library steps every morning, until she finally returns the book. They talk, they go out for coffee, and Jeronimo finds himself uncharacteristically taken with Emily. Thus begins his eccentric courtship: "He'd intended to be charming. But that was only, he reminded himself, in case she decided to renew the book. He'd been prepared to charm it away from her. What he hadn't intended was . . . to care so deeply about what the devil she thought of him."
Hobbs portrays characters deftly. Jeronimo does not go gently in his life, but sails into it with directness: "While he waited, he attacked a flyer hung on the door with his blue marking pen, adding an m to community and changing the e to an a in effect." Emily, who has moved to California from Pittsburgh to take care of her grandchildren, is becoming weary: "They all slammed doors in this family. They said all the worst things with doors. And it was wearing [her] down. A year and four months she'd been here. Sixteen months on the way to forever . . . she knew with a sickening certainty that her coming here had been a mistake."
What Jeronimo doesn't know is that Emily is dying of cancer. She hasn't told her daughter, and is still trying to figure out how to live in the time she has left. As she thinks about him, she wonders why it matters what he thinks of her. "Was she still in denial? Hadn't she yet passed into one of the other more useful, sensible stages? She should be reading about that, about dying in the correct order, not about planting gardens she would never get to weed."
The Yeats-loving janitor impulsively proposes a road trip to Yellowstone; however, Emily doesn't have the courage to run away, believing that "the last trip of her life would be to a sick ward." But when Jeronimo climbs a ladder to her window in the middle of the night, camper packed and ready to go, she doesn't hesitate.
Family responsibilities, their own needs and longings, their rebellion against aging "sensibly" all combine to tell a charming and bittersweet story. As Emily says, "Not all gifts are those one would choose, are they?" But she and Jeronimo turn their imposed gift into one of love.--Marilyn Dahl