Number fourteen had once been the Alder Street Children’s Library, run by Eleanor Albright for thirty-one years. After she died, the building was condemned, and the library was knocked down. Mr. Albright had refused every offer to sell the lot, because he could not bear to see anything else stand where she had read aloud to children. He had paid the taxes from his pension and visited every Sunday at three, her old story hour.

Priya was one of those children. She had grown up poor, learned English from Eleanor’s picture books, and become a pediatrician. She had been trying to find the library’s owner so she could ask permission to build a garden in Eleanor’s memory. When one of her letters finally reached a cousin who knew Mr. Albright, he agreed, with one condition. He wanted to see it through the window of a taxi, because he did not trust himself to stand there alone.

The crowd, it turned out, were more than a hundred of Eleanor’s former pupils. Teachers, nurses, a bus driver, a judge. Each one had donated and shown up with a book. They placed them on the shelves of a small glass reading house at the center of the lot, and one by one they told Mr. Albright what she had given them. He sat in a folding chair, holding his hat, nodding, and tears ran down his lined face.

I did not charge him for that ride. I have driven him there every Sunday since, and we sit together in the garden at three while children read aloud on the grass. Mr. Albright keeps a small stack of picture books on his knee and reads one to whichever child sits nearest. His voice is gentle and slow. I still drive a taxi, but my favorite fare ends at a place that finally exists.