The Book Returned Forty Years Late

Every Monday at ten o'clock, Wanda Pell emptied the book drop at the Millbrook Public Library. On this Monday in September, she found something she had never seen in twenty-two years at the library: a book that had been missing since 1986.

It was a collection of bedtime stories, and its spine was held together with tape. Inside the back cover was an old borrower's card, the kind the library had stopped using when it got computers. Someone had written a name on it in blue ink, Hester Pruitt, and next to it was a purple stamp: DUE OCT 3 1986.

Tucked inside the front cover were a folded note and a twenty-dollar bill. The note wasn't signed. It said: "I'm sorry this is so late. She always meant to bring it back. This is for the fine." Who was "she"? And who had written the note? The money bothered Wanda, and so did the word "always."

The library's computer records only went back to 1998, so the card was her only clue. She searched the archive of the local newspaper for the name Pruitt and found an obituary from this August: "Hester Pruitt, 81, retired school nurse. She leaves behind her son, Calvin, who runs Pruitt Hardware on Canal Street."

At five, Wanda walked to Canal Street with the book under her arm. The store smelled of paint and sawdust. A tall man in his forties was cutting a key behind the counter. Wanda held up the note. "Did you write this?" "I did," he said quietly. "I left it in the drop at night. I didn't think anyone would bother to find me."

His mother had borrowed the book when he was five, the summer his father left. He wouldn't go to sleep unless she read from it, so she renewed it once, and then again. After that, she was too ashamed to bring it back so late, and the longer she kept it, the more ashamed she felt. "Every spring she said, 'This year we'll take it back,'" Calvin said, "and every spring she didn't. In the hospital, she asked me to return it and pay what she owed. It was the last thing she ever asked me to do."

At five cents a day, forty years came to $729.50. Wanda wrote the number on a library form and put it on the counter. Calvin stared at it, and then, for the first time, he laughed. Before he could reach for his wallet, Wanda tore the form in half and set the twenty-dollar bill on top of the pieces. "The book is home," she said. "That's all your mother really owed us."