Reading speed test

The library on Marsh Street opened at nine, and by five past, Nadia had already found the box on the returns cart. It was a shoebox, soft at the corners and tied with green garden twine. Someone had written on the lid in careful capitals: RETURNED WITH APOLOGIES.

Inside, wrapped in a dish towel, was a single hardback. The cover had faded from red to the color of weak tea, and the spine said A Pocket Guide to Lake and Shore Birds. The old date slip was still glued inside the front cover, and its last purple stamp said the book was due back on March 14, 1994.

Nadia had worked at the library for eleven years, long enough to see a lot of books come back late. They came back with sand in them, with bus tickets and pressed flowers in them, and once with a slice of ham. She had never held one that was thirty-two years overdue.

Under the book was a letter, folded twice.

“Dear Library,” it began. “I borrowed this book when I was nine. My father had just taken me to the reservoir to watch the herons, and I wanted to know the name of every bird we saw. I meant to bring it back. Then we moved to another town, the book went into a box, the box went into an attic, and I forgot about it until last month, when my daughter found it. She asked me why it said Marsh Street Library inside. I didn’t have a good answer, so I am sending it home. There are twenty dollars in the envelope for the fine. If it comes to more than that, please write and tell me.”

Nadia looked in the box again and found the envelope taped to the bottom. Inside were two ten-dollar bills and a crayon drawing of a gray bird with long legs, standing in blue water. Underneath, in a child’s uneven writing, someone had added: This is a heron. Grandpa would have liked it.

She carried the box to the front desk, where Mr. Osei was sorting the morning’s holds. He had worked at Marsh Street even longer than she had. He remembered the card catalog, and the days when someone had to set the date stamp by hand every morning.

“Ninety-four,” he said, turning the book over. “That was the year the roof leaked over the children’s room. We lost half the picture books.” He opened the cover, read the slip and laughed. “The fine stopped growing a long time ago. We never charged more than the price of the book.”

“So what do we do with twenty dollars?” Nadia asked.

Mr. Osei thought about it. The library didn’t need the money, exactly, but it never turned money down either. In the end they agreed to spend it on the bird feeder for the reading-room window, the one the Saturday volunteers had been asking for since spring.

That left the book itself. It couldn’t go back on the shelves. The pages had gone brown at the edges, and some of the advice was out of date: two of the birds it called rare were now common in every park in the county. The rules said a book in that state should be withdrawn and sent for recycling.

Nadia didn’t like that rule today. She found a clear plastic sleeve, slid the letter and the crayon heron inside it, and taped it to the inside cover, next to the purple stamp. Then she put the book in the glass case by the entrance, where the library kept things that mattered to the town: a photograph of the first building, a medal from a 1962 spelling bee, and a pair of reading glasses that had belonged to the woman who founded the place.

She wrote a small card to stand beside it. Returned after thirty-two years. Fine paid in full.

That afternoon she answered the letter. She wrote that the fine had come to much less than twenty dollars, that the rest had bought a feeder and a sack of seed, and that the book now had a place of honor by the front door. She added that a library card from 1994 had long since expired, but a new one took about five minutes, and the roof over the children’s room was much better these days.

Two weeks later, on a wet Saturday, a woman and a girl of about seven came in and stood in front of the glass case for a long time. Then the girl asked where the bird books were. Nadia showed her. The girl chose three, waited while her new card was printed, and promised, very seriously, to bring them back on time.