“Tell Maddie we miss her.”
Mrs. Pruitt said it with a little smile, holding a box of oatmeal in one hand and her basket in the other. We were standing in the cereal aisle at the Kroger on Main Street on a Tuesday afternoon. I had a cart full of groceries and a headache from a long day at work, and I was only half listening.
“I’ll tell her,” I said. “But you’ll see her Thursday anyway.”
Mrs. Pruitt tilted her head.
She has been the librarian at the Carver Public Library since I was fourteen years old. She still wears her silver hair in the same tight bun. She still wears the same little gold glasses on a beaded chain around her neck. When I was a teenager, I used to hide in the back corner of that library for hours, and she always pretended not to notice that I was crying.
“Thursday?” she said.
“She’s there every Thursday. Five-thirty to eight. Homework.”
Mrs. Pruitt looked at me over her glasses for a long moment. The kind of look she used to give kids who tried to sneak candy into the reading room.
“Honey,” she said gently. “She hasn’t been in since March.”
The cereal aisle went very quiet. Somewhere, a shopping cart squeaked. A little kid was crying about Lucky Charms. The music on the store speakers was playing some old song about a rainy night.
“That’s not possible,” I said. “I drop her off. Every Thursday. I watch her walk in the front doors.”
“She might walk in the front doors,” Mrs. Pruitt said carefully. “But she doesn’t stay. She used to sit at the table by the window with her books. Every week, right up through the winter. Then one Thursday in March she stopped coming. I thought maybe she’d gotten busy. Started a sport or something.” She paused. “I’ve missed her. She’s a lovely girl. She reminds me of you.”
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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