It came the next morning, in a padded brown envelope with no return address and her name printed on the front in square, careful, slightly crooked capital letters, the kind a man makes when he is spelling out each one. Inside there was a cassette tape. A plain one, a TDK, with a white label. On the label, in the same careful capitals, it said:
THE LITTLE RED HEN GOES TO TOWN
READ BY H. ELKINS
FOR C.
Jeanette brought her the clock radio from the bedroom, which had a tape deck in it, and the big padded headphones, which Mrs. Sunderman had lent her for the duration, and set them up on the coffee table, and then took one look at her sister's face and announced that she was going down to the bakery to buy a coffee cake, and would be gone for some time.
Cass put on the headphones, over her good ear, and pressed play.
There was a hiss, and a clunk, and the sound of somebody clearing his throat. Then a long pause. Then:
"Okay. Okay, here goes. Uh. This is—this is Hobie. I'm in the basement at the library. Mr. Fenstermaker's here. He says hi."
A distant, gruff voice: "Hello, Miss Ruska."
"He's going to help me if I get stuck. Which I'm going to. So. Okay." A rustle of pages. A breath. "'The Little Red Hen Goes to Town.' By—by Ellen—Ellen Wy—Wyck—"
"Wyckoff," said the gruff voice.
"Wyckoff. Thank you. Okay."
And then he read it.
It took him twenty-three minutes. It was a story that Cass could read in five. He read it slowly, word by word, sometimes syllable by syllable, and there were long pauses where she could hear him breathing, and the pages turning, and once, very faintly, the bubbling of a fish tank. He stumbled. He went back. He said "pig" for "big" and "was" for "saw" and caught himself both times, and once he got so stuck on the word "particularly" that Mr. Fenstermaker had to say it three times, and Hobie said, in a voice of utter disgust, "Who puts a word like that in a book for children," and Mr. Fenstermaker laughed, a dry, rusty sound, like an old hinge.