Page 27 of Keeping Secrets
"Not well," Melissa admitted.
Keely looked around and realized that Ingrid had already disappeared. She seemed to have taken at least two cupcakes with her. Keely‘s focus has been on the easy banter between the library staff. She had expected more of a stodgy, buttoned-up environment, but these women were delightful. She felt grateful all over again to have landed this job.
"We’ll get started as soon as I’m done with this cupcake," Ali told her. "No eating outside of the break room. Would you like a cup of coffee?"
"A cup of coffee would be great."
"We should get back to the desk," Melissa said reluctantly.
"Oh shoot! There’s no one out front." Maria ran out the door with Melissa trailing behind.
"We just got a new shipment of books in," Ali told her as they sipped their coffee, "so we can start there. You’ll get to see how we label the books and input them into the system, and then you can get a feel for what goes where when we shelve all of the new books together. After that, you can get some time in at the front desk. That’s the easy part, really."
"Sounds great," Keely agreed.
When their coffee was finished, Ali led her through a side door and down a set of cement steps into a basement that Keely hadn’t known existed. The large space was crowded floor to ceiling with not only books but old equipment and filing cabinets and a strange assortment of curios that ranged from round glass floats to antique furniture.
"The library has been working in conjunction with the historical society on the Pelican Point museum," Ali said when she noticed Keely looking at the piles of antiques." Have you seen it?"
"No, I haven’t. I didn’t even know that there was a museum here in town."
"It’s small, so we’ve been doing rotating exhibits and keeping the overflow in the basement here at the library." She looked at the barely organized chaos with a frown. "I’ve been working on getting it all organized in my spare time, but there’s so much. The books get most of my time and attention. There are things in here that I haven’t had time to dig into yet, all sorts of old documents. Positive side is that there’s plenty more for new exhibits at the Pelican Point museum whenever I get the time to go through and organize things."
"You said that there was a new shipment of books in today?"
"Right." Ali turned away from the jumbled chaos of Pelican Point history and led her to a more well-lit and organized portion of the basement. "This is where we catalog and label new books that come in. Hardcover books get wrapped in plastic. It’s also where we fix books that are starting to come apart. Now that is a fun job. I’ll show you another time."
It was hard for Keely to imagine pasting books back together in a windowless basement as a "fun job," but she smiled at Ali and nodded. The young librarian was so cheerful in general and especially happy in her work that her good attitude was catching.
Ali led her through the process of unboxing books, inputting them into the library‘s computer catalog, labeling them, wrapping them in protective plastic, and adding a library sticker to the inside of the cover.
Once all of the books were properly labeled and part of the digital catalog, they carried the two heavy boxes back up the stairs and set them on a cart to begin shelving them. It seemed to be a tedious process to Keely, but Ali hummed while she worked. She smiled softly at each volume as she tucked it into place, as if she were putting her children to bed for the night.
Once all of the books were shelved and they had taken their lunch break (more cupcakes and coffee, as Keely had forgotten in her first-day nerves to bring any actual food for lunch), Ali showed her how to work the front desk. Checking books in and out was as easy as scanning the barcode, and helping customers to locate books or order them from other branches was another lesson that only took a few minutes. With those lessons imparted, Ali left Keely to man the front desk while she did computer work a few feet away.
Traffic picked up as kids got out of school and families stopped by the library.
There was a free activity for kids available in a side room. Melissa ran that while Keely managed the flow of traffic that came past the front desk. She helped a few older citizens to navigate the electronic catalog and find the books that they were looking for. She helped grade-school kids and young moms order stacks of picture books on certain subjects. And she was momentarily struck dumb when a customer close to her age came up and asked her for a recommendation as if she were some kind of expert.
"I haven’t read anything for fun since I was a kid," the young woman said, "and I have no idea where to start. I mean I want to read something for grown-ups, but something really engaging. Not fantasy necessarily, but not something too dry and boring either. Any idea on where to start?"
Keely pondered over the question over for a moment, thinking over all of the books that she had gleaned from second-hand stores and from the Rocky Hill library throughout her months of recovery. There had been a time just a few months back when she had been reading multiple novels a day to occupy her mind and preserve her sanity.
"Have you read anything by Barbara Kingsolver?" she asked at last.
The other girl tilted her head to one side. "Who is that?"
"An American author. She won a Pulitzer recently for her book Demon Copperhead, but I love her early books best. I went through this summer and read everything she’s written, and actually her first book is my favorite. It’s called The Bean Trees. But really any of her books, you can’t go wrong. They have strong characters and great plots, but they also have such a phenomenal sense of place. She’s a biologist too, I think, and she describes the nature of each place in a way that makes it really come alive."
"Sold," the young patron said with a grin.
"Cool." Keely glanced at Ali, who smiled and gave her a surreptitious thumbs up. She felt like she had passed her first trial. "I’ll show you where her books are shelved, and you can look through them to see which one jumps out at you.
"Perfect."
She led the girl a short distance through the shelves, pointed out the long line of Kingsolver books, and then went back to the front desk. A few minutes later, the girl returned carrying three novels.
"I got The Bean Trees like you suggested, and I also picked up the ones that take place in Mexico and in Africa."