The Lending Library by Fogelson Aliza

Author:Fogelson, Aliza
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-06-30T16:00:00+00:00

—TWELVE—

July 2008

“Hey, Dodie?” Geraldine said. “I’m looking for The Good Thief. It was a New York Times Notable Book last year. Do you have it?”

“Yeah, it’s in Fiction,” I said.

“No, it’s not,” she corrected me politely.

“It’s by Hannah Tinti. Did you look under T in Fiction?”

“Yep. No sign of it.”

“Hmm, I don’t think anyone took it out, at least not while I was here. Let me check, though.” I pulled a stack of library cards off the corner of my desk. Thumbing through them, seeing the dark-red date stamps—some from the lending library, some from other libraries where the books had lived in years past—made me smile.

When I realized that there were eleven more stacks of library cards nestled in the drawer, I stopped smiling.

“I can’t find Netherland either, even though I know Lula returned it last week,” Roberta added. “Do you know if someone checked it out again?”

I didn’t. I flipped uselessly back through the library cards. I’d thought my loosey-goosey system of stamping and collecting the library cards and then roughly remembering who had which book had worked fine. Apparently not.

“Here,” Elmira said, materializing with a book in each hand.

“Hey, Elmira. I didn’t even know you were here,” I said.

“I got here about five minutes ago. Anyway, I heard your conversation, and I found those two books you were talking about. One was on the random book table, and one was misshelved in Narrative Nonfic.” She handed them to Roberta and Geraldine. I stamped their cards and gave them back the books, feeling a little miffed at my own confusion.

“Thanks, Elmira. What would the library do without you?”

She beamed like the winner of a sweepstakes. My heart twisted in my chest. It took so little to make her happy. So little. And still, that emotionally celibate mother of hers kept letting her down. She had put Elmira in summer school even though her grades were some of the best in the class. That way, she and her equally lovely husband didn’t have to be bothered entertaining Elmira when they could be lounging by the country club pool with her little brother tucked into childcare there. Or, in the case of Elmira’s father, yelling at office underlings on his cell phone by the country club pool. “Maybe we need a better cataloging system,” I mused.

“Or a cataloging system, period?” she joked.

“Yeah, I guess so,” I conceded. “Any ideas?”

The spark in her eyes reignited. “What if we created an online catalog? And got a bar code reader? I can google how to link them. I know you don’t really like using the electronic one, but it would make stuff a lot easier here.”

“You’re probably right. But I would still want my stamper.”

“No one’s taking away your stamper,” Kendra said as she walked in and sat on the edge of the circulation desk. “Hi, Elmira. Trying to convince Dodie to enter the twenty-first century?”

“The stamper’s not going anywhere,” I announced.

“But it’ll be obsolete once you have everything set up electronically.”

“No, it won’t.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.