Exalted

Steve smiled as he leaned over the counter to take the small, square library card from the little boy who was bouncing on his toes. “That’s quite the stack you’ve got,” he scanned the card and tucked a bookmark with a cartoon dog into one of the books. “I bet you’re going to work your way through all of our dinosaur books.”

“He will, sooner or later,” his mother laughed, smoothing her son’s hair with an affectionate hand. “Last year it was fire trucks.”

“I like trucks,” the little boy told Steve, his wide smile showing a gap where a front tooth had clearly recently departed. “But dinosaurs are so cool!”

“Dinosaurs are very cool,” Steve agreed as he scanned in the books. “I bet they use trucks to drive out to where they find the fossils, too, and bring the really big ones back.”

“Yeah!” The boy hopped in place as the door behind him swung open. “Like you need flatbed trucks for a T Rex skull! They’re super big! They have one at the nature museum. We went for my birthday!”

“Did you?” Steve walked around the counter to bring him the stack of books. “That sounds like a great birthday trip. What else did they have?” He crouched down to eye level with the boy. 

“They had a whole triceratops! He was this big!” The little boy held his arms out as far as he could, flailing in place in his excitement.

“I’m going to have to go and see that,” Steve said the corners of his eyes crinkling as he grinned. “You sure know a lot about dinosaurs already. Here you go,” he handed the books over, and the little boy took them very carefully.

“Thank you,” the mother smiled at Steve and led her son out of the door in a flood of chatter.

“Cute,” a voice said from behind him, and he turned to see Robin leaning over the wide wooden counter.

“I remember loving dinosaurs,” Steve rounded the counter to work on checking in the books Robin had brought him from the drop slot. “I think it was right after fire trucks for me, too.” He looked up at the ceiling, soaring two floors above them, as he tried to remember. “Or maybe right before.”

“Girls like dinosaurs and fire trucks, too, you know. We’re just not supposed to say so.” Robin tapped her chin in thought. “Not that I ever let that bother me, actually.”

“Dad said trying to stop you talking when you were a kid was like trying to stop a leaky dam with scotch tape. No sooner stop a leak than another one pops up.” Steve laughed, and she swatted him with a notepad. 

“You two gang up on me, it’s so not fair.” She pretended to pout, then headed off down the hall to the children’s section to help with setup for story time for the pre-school kids. The Saturday program bought parents a couple of hours of relative peace, and they were trying to expand it to at least once during the week, too, so stay-at-home parents could drop off their little one and maybe run some errands. Or take a nap in the car, if they needed to. They had the volunteers and the program ready to go, but working it through the layers of approvals needed for even a small change was a process. It had gotten pushed off the agenda due to time at the last meeting - the children’s librarian had fumed for days about spending 40 minutes on getting a new trash can for the ladies room because the one in there was always full - and it didn’t look good for the next meeting, either, since they had only tabled the discussion to measure trash cans. The men’s room trash can was apparently fine, and Steve and Robin had spent an otherwise dull Tuesday evening trying to figure out if they had fewer male patrons or if men washed their hands less, with Robin insisting on the latter and Steve fervently hoping for the former.

Steve grinned at her retreating back, noticing that she had cut her own hair and gotten it lop-sided again, then turned to the computer in time to see a flash of the fines on one book pop up. He let out a low whistle. How long had they had that out? He checked the date: two years? Holy cow. He clicked on their email and sent them a quick note offering to waive the fees if they came to the library during their Open House Week. He hated how people stopped coming to the library because they were embarrassed about their fines, when most of the librarians he knew would find a way to make it work for the patron and spare their pride, too. Nobody wanted their most vulnerable guests to not be able to access services.

He stacked the books onto the returns cart, sorted by section because he was feeling generous, and decided the morning was quiet enough to take a spin through the reading areas and straighten up, add more books to the cart before he handed it off to Robin. Steve made quick work of the main level - folding a couple of newspapers, picking up some magazines and books that he slotted into the cart, and then he trotted easily up the stairs to the second level. The stairs wrapped around their small elevator, and he loved following the gentle curve - the library had been smart to drop a frankly modern elevator and stairs into the space rather than try and match the existing building in style, he always thought. Nobody was building anything like this anymore.

He walked through the balcony area, waving to an elderly man sitting by a window and doing a crossword puzzle, like he did every day, and picked up more books for the cart. He slid the chairs back into place around a low table and swept some crumpled paper into a nearby trash can, finishing his walk of the space by following the glass sweep of the balcony edge around the curve and admiring the stained glass windows from this eye-level view. The round window over the door was his favorite; when the sun poured through it just right it pooled a perfect circle of colors onto the floor in front of the desk. He had looked up the design once, apparently the crossed keys represented St. Peter, and symbolized the locked door of excommunication and the open door of absolution. He didn’t look up anymore of the windows after that; it was better for his mental health to just enjoy them as pretty glass.

He strolled back down the stairs, piling his finds onto the cart and slipping behind the desk to help two older women who were looking for the local history section - It’s not really local, Genevieve. It’s ten miles away, Ellen. That’s local enough. Steve agreed - it was local enough, and he’d be happy to show them where to look. He bit the inside of his cheek to hide a grin as the women bickered all the way to the section, where they had both thanked him and called him dear before turning toward each other and continuing their argument with the ease of long argument and the lack of venom of old friends that had become more than family. Me and Robin in 40 years, he thought with a fond smile. Honestly, us most of the time right now.

Robin returned from the other section, and Steve asked her to take over the desk. “I’ve got that licensure call in five,” he reminded her when she grumbled, and she stuck out her tongue. “Just be glad it’s not you,” he snarked, heading for his postage stamp of an office.

He dialed into the call - grateful it wasn’t a Zoom meeting, where he’d have to pretend to be engaged - and waited through roll call before going on mute. He’d already completed the whole thing, but he had to be on anyway, because it checked a box for the library to have a representative there, and the director always managed to be urgently engaged elsewhere when these calls came up. Funding was always tricky with libraries, and nobody wanted to take any chances on even a tiny black mark on the record. He cleared the top of his desk while he half-listened to the call, consolidating a bunch of small post-its to a bigger to-do list, emptying three Altoids tins into one, finally turning the pages of his joke-of-the-day calendar to the right day (a gift from Robin, of course. The jokes were terrible, and he loved it.) He wasn’t much of a hoarder, and he had learned early into the job to keep his area neat or risk having nowhere to sit, so it didn’t take the whole call for him to get through what he could do and still pay enough attention.

He tilted back in his wooden desk chair - inherited from the director, Steve had been able to fix the wobbly arm, and it was a pretty nice chair otherwise, if you didn’t mind the crack across the back. There was a narrow bookcase tucked into a small nook behind him, filled with damaged books he was repairing as he had time, and a box of the supplies for him to do so. He had taken bookbinding and repair classes, and there was never a shortage of work to do. Their library had received a private library and correspondence with the building, willed to them by a local philanthropist who had died without children and didn’t like his only brother, and they were required to keep it intact - no pitching the books that never got checked out. Steve didn’t mind, and some of the books were really interesting, especially the journals. The old man had inherited the habit of keeping a diary from his father, who’d inherited it from his father, and so on - generations of insights into the daily life of the area kept local historians, scientists, and even meteorologists coming in to visit the non-circulating section. They’d had to put the journals into non-circulating, not because of the historians, but because locals who didn’t like some of the candid observations of local families. Steve had read some of it, and, allowing for the old-fashioned language, it was definitely spicy. People always thought prior generations were boring, but in Steve’s opinion people had been doing the same things - and gossiping about them - forever.

Steve clicked back into the call to confirm that he was complete, and there were no outstanding checklist items at his branch, and then added his goodbye to the chorus and hung up with relief. He stood from his chair and stretched, feeling his back pop and letting out a relieved sigh. He wasn’t even 30 yet, but you couldn’t tell that to his back.

He went to the staff room at the back of the building and made himself a cup of coffee, watching the traffic slide by outside the window as he munched on a cookie someone had brought in for everyone - snickerdoodles, a little over-baked but still good - and enjoyed his caffeine. He popped a mint into his mouth as he walked back to relieve Robin at the desk, reminding her that there were cookies in the break room, and if she didn’t get to them soon Murray would find them and she wouldn’t get one. She darted for the back with an indignant squawk, Steve quietly calling after her that she was doing put-backs as soon as her break was over.

There was a brief flutter of business, people coming in and going out, and a group of high school students crowding the desk for help with finding the books they needed - right now, apparently, since the report was due on Monday. Steve didn’t ask when it had been assigned - he’d been that kid in high school, too - and led them to the Biography section, showing them how to look books up on their phones and then find them by number. He thought, not for the first time, that if he could come up with some kind of app to replace the Dewey decimal system he’d be a millionaire - if he didn’t get killed by some of his older colleagues, who couldn’t understand why a card file wasn’t good enough for everyone.

Steve escaped the group eventually - he hadn’t been out of school that long, he wasn’t that much older than them, but he swore girls were a lot bolder than they’d been when he was in school. One of them had said she liked his glasses, a second his hair, and another one complimented his sweater and rubbed his arm, and he had gulped down his panic and fled as politely as he could. He knew they were probably just messing with him - he must seem positively geriatric to a bunch of high school kids - but he was still a little shocked. He would have never been that bold with an adult when he was in school. He wasn’t that bold with adults now, and he was one.

The sun had come out from behind the clouds when he made it back to the main entrance, and bright colors were painting the tiled floor as he walked through the circle cast by his favorite window. He turned his face up into the sun, closing his eyes to enjoy the warmth for a moment. As the shower of colors painted his creamy sweater in all the colors of the rainbow, the white center of the window caught the gold strands in his hair and lit them up like a crown. A small noise, like a sharp inhale of breath, sounded above him, and he opened his eyes to meet another set of brown eyes looking directly into his. A younger man with long, dark hair was looking over the balcony at him, his eyes wide with surprise. Steve blinked but didn’t look away - the habit to be polite to patrons was deeply engrained, and he’d never seen the other man before. New adult patrons weren’t really all that common, and definitely not to be slighted. Getting caught standing in the stained glass light like one of the kids visiting the library wasn’t the most embarrassing thing he’d ever done, either.

Steve smiled. “Welcome,” he said called softly. “I’m Steve, let me know if you need help finding anything.”

The other man tilted his head, more curls falling over his shoulder, and a strangely sweet smile crept onto his face. “I’m Eddie,” he called back, equally quietly. “And thanks - I think I already found it.”