She looked around the building, at the cracked plaster, the windows in their original frames that either wouldn’t open or leaked cold air in the winter and hot air in the summer, at the worn marble floor, the tarnished signs indicating the bathrooms and meeting room, at the oak shelves in desperate need of refinishing. “He’s sixteen years old.”
“Seventeen. He’s lucky to get community service. He should have gone to jail.”
She blinked at that brusque assessment. “I don’t have any supplies. What could he possibly know about that kind of work?”
Lucas’s shrug was audible. “No idea. Might not be a bad thing for him to learn.”
“Who’s going to teach him? I can’t unstop my own drain.”
“I have to go,” Lucas said.
She stared at her phone, which was flashing a call time of just over a minute, then looked at her new assistant. Cody Burton was pulling books from the overnight returns box and stacking them on the table. He was tall and so painfully thin Alana could see the bones of his shoulders jutting through his sweater. She slipped her phone into her purse and walked over to the table.
“Why aren’t you in school?”
“Suspended,” he said.
“For?”
“Two weeks.”
“I meant, what did you do?”
Cody just shrugged and continued to stack books, his defensive demeanor shattered by the loud rumble of his stomach. He had cheekbones like cliffs to go with the prominent shoulder bones, but he didn’t stop removing books from the box. Alana considered him for a second, then went to the circulation desk and picked up her oatmeal. Without a word she set it on the table next to him.
The color in his cheekbones darkened along with his pale blue eyes. She thought he’d refuse the offering, so she spoke hurriedly.
“I wasn’t prepared for you, so give me a little while to think about what you’d be able to do for the library. Do you have a form to track your hours?”
He pulled two sheets of paper stapled together, folded into quarters, from the back pocket of his jeans and handed them to her. Alana walked once again to the circulation desk, sat down, and smoothed open the papers.
Cody Mitchell Burton, she read just below the county court’s seal. Birth date. An address on a county road. A chart with columns for the date, start and end time, and her signature for each day. Easy enough, if she knew what to do with him.
She risked a glance at the table. Cody had his back to her, his shoulders hunched over. His hair curled into the fraying collar of his sweater.
The oatmeal was gone from beside the box.
It was a breakfast perfectly suited to a sedentary librarian a little worried about weight gain as she approached thirty, but probably a drop in the empty stomach of a reed-thin teenage boy. As she watched, he bent over to place the container at the bottom of the plastic-lined trash can next to the table, taking care not to make a single sound, no mean feat in the empty, echoing library. Alana glanced back down at the paperwork in front of her and waited until Cody lifted another handful of books from the box.
“Looks simple enough,” she said as she approached the table.
This banality didn’t even get a shrug. She held the sheet out to him.
“You’re not going to keep it?”
“Your hours, your responsibility,” she said.
His long, thin fingers closed around the paper while his eyes dared her to say anything about the oatmeal. She prayed her own stomach would stay quiet, then added a second prayer that Mrs. Battle hadn’t eaten all the cereal bars stored under the microwave in her office.
Give him something to do. Anything. “You can start by reshelving those books,” she said. “After that, please sweep the entry, run the sweeper along the runner protecting the hardwood floors, and water the plants.”
He looked at her, mocking challenge twisting his lip. “How do I know where they go?”
“I know the librarian at the high school teaches you how to use the Dewey decimal system,” she countered.
“I must have missed that day.”
“I’ll give you a quick tour,” she said, and led him away from the large paneled front doors. The interior didn’t lack for light, as big triptych windows, framed in oak with smaller windows above, opened to the main room. A small fireplace framed in brick with a charmingly carved mantel above set off the reading space by the windows. “Periodicals,” she said, gesturing at the oak magazine racks and the spindles holding the weekly newspapers from Brookings and Sioux Falls. “Children’s section, then hardback fiction on the shelves, with paperbacks in the racks. Nonfiction is housed at the back,” she said, pointing at the taller stacks in the darker rear of the building, then widened the sweep of her arm to include the balcony running along the side of the building. An oak railing theoretically kept people from falling to the main floor, but the wood had weakened over the years, and now Alana brought down reference materials herself. “Our reference section.”