by Sophie Moss
“Luke?” Colin asked.
“Yeah,” Will said, surprised. “Right, the kid you picked up on the road the other day. I heard about that. Anyway, Jimmy was supposed to go in place of his mom, but no one can find him. She wants me to try and track him down before I head back to Virginia Beach.” He checked the clock on the dashboard. “I can probably spare about fifteen minutes. You want to come?”
Colin was tempted. But he knew what Will would find if he was able to track down Jimmy in the next fifteen minutes. Their contractor would be in no shape to spend the day at school with a bunch of eight-year-olds. As much as he wanted to find Jimmy himself and knock some sense into him, he couldn’t stand the thought of Luke being the only kid at school who didn’t have anyone to spend the day with him.
He remembered the look on Luke’s face when he’d found him running away the other day, when the kid had said no one would even notice he was gone. He remembered the promise he’d made, that he would find someone to fill Jimmy’s shoes. When he’d dropped Luke off and told Shelley what had happened, she’d said they would arrange for a back up. But what if they’d forgotten, or the other person had fallen through?
“You go ahead,” Colin said, already walking back to his own truck. “There’s something else I need to do.”
She was going to kill Jimmy Faulkner, Becca thought, slipping out of the classroom filled with parents and students and jogging down the hallway to greet her father as he made his way across the parking lot from the marina. “I’m so sorry,” she said, holding the door open for him. “Courtney left a message on my phone last night promising that Jimmy was going to be here today.”
“It’s okay.” Her father’s deep voice reverberated off the lockers as the heavy glass doors swung shut behind them. “I thought I might hear from you so I stayed close to shore.”
He was still dressed in his waterman’s clothes. A salt-and-sun-bleached baseball cap shaded his brown eyes and scruffy gray beard. He wore a white T-shirt over faded khakis, and his beat-up sneakers left a trail of mud on the tiles as they walked back to the classroom. He smelled like the Bay and gasoline, and she’d never been more relieved to see him.
When she’d told him about Luke running away on Tuesday because he didn’t have anyone to bring to the event at school this week, he’d offered to fill in at the last minute if no one else stepped up to the plate. She was incredibly grateful he was here, but she knew it wasn’t easy for him to miss a day of work for this.
“How’s he doing?” her father asked, lowering his voice when they neared the door to the classroom.
“He’s upset,” Becca said, pulling her phone out to see if she’d gotten a message back from Jimmy yet. Nothing. She shoved the phone back in her pocket, frustrated. “Luke’s the only one who didn’t have a parent show up today.”
They paused in the doorway, looking across the crowded room at where Luke sat at a table in the back with a few other students and parents. The hood of his sweatshirt was flipped up over his face, hiding it from view. He was slumped down in his seat, sketching in his notebook and trying to make himself as invisible as possible. The sight of the empty chair beside him was enough to make her blood boil all over again.
“If I find him at Rusty’s later—” Becca began.
“Hey,” her father murmured, concern knitting his brow. “I know you’re angry, but I think you should steer clear of Jimmy for a few days.”
Becca frowned. “Why?”
“I don’t think he’s in a good place right now.”
Of course he wasn’t, Becca thought, but that didn’t mean he shouldn’t have to answer for his actions.
“Why don’t you let me talk to him this afternoon?” her father suggested. “Maybe I can convince him to come to a meeting with me later this week.”
A meeting. Becca held his gaze. He meant an AA meeting. Even after all this time, her father still went to a meeting once a week. Not just to remind himself why he’d stopped drinking, but to show the newer members that it was possible to stay sober for over fifteen years.
She appreciated the offer, but she highly doubted that attending an AA meeting was going to cure Jimmy’s drinking habit. And as far as staying out of it…? She didn’t care that her father was the second person to warn her to be careful around Jimmy. There was no way she was letting Jimmy off the hook for this.
But she didn’t have time to argue with him about it right now.
From the growing level of voices and conversations inside the classroom, it sounded like everyone was close to finishing the activity she’d left them with. “Okay,” she said, nodding briefly to her father. “I’ll steer clear, but only for a few days.”
“Good,” he said, giving her shoulder a squeeze.
Taking a deep breath, Becca stepped into the room filled with parents who’d taken the time out from their busy schedules to attend a day of school with their children. She knew it was a struggle for many of them to take a day off work, but by making that sacrifice, they sent a clear message to their children—that education was something to be valued and taken seriously. Every study showed that students whose parents became actively engaged in their school lives were more likely to succeed.
Many of the children in this room, especially the boys, would consider following in their fathers’ footsteps when they graduated high school, by trying to make a living off the Bay. There was nothing wrong with that, but she knew how hard it had been for her father to make ends meet over the years. She wanted to make sure that every child in this room had the building blocks to succeed in case that path became impossible in their lives. With a solid education, they would have something to fall back on. They would have the basic knowledge and skills necessary to thrive in whatever profession they chose.
“All right, everyone,” she said, raising her voice over the noise when she got to the front of the room. “Who wants to share their story?”
A few hands went up.
“Yes, Christine,” she said, smiling down at a shy redhead at one of the front tables. “Why don’t you start by reading us the sentence you picked from the jar? And speak up so everyone can hear you.”
Christine held up the strip of paper she’d pulled from the glass jar that Becca had filled with prompts that morning. “There once was a jellyfish who befriended a crab.”
A few kids giggled as Christine began to read the story her group had created from the prompt. Out of the corner of her eye, Becca watched her father slip into the empty chair beside Luke. She didn’t want to make a big deal about the fact that he was here. It was fairly common for her father to drop by the school. Since the marina was directly across the street, he came in once or twice a week to check in on her or to visit with Shelley in the front office. The children were used to seeing him around.
A few of the parents waved when they spotted him, but most were too engrossed in the activity to notice. Good, she thought. She didn’t want them to focus on anything but the activity. She wanted the transition to be seamless, and not draw attention to Luke in any way.
As Christine wrapped up her story, Becca saw her father lean over and say a few words to Luke. Luke stopped drawing, his gaze darting around the room to see if anyone was watching. Once he realized they weren’t, he nodded in response to whatever her father had said, and then went back to sketching in his notebook. Becca felt a wave of relief when she saw him shift ever so slightly in his chair to move closer to her father.
Looking back at Christine as she finished her story, she smiled and said, “Very nice, Christine. Thank you.” Everyone clapped and Becca looked around the room at the other groups. “Who’s next?”
Robby Porter stood up from the table by the window. “We drew our story with pictures, instead of wrote it.”
Becca smiled and walked over to the other side of the room to give the new group her undivided attention. She wasn’t surprised Robby had decided to tell his story with pictures instead of words. A series of tests from a specialist earlie
r that year had concluded that he was dyslexic. She had been working with him after school on some of the longer reading assignments and he was making great progress. The fact that he had the confidence to lead the storytelling exercise today through pictures made her realize that he was starting to accept that not everyone was going to learn the same way and there was nothing wrong with that.
Feeling herself begin to relax for the first time that morning, Becca leaned a hip against the edge of her desk, listening to Robby as he launched into his story. This was exactly the kind of learning environment she’d worked hard to cultivate and nurture in her classroom. She wanted every one of her students to know that it was okay to think outside the box. Every child was different. Every child had different strengths and weaknesses and would learn what worked best for them. She was lucky to have such a small group of children to work with so she could shift her teaching methods depending on the needs of each class, and not always be stuck to the same curriculum.
She had chosen this activity specifically to begin the day with because it was interactive, and it would show the parents how important creativity could be, even when done fast. Making up stories was something they could do at home with their children, to keep them engaged, to keep their imaginations running wild. Learning didn’t have to be all about tedious homework assignments and getting the highest test score. It could be fun, too.
More laughter broke out throughout the room as Robby regaled the class with a story about a fish that could sprout wings and fly to the moon and back when the tide was high. The accompanying illustrations were equally ridiculous, and the laughter grew louder as some of the kids started passing them around the room. Bob Hargrove blushed when his daughter made fun of the stick figure he’d drawn of a person pointing up at the sky from the end of a dock. “Hey,” he said defensively, “I never said art was my thing.”
Becca stole another glance at Luke. He had stopped sketching in his own notebook and was grinning down at one of Robby’s drawings of a fish with huge wings, laughing with her father at how primitive it was.
“Look, Miss Haddaway,” Audrey Morris said from a few chairs away as she held up the drawing she’d done. “It’s a seahorse.”
“That’s wonderful, Audrey,” Becca said, smiling. Beside Audrey, her mother, Rachel Morris, beamed with pride. The unexpected pang of envy came fast and hard, before Becca could stop it. She would never be sitting in this classroom with one of her own kids, Becca realized suddenly. She would never be sitting in any of these rooms, surrounded by her friends and neighbors, people she’d known her whole life, drawing pictures and making up stories about the world she’d grown up in.
I don’t want to leave. The truth she had been trying so hard to push away for the past several weeks rose up, lodging in the back of her throat. She swallowed, hard, forcing it back. “Okay, everyone,” she called, raising her voice over the swell of conversations. She needed to regain control, not just of the class, but of herself. This wasn’t the time or the place to fall apart. “We still have a lot to do today, so why don’t we move onto the next—”
A tall figure stepped into the doorway and she froze, every muscle in her body contracting when Colin’s blue-eyed gaze met hers. What was he doing here? Her heart rate kicked into overdrive. Her palms began to sweat. The voices in the room faded to a quiet murmur as everyone turned to see what she was looking at.
Colin held her gaze for another long beat before breaking contact and scanning the faces in the room. When he spotted Luke at a table in the back, he stepped through the doorway, cutting a clear path toward the child. Every pair of female eyes followed him as he crossed the room. Several of the men sat up straighter, sucking in their beer guts when he passed.
He wasn’t the kind of man who could slip into a room unnoticed. Becca’s fingers curled around the chipped wood at the edge of her desk. She hadn’t seen him or spoken to him since the night before, when she’d gone to his apartment, when she’d kissed him. The memories swam back—his lips, warm and firm and hungry on hers. His hands, strong and calloused, cruising over her hips, her waist, her breasts. His voice, desperate and pleading, asking her to stay.
She looked quickly over at Luke, worried he wouldn’t want the attention. But Luke’s eyes were focused like lasers on Colin and it didn’t appear that he seemed at all concerned that everyone else had gone completely quiet.
“Hey, buddy,” Colin said easily, as if it were just the two of them in the room and close to thirty people weren’t hanging on his every word. “Your uncle had to stay at the inn and work on something for me. I told him I’d stop by and see how you were doing.”
It was a lie, Becca thought. Why would he come here and lie for Jimmy? Why would he cover for him this way? As far as she knew, Colin hadn’t had any contact with Luke before the other day when he’d picked him up on the side of the road. He barely knew him.
Luke blinked, but he didn’t hunch his shoulders or shy away from the attention. “I’m fine.”
Colin gestured to the drawing of the flying fish. “What are you working on?”
Luke quickly passed the paper to another person at the table. “That’s not mine.”
Snagging a chair from the back of the room, Colin pulled it up to the table. Nodding to the rest of the parents in the group, he sat down.
Luke stared at him. “You’re…staying?”
Colin nodded.
Luke’s eyes widened. “For how long?”
“As long as you want me to.”
Luke’s mouth fell open, stayed that way for a few beats, then broke into a wide grin. “Cool,” he breathed, pushing the hood of his sweatshirt back from his face and scooting his chair closer to the table.
Beside him, Colin leaned back in his seat, folded his hands in his lap, and looked back at Becca, as if it were perfectly normal for him to offer to spend the day in a classroom with a child he barely knew.
Becca was aware, in some far off corner of her mind, that it was time for her to say something, to take charge of the room again. But her tongue felt thick, her mouth dry. She didn’t trust herself to speak. Not yet.
How was she going to handle having him here, in her classroom, for the rest of the day?
She could barely be in the same room with Colin for five minutes without wanting to touch him, without wanting to be near him, without feeling—every time he looked at her—like her entire body was on fire. Tearing her eyes from his, she looked up at the clock in the back of the room, silently counting the hours left in the day.
The second hand ticked. A teacher’s voice from a neighboring classroom drifted down the hall. Her gaze swept over the walls covered in student artwork, the wooden counter in the back overflowing with craft supplies, the bookshelves filled with worn paperbacks and hand-me-down textbooks, the cubbies painted bright rainbow colors.
Just as she had when he’d first come to her house, she imagined how this room might look through his eyes—how this classroom, her mother’s old classroom, a place that meant almost as much to her as her own home, would look to him. Nerves jumped, low in her belly, as if this were the first class she’d ever taught, the first time she’d ever stood up in front of a room full of parents and students.
Why did she care so much about what he thought?
When someone quietly cleared her throat in the front row, she glanced down, jolted from her thoughts. Annie looked back at her, watching her with a strange expression on her face. It was the first time Annie had really looked at her in days, not since the news about the school had come out.
Becca swallowed, looking away. Many of her friends were watching her strangely now. When one woman lifted an eyebrow, Becca felt a flush of color creep up her cheeks. Turning, as several more brows went up, she glanced back at the day’s schedule printed in neat handwriting on the chalkboard. “Let’s move on,” she said quickly, grabbing a math workbook from the pile of books on her desk. “Everybody open to page fifteen.”
“What about the ne
xt story?” a child in the front row asked.
Right, Becca thought, her heart fluttering in her throat. The next story. They still had two more to go. She set the book back down, her hands shaking as she wiped her damp palms over the front of her skirt. How was she going to pull this off if she couldn’t get a hold of herself?
“Erica,” she said, forcing herself to get a grip as she called on one of the girls at the table in the back by the door. Her voice sounded funny, far off, like she was speaking through a tunnel. “Why don’t you read us your story?”
Erica began to read the story, and Becca stole a glance at her father. He was watching her closely, a worried look on his face. She attempted a smile to put him at ease, but it felt forced, even to her. She rested her hands on the back of her chair, trying to regain her composure, letting a full minute pass before risking a glance back over at Colin.
When she did, she saw that his body was relaxed, his expression perfectly calm, but he was gazing back at her with the same heat and intensity as he had the night before. And she knew, without a doubt, that he hadn’t taken his eyes off her since the moment he’d sat down.
She tried, fleetingly, to imagine that it was Tom in that chair, that it was Tom who had dropped everything to be here for Luke today, that it was Tom who had cleared his schedule to spend the day at the school.
But she knew he would never do that.
He would never dream of taking off a day of work to hang out with a kid he barely knew. He hadn’t even been willing to take Easter Sunday off to spend the day with her and her father.
Colin held her gaze, as if it were just the two of them in the room, as if it had always been just the two of them.
She heard the faintest sound of silver charms clinking together—a delicate, familiar song drifting over the wind—and her heart simply turned over in her chest.
We have a problem,” Jenna Price said, walking into Tom’s office in Baltimore and shutting the door.
