by Fredrick, MJ
***
Trinity watched the interaction through the glass door and her heart broke. She knew the story, of course. Max’s mom’s car had broken down on the side of the road. A driver had swerved into her while she was waiting for the tow truck and she was killed. Max’s father had been on assignment in Iraq and couldn’t come back for days. The child’s only security was his grandparents. And even when Leo had shown up, he’d been so wrapped up in his own grief he didn’t know how to deal with Max’s. Or Max. When the child started acting out, Leo shipped him to his parents and bailed.
Only the story no longer seemed so black-and-white. She didn’t know why she expected any story to. Perhaps she’d lived with her parents too long.
She turned back to her office. Thursday afternoon meant faculty meeting and she was afraid she knew the topic. Their enrollment was terrible as families moved away, to the cities where the jobs were. Bluestone Elementary had gone from having two teachers per grade level to one, and now they were considering combining grade levels—kinder and first, second and third, fourth and fifth, which meant three teachers losing their jobs. She was lucky she’d been able to hold onto her job as long as she had. Honestly, she’d rather lose hers than see Mrs. Conover, who had a young family, or Mrs. Dennis, whose husband was one of Lily Prater’s employees, and his job was on the edge. Trinity at least lived with her parents, though she had been saving for three years to get her own place. She just couldn’t decide if she wanted to live that close to her parents.
Oh, well, her decision might be made for her in a few minutes.
***
Trinity walked out of the faculty meeting nearly two hours later no more certain than when she’d walked in. The school board would allow them to continue the rest of the year, three more months, on the current budget, though it strained the coffers. But next year, if the situation didn’t drastically improve, they’d make the changes, and in addition, Trinity would be a floating counselor, serving the elementary, middle and high school in Bluestone one week, and then work in nearby Wilson another. Okay, nearby but not nearby enough, and not in the winter. Ugh. And she preferred working with the younger children, though her job sometimes gave her an unexpected twinge, especially when she spent time in a first grade class and saw the enthusiasm and innocence of the children. She couldn’t help wondering what kind of personality her daughter had.
She shook herself back to the present. She didn’t expect that any of the solutions presented last night were going to save her job, or Mrs. Conover’s, or Mrs. Dennis’s. What had that lady on the news called it? The new reality.
She didn’t want to go home yet, where the news was always grimmer, no matter what. She’d splurge on dinner at Quinn’s. She was bound to know someone there, and even if she didn’t, she didn’t mind eating by herself.
***
Leo shouldn’t be surprised that Max was less than thrilled with the present. Leo tried to hide his frustration as he urged the reluctant boy out into the front yard, positioned him with his back to the house and the glove dangling limply from his left hand.
“Bring it up, be ready now. You ever played before?”
“In PE. I don’t like it.”
“It takes practice. That’s why I got this.”
“Where’s your glove?”
Huh. Good question. What had he done with it when he packed up the Excelsior house? “Maybe in the attic. I’ll look for it tonight.” He checked his feet, spun the ball in his hand. It had been a long damn time since he’d held one. He forgot how right it felt. He rubbed his thumb over the threads and the muscles in his arm bunched in memory. He had to temper it—no fast balls to his kid, not yet. With a grin, he wound up and tossed a soft one.
Max missed it, but stared at Leo. “You did that just like on TV.”
Leo rolled his shoulders at the bit of pride that rolled through him. “I played in high school and college.”
“Were you good?” Curiosity edged into Max’s tone, and he shifted, bringing the glove up to touch it testingly.
“Had a scholarship.”
“What does that mean?”
“I got to go to college for free.”
“You have to pay to go to college?” Max bent and picked up the ball, put it in his glove, then tried to mimic Leo’s movement. The ball arced, then fell short.
“Good effort. Here, I’ll show you.” He crossed the yard. For the first time since he’d been here, Max let Leo touch him without flinching as he drew back his son’s arm, placed the ball in his hand and showed him how to throw.
They spent an hour throwing, catching, and talking. Max’s questions were hesitant at first, as were his answers to Leo’s questions, but his questions became more spontaneous, random. He never quite reached chatty, but Leo was feeling good when he ushered Max inside.
“I’ll give you your bath.”
“Dad.” Exasperation. “I’m old enough to bathe myself.”
Leo hid a grin. “I thought Grandma had been giving you baths.”
“She has but I’m old enough.”
“Just hard for her to see that, huh?”
Max nodded.
“I forgot to ask if you have homework.”
The look on his face said it all. Well, hell. So much for good parenting.
***
Leo decided to take advantage of the early sunrise to go for a run before he got Max ready for school. He’d found a path that was just shy of decent along the lake. Anything to get the kinks out.
His muscles twinged pleasantly when he bent to tie his shoes. Throwing that ball last night had felt good, had released some of the tension that knotted up his back and shoulders. He hoped Max was willing to repeat it this afternoon.
He stretched in the small unfamiliar room that had been his brother Kevin’s. His older brother had moved out when Leo was five, so Leo hadn’t spent much time in here. Maybe they’d get along better if they’d been closer in age. Maybe Kevin wouldn’t be so impatient with every choice Leo made, including Leo’s marriage to Liv, which had only widened the rift.
Leo straightened and trotted down the stairs. He could hear his parents moving around in their bedroom. He fully intended to be back in time to get Max up and ready, but to do that, he had to avoid talking to his mom now.
He slipped out the front door, wincing at the chirp of the alarm, and started at a brisk walk down to the lake. Mist hung low to the ground, blurring the trees and houses as he strode past. He wished he’d chosen sweatpants instead of shorts, but returning to the house to change would put him behind schedule. He’d warm up soon.
When he returned, he’d have to write a note to Max’s teacher about the missing homework. Max insisted he needed one, and Leo admitted to feeling a little defensive about apologizing for taking some time to bond with his kid. If Max was as much trouble in school as his mother had reported, the teacher should appreciate his effort, right?
He crested the hill that looked onto the lake. The water was like a mirror on the still morning. The birds, who were returning from their trip south, were making a racket in the trees around him. The sound cheered him as he crossed the main street and hit the packed dirt path that curved alongside the lake.
He hadn’t run outside since he lived in Excelsior. Back then, he’d run with an iPod blaring music so he’d keep a rhythm, blocking out everything else. Now he wanted to hear what was around him. Not sure if that was because of his time in a war zone or because he needed to appreciate his surroundings. He listened to the slow putter of a boat heading out for a day of fishing, the occasional splash of a fish. He jogged past Prater Landing, the launch company Lily’s family owned. He saw a couple of guys bundled up checking out the boats lashed to the dock, and he waved as he ran by.
Then he spotted a figure ahead of him on the path, someone sensible enough to wear sweats over her curvy bottom, her blonde ponytail swinging rhythmically as she jogged.
Trinity Madison. What were the odds? He hesitated, not sure if he should approach,
what his welcome would be—the friendly flirt at the town hall meeting or the stern teacher. He pulled alongside her and she jumped a foot to the side. Too late, he saw she was listening to an iPod and hadn’t heard him. He reached out a hand to steady her on the uneven path.
“Sorry about that.” He gestured to the earbuds. “What are you listening to?”
“Maddox Bradley, since they were talking about him at the town hall meeting.”
“Do you remember him? Are you—did you grow up in Bluestone? He was a summer kid.” He didn’t remember her, but she was younger than him. So was Maddox, for that matter. He remembered the guy as a little prick, but the girls had had a different view.
“I vaguely remember him. He was a couple of years older. We moved here about fifteen years ago when my father was assigned to Bluestone Methodist, then I went away to school for a couple of years, and came back here to teach.”
“So you were, what, a freshman?”
“Eighth grade.”
He gestured to the bakery, with its neon “OPEN” sign. “Want some coffee?”
She glanced at the face of her iPod. “I guess I have a few minutes, if we get it to go.”
He guided her across the street with his hand at the small of her back. It had been so long since he’d touched a woman in such a way. Lily didn’t count—she was like the sister he never had, no matter what Quinn thought. And that zing of awareness didn’t buzz through his body when she was around.
They walked to the counter and ordered two coffees to go. While they waited, he turned to her. “So you’re pretty young for a counselor.”
She shrugged and placed her palms on the counter. “I went on and got my masters, since I was already in the swing of going to school. I put in a few years in the classroom before I decided I wanted focus on counseling.”
A smile canted his lips. “Come on, we’re in Bluestone. Do you really see that many problem kids?”
She leveled a look at him. “I also deal with testing and achievement data, as well as kids dealing with divorce, with the loss of family income, with the loss of a mother.”
Ow. He shifted back toward the counter, as if that would make him any less vulnerable to her words. “Does he talk to you? About her?”
She shook her head. “Does he talk to you?”
He frowned, wishing he hadn’t brought it up. It had been a surprisingly pleasant morning, and while the pain of losing Liv was no longer sharp, the pain of what his son was dealing with was. “I mentioned her yesterday in passing and we both kind of froze up.”
“You can’t do that, Mr. Erickson. He has to be able to talk about her, to hear about her. He might think you’ve forgotten about her otherwise.”
Leo folded his hand around the disposable cup, savoring the bite of pain at the heat against his palm. “He doesn’t think that.”
“Sometimes kids do. I know it’s hard for you to talk about, but you should make an effort for him.”
“What if talking about her just reopens old wounds?”
“It might. He might cry, and he might dream about her, and he might hurt. But you’re not doing him a favor by protecting him from his memories of her, from your memories of her.”
“She always worried I’d be killed,” he mused after a few moments. “I’m the one who went off to war zones and disaster areas. She always said I’d leave her alone, a widow. We’d fight about it. I never thought…”
“No, we never do think.”
“I imagine he thinks that now, too. Worries about it.” Though for all Leo knew, Max didn’t care one way or another if Leo died.
“So what are you going to do?”
He shrugged. “No idea. I have some money saved, so I can take a sabbatical for a bit. Not sure if that will do any good or not.”
“I’m sure it will to Max. Hey, maybe you could buy Quinn’s place.” She flashed him a teasing grin.
He grasped onto the change of subject like a lifeline. He hadn’t wanted this to turn into a counseling session. “I doubt Quinn would sell to me if I was the last person on earth. He doesn’t like me much.”
“He doesn’t like anyone.”
“Except Lily.”
She pivoted toward him. “You see it, too?”
“Could’ve been the way he snarled at me when she hugged me the other night. Does she not know?”
Trinity waved her hand. “She has so many other things on her mind it’s not funny. I’m sure she doesn’t notice.”
“Good. He’s not the right guy for her.”
Her smile faded, and she sent him an assessing glance. “You two go back?”
“Oh, yeah. I was her shoulder to cry on many a time.” When some idiot boy broke her heart. When her dad would get after her, always harder on her than on her brothers, no matter how hard she worked.
“But not—romantic.” She blushed as she said it. Huh. A little return on his attraction there.
“No. I didn’t want to get tied to a girl who was tied to this place.” She drew in a little breath, but he didn’t take time to analyze it. “You can pass that on to Quinn if you want.”
She closed her hand around the paper cup and straightened. “I need to get ready for school. Thank you for the coffee. Don’t forget you have a parent conference with Mrs. Boller at eleven.”
She pivoted and took off before he could ask her if she ran every morning. Then he wondered why he cared.
***
Leo was unaccountably nervous as he parked at the supermarket at ten fifty-five for his teacher conference. He hadn’t been to one before—Liv or his mom had taken care of that—another mark against him in the parenting column. He didn’t want to hear all the bad things they were going to tell him about Max. He knew the kid was troubled. He was doing the best he could to fix it.
He tugged at the bottom of his shirt, slammed the driver’s door of the SUV and marched across the street to the school, which of course had plenty of parking at this time of the day.
The building smelled of pencil shavings and paper and baked chicken, things that had always made him excited to come to school. He’d loved school when he was Max’s age. He stepped into the glassed-in office because the signs all told him to sign in.
“I’m Leo Erickson. I’m here for a conference with Max’s teacher, Mrs. Boller,” he told the secretary, who looked vaguely familiar.
The woman looked at him over the tops of her glasses. “I know who you are. I’ve known your mother for years. I saw you at the town hall meeting the other night. Didn’t bother to say hi then, did you?”
“I was kind of—overwhelmed,” he admitted.
“Not too overwhelmed to show off, but then you never were.”
As Leo was puzzling out where he knew this woman from, Trinity stepped out of an office and offered a warm smile. “I’ll take you down to Mrs. Boller’s class. Mrs. Jensen, will you buzz her and let her know we’re on our way?”
“What is it about being in an elementary school that makes you feel seven years old again?” he muttered to Trinity when he escaped the office with a visitor nametag and joined her in the hallway.
“Were you in the office a lot as a kid?”
“Couple times. Never my fault, of course.”
She laughed. “Of course. And I imagined you knew how to charm your way out of it.”
“Why would you say that? Does Max do that?”
Her smile dimmed. “No, Max takes full responsibility for his actions, like he has the weight of the world on his shoulders.”
“He gets that from my brother Kevin.”
“Not just genetics, I don’t think.”
She stopped in front of a bulletin board covered with student essays, surrounded by cute little cardboard children. Leo scanned it for Max’s name, but didn’t see it. He peered closer at the titles. “My Hero.” Yeah, that made sense. Who did Max have as a hero? Not him, certainly.
He heard the sound of children chattering in the room and looked through the narrow window in th
e door. Children were putting books and papers away while the teacher, a woman in her mid-forties, was shuffling things on her table, which was piled with papers. Max sat in the front row, solemn expression, no children around him. Leo’s heart clutched. He’d done the wrong thing taking the kid from Excelsior. He should have done whatever it took to make his life as normal as it could be instead of uprooting him and dropping him into this new environment where everyone already knew each other.
Trinity knocked lightly and opened the door. “Mrs. Boller, this is Max’s dad, Leo Erickson. I can take your class to PE for you so you can start your conference.”
“Oh. Thank you.” The woman’s cheeks pinkened as she stood to greet Leo. “You look just like Max.”
He shifted his gaze to his son, who looked quickly away. “He has his mom’s eyes.”
Max’s gaze shot back to him, and those chocolatey eyes widened. Leo gave in to the urge to cross the room to ruffle the boy’s short dark hair. Max ducked away. Normal, right? Not wanting to be pet in front of his classmates? Leo tried not to let it bother him as Trinity called for the class to line up.
“Dad.” Max hung back and signaled to Leo tensely. “You forgot to give me my note for the homework. I got in trouble.”
Leo rubbed his fingers over his forehead. Crap. “It’s okay. I’ll explain to Mrs. Boller.”
“I don’t get recess today.”
“I’ll talk to her, Max, okay? I’m sorry. It’s my fault. Now go line up. I’ll see you in a bit.” He was too aware of the two women watching him, judging his interaction with his own kid, something he’d felt ever since he’d come back to Bluestone.
He stood until Trinity led the group out of the room, Max at the end, before he turned back to Mrs. Boller, shook her hand and sat in the chair she indicated. Not a tiny student chair, like he’d expected, but when she took her own seat behind the desk, her position was clearly one of authority.
