Swinging his helmet by its strap over his shoulder, he set off down the road, feeling like a trailblazer discovering the promised land—which, in his own way, he was.
HOUSTON TAUGHT third grade at Carsonville Elementary School, which was enough of a challenge to put all thoughts of everything else out of her mind even on an ordinary day. With twenty-eight active eight-year-olds all suffering from spring fever, this was by no means an ordinary day. There were two fights, one lost lunch box and one playground accident. The class gerbil escaped. After eight-thirty that day, Houston barely gave the man in the silver suit another thought.
Just when she thought she might get through the day with her sanity intact, she was called to the office for a phone call.
The sheepish voice on the other end made her stomach clench.
“Hi, hon. Look, I’m sorry for bothering you at school…”
“I have asked you not to call me here, Mike,” Houston reminded her ex-husband as politely as she could manage. She was acutely aware of the school secretary a few feet away, who was trying a little too hard to pretend she wasn’t listening. “It’s hard for me to get away from the classroom.”
“I know, and I really hate to do it, but I’ve got a little emergency here.” He gave one of those phony, self-deprecating laughs that set her teeth on edge. “Yeah, I know it’s not the first time.”
“What’s the problem?” Houston inquired tightly. She knew what the problem was, and she didn’t particularly want to hear it. But she also knew hearing it was inevitable.
“Nothing seventy-five dollars couldn’t fix.”
Houston didn’t know whether to be relieved or infuriated. It could have been triple that amount, so she was relieved. But seventy-five dollars was seventy-five she couldn’t spare, and she was furious.
She deliberately turned her back on the secretary—and found herself looking straight into the face of her principal, Millie Shores. Millie was more than Houston’s principal, she was also her best friend. She stood now leaning against the doorway of her office with a very disapproving look on her face. Millie was of the opinion that ex-husbands, like old horses, should be humanely put to sleep when they had outlived their usefulness.
Houston said to Mike, “I thought you had gotten that job over in Sable.” She didn’t want to be having this conversation over the phone; she knew it was a battle she couldn’t win and she didn’t know why she even wasted the energy trying. Habit, perhaps.
“I did,” he insisted. “But that’s the thing—first check isn’t for two weeks and I’ve got to have gas money, don’t I? I’ll pay you back, hon, first check.”
“Now where have I heard that before?” Houston murmured. She knew it was futile, but she just couldn’t resist.
He bristled—or pretended to. “Hey, do you think I like this? Do you think I like being unemployed, begging my ex-wife for grocery money?”
“As a matter of fact,” Houston said, “I do.”
The hurt silence on the other end of the phone was astonishingly convincing. Houston felt remorse creeping through her like some insidious parasite, turning her spine to jelly.
His tone was subdued as he said, “I’m sorry I bothered you.”
“No, wait.” Houston couldn’t believe those words were coming out of her mouth. She hated herself.
She sighed, and her own tone dropped a fraction as she said, “I know you’re trying. All right. But, Mike, you can’t keep doing this.”
“Great.” He cheered immediately. “Just drop it in the mail, will you? To my mother’s address. Thanks, hon!”
The final bell of the day rang as she hung up the phone, feeling like the world’s biggest chump.
Millie beckoned her into her office, her expression stern. “You,” she informed her, “are a professional doormat.”
Houston groaned. “I know.”
“If you stood up to the kids in your class the way you stand up to that leech you call an ex-husband, the animals would be running the zoo.”
Houston sank into the chair beside the door, sighing as she tugged loose the band that held her mass of bright red curls into an unruly semblance of a ponytail. “I know.”
“The guy owes you over ten thousand dollars in back child support and you’re giving him money!”
“I know, I know. I’m a wimp and a sucker and if there were a law against stupidity I’d be doing ten to life.” She rebundled the ponytail into a slightly neater mass and stuffed it back into the elastic band.
“Why do you let him do this to you?”
“Because it’s easier to pay him than to listen to him whine.”
Millie leaned against the desk, folded her arms across her chest and looked as though she was going to launch into an extremely familiar lecture. Houston met her stare for stare, however, and in the end all she said was, “Other than that, how’s life treating you?”
Houston considered the question as she pushed up the sleeves of her sweater, noticed a spaghetti-sauce stain on her cuff and tried to brush off a smear of plaster of paris that seemed to have become embedded in the weave of her skirt.
“The car’s acting up again,” she said. “I’ve got another leak in the roof. Kelly Cramer threw up on Jeff Holbrook’s new jacket—guess who Jeff’s mother is going to blame for that? And—oh yeah, a man wearing nothing but a silver jumpsuit fell out of my apple tree this morning.”
Millie lifted an eyebrow. “Good-looking?”
Houston grinned. “You bet.”
“There, you see? Things are looking up.” Millie turned to start packing her briefcase. “I hope you didn’t let him get away. This might have been the one.”
Houston shook her head ruefully. “What is it with you happily married women? You can’t let anybody be single in peace.”
“I’d just like to prove to you that all men aren’t like that blight on the face of humanity you married the first time.”
“I know that. I don’t have to marry the first thing in pants I see to prove it.”
Millie closed her briefcase and turned to Houston with a puzzled frown. “What was he doing in your apple tree?”
Houston stood with a shrug. “I don’t have a clue. I think he was making a movie.”
“In a silver jumpsuit?”
They started down the hall. “A great-fitting silver jumpsuit.”
They looked at each other and grinned.
They made their way down the hall against the stream of noisy, exuberant children, occasionally halting a crime in progress with a stern look or a sharply called name. That those crimes were nothing more serious than a book in the process of being thrown or a wall about to be defaced with a pencil was only one of the reasons Houston had chosen to bring up her son in a small town and to teach in a rural elementary school.
Millie asked, “Do you want me to send Len over to look at your roof?”
Millie’s husband, Len, was the most mechanically incompetent man Houston had ever known. Millie knew that. Len knew that. Nonetheless, Millie felt obliged to volunteer Len to fix whatever went wrong in Houston’s life—because, presumably, he was a man and Millie’s to volunteer.
“Sure,” responded Houston. “He can look at it and tell me what a good job I did fixing it.”
They stopped by Houston’s classroom to pick up her papers and books, then stepped out into the sun-splashed walkway. Millie grimaced and dug in her purse for sunglasses. “God, I hate this time of year. Why can’t we skip right from Christmas to summer vacation?”
Houston chuckled. “You’ve got to be the only person in the world who hates spring.”
“Me and several hundred other elementary school principals. I mean, look at them. These kids are wild.”
“Spring fever,” Houston agreed.
“You’re lucky Mark’s such a sweet boy. Good student, too.”
“The other kids pick on him.”
“They always pick on the smart kids.”
“Nerds, you mean.”
M
illie was indignant. “Mark is not a nerd!”
“I know that,” Houston admitted. “It’s just that he worries me sometimes. He doesn’t have many friends, and he’s so serious. He’s driving me crazy wanting a CD-rom for his computer. Why can’t he want roller blades like the other kids? What is a CD-rom, anyway?”
“About six hundred dollars.”
“Great.”
“He’s probably going to grow up to be another Stephen Hawking.”
“Or Ted Bundy.”
“Could be. I understand that his mother was a pessimist, too.”
Houston spotted Mark across the parking lot, struggling to keep his backpack from slipping off his narrow shoulders. She waved to him. “Well, I’d better get my little genius—or serial killer—home. It looks like he has a lot of homework, and I have to stop by the hardware store for shingles.”
Millie stopped walking. “Listen, Houston. This might not be the best time to bring this up, but Karen has spoken to me again about putting Mark up a grade. She’ll be calling you, but I thought you’d want to be thinking about it.”
Karen was Mark’s teacher, and they had had this discussion before. And every time they had it, Houston ended up feeling like a bad mother.
She said reluctantly, “You know how I feel about skipping grades, Millie.”
“I wish we had a gifted program here, but we don’t. The best we can do is try to keep our exceptional students from becoming bored with their grade-level work. And since he’ll be going to middle school next year, anyway, the jump won’t be so drastic as it would have been this year.”
“But what about social development?”
Millie smiled sympathetically and patted her arm. “You think about it. Talk it over with Mark.”
Houston nodded, straightening her shoulders. “Right. Just another one of those average, run-of-the-mill, life-changing decisions to make.”
Houston started for her car.
“Do you want to go to Jordo’s for dinner?”
Houston grimaced. “Sorry. Can’t afford it.”
She grinned as Millie threw up her hands in exasperation and walked off.
Chapter Two
There was no accepted scientific theory to back it, but one thing Quinn had discovered in his experience as a time traveler was a certain tendency toward predestination, even synchronicity, in the universe. He had discovered during the course of the day that he was in a place called Carsonville, Iowa, in the United States of America. The date was May 21, 1994, which meant he was only ten years and several hundred miles off target. The population of Carsonville and its surrounding county was 18,621. He was walking along the side of the highway some five miles north of his original landing site in the apple tree of one angry red-haired lady, yet he was not at all surprised to see—of all 18,621 possible candidates—that same angry red-haired lady standing beside the raised hood of a stalled car just ahead.
Synchronicity. Someday he would write a paper.
Her expression grew puzzled as he approached. His traveling clothes were stored at the bottom of the canvas duffel he carried over his shoulder, and he was wearing the chambray shirt and denim pants that seemed to be the uniform of the middle classes for most of the last half of the twentieth century. She didn’t recognize him immediately, which was no surprise.
He, on the other hand, could not have mistaken her had she been one of a hundred women in a crush at a New York subway stop, instead of standing alone on the side of an empty rural highway. She was wearing the same print shirtwaist and white canvas shoes she had been wearing that morning, of course, and her wildly curly strawberry-colored hair was drawn away from her face.
The sun was in her eyes, and she squinted to shade them. The wind blew her skirt between her legs and then billowed it away again, shaping and caressing her body. Tiny curls escaped their binding and played around her head like a halo. Sunlight highlighted every freckle on her face and turned her eyes into crinkled pools of cellophane.
Looking at her, Quinn felt his breath catch and his steps slow ever so slightly. In the vastness and glory of this incredible century there were many scenes that were etched indelibly on Quinn’s mind, but never had one affected him with its simple unadorned beauty the way the sight of that slender red-haired woman in the windblown dress did.
The picture she made, leaning against the broken car in her yellow print dress with the empty road curving behind her and the wind and the sun playing with the curves of her body was a masterpiece someone had forgotten to paint. It was a portrait he wanted to capture in his mind forever, to hold like a talisman against the barren lonely days that were sure to come.
He was about ten feet from her then, and she must have noticed the odd expression on his face, the slowing of his steps, because her own expression changed as she looked at him more closely. It was then that she recognized him. Surprise and wariness mingled on her face, and she turned to say something to her son, who was studying the network of wire and hoses under the hood of the car as though they formed some words he could read.
Quinn smiled as he grew within speaking distance. “Hi,” he said. “Having trouble?”
The boy was looking at him with frank curiosity. The woman was still cautious—and a little disbelieving. “It is you, isn’t it? The man from the apple tree!”
He grinned and shifted his duffel to the other shoulder, extending his hand. “I’m not sure that’s how I want to be known from now on. The name is Quinn.”
“Yes, I remember,” she murmured uncertainly. Then she seemed to come to a decision and accepted his handshake. “My name is Houston Malloy, and this is my son, Mark.”
Her hand was small and strong, and he tried not to hold it too long before turning to nod to Mark. “Nice to meet you both.”
But the boy was not so easily impressed. He regarded Quinn skeptically and asked, “What are you doing way out here?”
He answered, “I’ve been to town.”
Houston stared. “On foot?”
“It’s the best way to see the country.”
A moment of silence fell in which he felt himself the object of intense scrutiny by the boy and abject curiosity by the woman, and in which he tried very hard not to be too fascinated by the way the sunlight sparkled in her eyes. He had always found it a good practice not to become too involved with the locals, at least not until he had his cover story well established. With such an inauspicious beginning as he had had with this family, it was more important than ever that he not expose himself to many hard-to-answer questions. On the other hand, his only chance of returning home might well be lying somewhere beneath her apple tree right now. He would have to go back eventually to search, and that search would be a great deal easier with the permission of the property owner.
Synchronicity? Or serendipity?
He nodded toward the car. “Would you like me to take a look?
Houston hesitated, clearly debating the odds against a man who preferred to travel on foot knowing anything at all about repairing an automobile. Then she shrugged. “It won’t do any good. It’s the timing belt or the alternator or something major like that. It’s always something major—and expensive—on this car. Someone we know will be by sooner or later. I’ll get a ride home and call the tow truck.”
Quinn let his duffel bag slide to the ground, then moved to examine the internal components of the car. Mark watched him closely, and so did Houston.
She knew she should be suspicious. First the man appeared out of nowhere in a place no one had any business being and with no good explanation for his presence there, and then he just happened to be hiking down the highway at the same moment her car broke down. Coincidence? Maybe. Probably. What else, in fact, could it be? But there was something very strange about this man…and perhaps the strangest thing was that it was so easy to trust him.
Quinn turned to take a small pouch of tools from his duffel bag and returned to the engine compartment, muttering something about combustion engines.
Houston moved closer. “What did you say?”
“He said the concept of the internal combustion engine was a mistake,” Mark informed her.
Houston muttered, “I can’t say I disagree with him there.”
She tried to peer over his shoulder as he took one tiny instrument after another from the pouch. “What are those—wrenches?”
He grunted in reply.
“Must be for imports, huh?”
Mark said, “I don’t think they’re wrenches, Mom.”
The instruments spun and hissed, punctuated by Quinn’s mutterings under his breath. Mark looked disgusted. “I don’t know what you’re doing, mister, but it’s not going to work.”
“Really,” Houston said anxiously, “I appreciate your trying to help but it’s no problem. This happens all the time.” It was beginning to occur to her that what might have been a minor breakdown could easily become an irreparable problem if she allowed this obviously inexperienced stranger to continue to do things beneath the hood. Even Mark disapproved.
Quinn straightened up and tucked the tools back into their pouch. His hands were not even greasy. “Try it now,” he said.
Houston regarded him skeptically.
“The engine,” he repeated, as though she might have misunderstood him the first time. “Turn it on.”
What was it about men that made them so certain that all it took was the magical touch of a pair of male hands to repair anything from a sagging shelf to the most complex piece of space-age technology? And if a woman was to be so bold as to question their judgment or refuse their help, their egos were crushed forever.
Trying to hide her sour look, Houston got behind the wheel and turned the key.
Houston’s car was ten years old. It drank a quart of oil a day, threw a rod every six months or so and got approximately eight miles to the gallon. It had never, in all the time Houston had owned it, started on the first try. Until today.
She turned the key, and the ignition caught and hummed so softly that, for a moment, she didn’t recognize the sound.
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