by Erin Wright
“Abby and Wyatt Miller are adopting him – making him their own,” he told Brooksy. “Like you’re my daughter – Juan is gonna be their son, forever.” He paused for a moment, searching for just the right words for the next part. “His…uh…his biological parents ain’t, you know, real good people, you see, so they gave him up—”
“His parents sold little girls to other people,” Brooksy interrupted him, soundin’ official, as if she knew exactly what that meant.
Elijah felt ill again. His daughter was learnin’ the word “spic” and all about human trafficking? He was suddenly wishing very hard that he were back to changing her diapers. He’d hated to do it back then, of course, but now…
He’d take a real doozy of a diaper over this any day of the week.
“And they weren’t nice to him, neither,” she added. “He likes his parents now. They feed him every day – good food, even – and they don’t leave him places with strangers for weeks and weeks.”
“That’s…that’s good,” Elijah finally managed, not sure what else to say. It was good, of course, but that weren’t a hell of a high bar to leap over, and the fact that Juan had ever had parents that did otherwise made Eli wanna rearrange some noses.
“So, what’s a spic?” Brooksy persisted.
Dammit. Her long attention span sure as hell didn’t come from him. When he was her age, he could hardly sit still for more than two minutes at a time, always wantin’ to be off running and playing and jumping, something that his teachers sure didn’t appreciate.
Brooksy, on the other hand, could sit and focus on something for what seemed like hours. Especially if that “something” weren’t something he wanted to discuss.
He looked at her and found her gray-green eyes – an exact match to his – was still pinned on him. He sighed.
“That’s a…not nice way of saying he’s Hispanic,” Elijah finally settled on. “He’s from Mexico, right? Well, this is a mean way of saying that.”
“Is it bad to be from Mexico?”
The urge to run and move and be anywhere but there at that moment was just as strong as it’d been when he’d been in fifth grade. He shifted on his bucket-cum-seat.
“No, not at all,” he reassured her. “Mexico is just another country, like the US is a country. Some people are just assholes.”
“That’s Dayton all right,” Brooksy said morosely. “He’s a great, big asshole.”
“Brooksy!” Elijah choked out.
“What?” she volleyed back defensively. “You’re the one who said it.”
Elijah squeezed his eyes shut. When he’d found out Sarah was pregnant, he hadn’t been happy, of course, and had spent nine months dreading the idea of changing a baby’s diaper and trying to get ‘em to go to sleep and living through screamin’ fits…
But as soon as they laid the reddest, most wrinkled, ugliest baby in the world in his arms, he’d fallen in love with her on the spot. He was gonna be a perfect daddy. He was never gonna screw nothin’ up. He was never gonna swear around her or get angry and yell or nothing.
Ten years later…
Well, that hadn’t exactly worked out the way he’d been plannin’.
“Why didn’t you tell Miss Lambert about this?” Elijah asked, deciding to sidestep the swearing issue for the moment. He’d figure out what to do on that topic later. “If Dayton was calling Juan bad names, why didn’t you tell Miss Lambert?”
“I thought Juan would get in trouble,” Brooksy said, shrugging. “I didn’t know what ‘spic’ meant, but I knew it wasn’t nice, so maybe Juan would be in trouble for being it.”
Elijah tried to follow the convoluted ten-year-old logic but got lost about halfway through.
“Dayton keeps telling Juan that they have to meet up by the swing set after school,” she continued matter-of-factly. “Dayton wants to fight. Juan can’t do it; Abby or Wyatt is always there right after school to pick him up. Dayton says that he’s a scaredy cat and that’s why he won’t fight. But Juan isn’t. Juan is the nicest boy in the whole fifth grade!” she finished loyally.
Elijah opened up his mouth to point out that being the nicest boy in the whole fifth grade didn’t mean that he weren’t also a scaredy cat, but then decided against it. He weren’t about to egg on a fight between a racist bully and an adopted kid who’d been through enough trauma to last a lifetime.
“You hafta tell Miss Lambert what’s going on,” Elijah said instead. “Your teacher…she’ll listen. Juan won’t be in trouble, I promise.”
Brooksy looked at him skeptically, clearly unconvinced.
“She’s one of the good ones,” he promised her. He weren’t sure what caused him to say that – he hardly knew Hannah at all. She was too damn quiet to know a thing about her. But somehow, it felt…right. He knew the words was true, even if he couldn’t say why. “But Brooks, you cannot just go around kickin’ bullies in the leg.” Even as the words came out of his mouth, he hated himself for it. When he’d been a kid and he’d been told to go talk to an adult whenever something bad had happened, all he could think was that his parents and his teachers didn’t have a damn clue of what it were really like out on the playground. If they had, they never would’ve given him such dumbass advice.
Now that he was an adult and a parent…he could see it. It sure ain’t fun and he sure didn’t like it, but dammit all, they’d been right. He couldn’t just go around, avenging the wrongs of the world whenever he wanted.
No, that was Aaron’s job.
Why didn’t Elijah become a cop like his brother? There were more than a few people he’d like to kick in the shins if given half a chance.
He forced himself to focus, and began ticking the items off on his fingers. “You need to talk to Miss Lambert about Dayton and Juan; you can’t kick Dayton in the shins no more; and you shouldn’t never use the word that Dayton used.”
“Don’t say ‘spic’?” Brooksy asked, her forehead wrinkled with confusion.
“Yeah, that word,” Elijah said dryly. “It’s not a nice one. It’s much worse than ‘asshole.’”
“Does that mean I can say ‘ass—’”
“Brooksy!” Elijah cut her off, glaring at her. The laughing grin died away as she looked up at him and saw that he weren’t kidding.
“Sorry, Dad,” she mumbled.
Yeah, he’d take a stinky diaper over a swearing ten-year-old any day of the week.
Chapter 10
Hannah
The fluorescent light bulb overhead flickered endlessly, the flashing and sputtering of the horrid light giving Hannah a downright awful headache from it all.
“I really hate you,” she mumbled up at the light fixture as she walked over to the doorway of the classroom to flick the switch off. She’d choose to sit through three – no, make that four – professional development classes over submitting a work order to the school district to get repairs done, but at this point, she really didn’t have a choice.
It wouldn’t be so bad except the head of maintenance, Mr. Fuhlman, made it his personal goal in life to—
“I can help you with that,” a male voice said right in her ear.
She screamed and yelped and spun in a half-circle with her hand clasped over her mouth, her heart going a million miles an hour, to find Mr. Morland looking down at her and laughing.
“I’m sorry,” he said, holding up a hand placatingly, looking not a bit sorry at all. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I just thought I’d offer to help ya out.” He squinted up at the turned-off light fixture. “Flickering a bunch on ya?”
“Yes. It’s enough to—”
She stopped. He didn’t want to hear about how it gave her headaches. People didn’t care about that sort of thing about her. She just wasn’t interesting enough.
He waited for a moment for her to continue, but when she didn’t, he flipped the switch on the wall again, bringing the flickering fixture to life.
“Hmmm…” he said, studying the godawful light for a moment be
fore thankfully flipping it back off again. “I’ll take care of it for you,” he promised, turning back to her. “That way, you don’t hafta talk to Mr. Fuhlman about it. It ain’t nice to talk bad of others, but…”
He trailed off.
Usually almost mute around the male species – at least around the ones taller than her – Hannah felt the bizarre compulsion to tell Mr. Morland a too-strange-to-be-true-and-yet-it-was story about Mr. Fuhlman.
Just because it seemed like he’d enjoy it.
“Last week,” she blurted out before she could come to her senses, “he blamed Mrs. Crofts for the fact that a ceiling tile had fallen on a student while she was teaching. Said it was her fault for not doing regular maintenance on the ceiling and keeping it in good shape.”
Mr. Morland bust up laughing, his eyes crinkling delightfully with contagious humor. Hannah watched him closely, trying to figure out if he was just humoring her or if he honest to Pete thought she was funny. “I missed that one,” he admitted when he finally stopped laughing. “I ain’t surprised, though. Is, uh, is the kid okay?”
Either he’s the world’s best actor, or he really did think I was funny.
She wasn’t sure what to think about that. Something that insanely crazy didn’t happen every day.
“Yeah, it mostly hit the desk,” she responded, forcing herself to talk rather than just hurry and hide behind her desk again like every nerve-ending in her body was telling her to do. “Surprised the heck out of everyone, of course, but the student’s fine.” Right in the middle of this spate of words that she wasn’t even quite sure where they were coming from, an attack of guilt overwhelmed her, making her feel bad for bad-mouthing the older gentleman. “Mr. Fuhlman – he’s good at fixing things, he is,” she hurried on. “He just…he gives out a lot of guff before he gets to the fixing part of things.”
“That’s an awful nice way of saying it,” Mr. Morland said dryly. “Your problem is easy enough to fix, though. It’s just your ballast – it’s going out. I’ll need to get supplies to replace it, so it won’t be until tomorrow after school that I can work on it. Is that soon enough?”
“Sure,” she said, grateful and a little awed that he was still talking to her. She casually clasped her hands behind her back and pinched her arm as hard as she could.
Ouch!
Yup, she was definitely awake.
She gingerly rubbed at the sore spot as she asked, “How do you know about ballasts? Did this happen a lot at Mr. Petrol’s?”
He shrugged nonchalantly. “Nah, we had a contract for all of our maintenance there. I never did more than plunge a toilet when I had to. But I had this same problem with the light in my garage. Did a YouTube search to figure out how to fix it. Pretty straightforward.”
“Not to me, it isn’t,” she mumbled. She had all of the mechanical skills of a drunk monkey high on cocaine. Asking her to fix something…she had a better chance of figuring out how to fly to the moon the following Thursday.
“Brooksy talked to you about Dayton, right?” Mr. Morland asked, interrupting her self-deprecating thoughts. “About his language and such?”
“Yes,” Hannah said, keeping a straight face like any proper elementary teacher should, but his question reminded her of the discussion she’d had with Brooklyn, and…well, she bust up laughing. Also not something she did often around men. “I meant to say – you must’ve given her quite the talking to about language. She kept going the rounds with me, refusing to say what Dayton had called Juan because you’d told her not to use that word anymore. I finally had to cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die promise that I wouldn’t be mad at her and reassure her that it was okay to repeat a word but not to say it in anger. Still, she whispered it in my ear.”
All
These
Words
Where are they coming from? Have aliens come and taken over my body?
Mr. Morland looked at her and grinned, revealing a slight crossover of his two front teeth that she hadn’t noticed before. It made his smile even more endearing and heart-stopping than it would’ve been otherwise.
Which, considering how her heart was racing at the moment, Hannah didn’t figure she really needed much help on.
“I, uhhh, might’ve made that point pretty clear,” he admitted. “I just didn’t want her running around, spoutin’ it off to anyone who stood still for more than three seconds at a time.”
“No, that wouldn’t be good,” Hannah agreed soberly. “I will be talking to Dayton’s parents about that language; my worry is, that’s who he learned it…” She trailed to a stop.
She really couldn’t gossip about the parents of her students with other parents of her students. That broke like ten ethics rules.
Hannah was many things, but rule-breaker? Not on that list.
“Well anyway,” she said overly brightly, “I’m glad we figured it out.” She still had a classroom full of fighting and bullying and she had no idea how to bring the class together as a cohesive whole, but at least one mystery was solved. “We talked about how she can’t just kick Dayton whenever he isn’t being nice to Juan; she informed me – pretty morosely – that you’d already told her that. She didn’t seem happy about it.”
“She’s my mini-me,” Mr. Morland said with a laugh. “Seeing wrongs in the world…she wants to fix ‘em herself. After her karate chop to that kid’s leg, I’m thinkin’ she should look at becoming a cop or somethin’.”
Mini-me…listening to Mr. Morland talk about his daughter was ridiculously adorable. His willingness to become a janitor so he could see Brooklyn; his obvious love and pride in her…
Yeah, he was impressive as hell. As someone who’d lay down her life for her students and was all-too-often disappointed by parents who didn’t seem to feel the same way about their children, Mr. Morland was getting more attractive by the moment.
Which he really, really didn’t need help with.
She gulped.
“I told her she could talk to you anytime,” he said seriously, apparently completely oblivious to the thoughts racing through her mind. “She didn’t seem to think that she could talk to a teacher ‘bout what was happening, but I told her you was one of the good guys.”
Hannah felt a large lump form in her throat from the kindness of his words. Did he have any idea how much they meant to her? She searched his face. He couldn’t know.
He couldn’t.
And then the story behind his words registered fully and Hannah gulped. “I…I understand her hesitation,” she finally got out. “Her…uh…the teacher she had for fourth grade…he isn’t…well, I guess I wouldn’t choose him to teach a child of mine. If given the choice.”
Which was going to go down in history as the largest understatement ever uttered. In her not-so-humble opinion, Mr. Pettengill shouldn’t be in charge of teaching a pet rock, let alone a sentient being.
“So after a rough year with him, she don’t exactly like teachers anymore?” Mr. Morland asked softly, the concern for his daughter obvious from a mile away.
“That’s my guess. She doesn’t trust me enough to tell me that, but…” She shrugged. “It makes sense.”
He nodded slowly, and she could tell that something was bothering him, but he didn’t say another word for a long time. So long, in fact, she began shifting from foot to foot, wondering how she could excuse herself from the conversation and go hide behind her desk when he finally spoke again.
“I’ll be back tomorrow to work on the ballast,” he said quietly, and then slipped out the door, the clanking of the mop bucket starting up as he began pushing it down the hallway.
Hannah walked slowly back up to the front of the classroom and sank into her chair behind her desk, automatically adjusting her weight to accommodate for the wonkiness of the chair so she didn’t pitch off it and onto the floor.
She was in trouble. Deep trouble.
Falling into lust with a student’s father…
Deep, deep, deep trouble.
&nb
sp; Chapter 11
Elijah
He climbed up the ladder and slid the cover off the broken light fixture. Below him, he could see Hannah hovering out of the corner of his eye, watching his every movement.
“You don’t need to watch if you don’t want to,” he said as he carefully lowered the cover down to the floor and leaned it up against the ladder. “If you’ve got other things to do, you’re free to go do ‘em.”
“Okay,” she said agreeably, not moving an inch, her teeth worrying her bottom lip.
Elijah quit sneakin’ peeks at her out of the corner of his eye and got to work on the fixture. If she wanted to stand there and gawk at him while he worked, it weren’t no skin off his nose.
A couple of minutes passed by in absolute dead silence, other than the whine of his cordless drill and the occasional swear word he let loose when a screw got caught up in shit. And still, she didn’t move. Prickles danced over his skin, making him antsy.
Did she really have to stand right there? Teachers was always claimin’ that they was busier than a one-legged man in a hoppin’ contest, so how come she had all of this free time to stand around and just watch him work?
He opened up his mouth to give her a more pointed suggestion about how she ought to go do somethin’ else – anything else – when she blurted out, “Is Sarah having financial problems?”
He swung his head ‘round so quickly, he weren’t watching what he was doing and he smashed it up against the dangling shroud. “Shit,” he growled, rubbing at his head. He glared down at Hannah. “Sarah ain’t my wife – we got a divorce over a year ago.”
“I know that,” she retorted. She was still worrying her bottom lip. He had to force himself to look away from her full lips and back towards her eyes, distorted behind the thick lenses. There, that were a better sight to focus on. “It’s just that Brooklyn’s clothes are ill-fitting, and I thought perhaps Sarah couldn’t afford to buy her clothes this school year. Because of financial problems,” she added.
