A woman sat inside, alone at the conference table.
As soon as Anaya walked in, the woman stood to introduce herself. “Cindy Ellis, assistant superintendent here at Crystal Ridge.”
Cindy Ellis, assistant superintendent, had the distinct look of a woman who was once fat but had recently lost a lot of weight and didn’t really look the better for it.
“Would you like some water?” Cindy asked. Not waiting for an answer, she reached for the pitcher at the center of the conference table and poured Anaya a glass, then indicated one of the open seats.
Anaya sat down with a quiet “thank you” and carefully placed her portfolio in front of her.
“Usually, we do interviews for elementary positions with all the principals, but since this is so late in the year and we are interviewing for one specific position, it’s just us.” Cindy set the glass of water to the left of Anaya’s portfolio. “We’re very impressed by the glowing recommendation you received from your cooperating teacher, Kyle Davis. And of course, it doesn’t hurt that you’re already familiar with our district.”
Anaya twisted her fingers in her lap, her acrylic nails so bright pink, they were almost fuchsia. ReShawn did them yesterday in Auntie Trill’s salon while Anaya got braids. ReShawn was Auntie Trill’s oldest but not actually Anaya’s cousin, since Auntie Trill wasn’t technically Anaya’s aunt. She was Mama’s best friend and Anaya’s godmother. Anaya had asked ReShawn for something more subtle—like a French manicure—but ReShawn scoffed.
Don’t let them make you forget who you are.
The advice had annoyed her.
Anaya liked a French manicure as much as she liked fuchsia. And she wasn’t going to forget who she was. Not ever again.
“We’d love to know, Anaya. What makes you interested in teaching for Crystal Ridge?”
The paycheck.
But Anaya could hardly say that. Nor could she mention the fact that the district she pictured herself teaching for was in no position to hire. As she looked at the apple-cheeked Mr. Kelly and the gaunt Ms. Ellis, she wondered if either had anything to say about South Fork, its loss of accreditation, and all the talk of student transfers. The people of South Fork certainly had plenty to say. Mama, most especially.
“I admire the way the district strives for excellence,” Anaya answered, “and expects excellence from every student. I want to be part of an atmosphere that fosters success.”
Mama always said her lip twitched when she lied. Anaya wondered if it was twitching now.
“You used to be quite the track star.” Cindy looked down at a copy of Anaya’s resume. “Our athletic director told me you broke every single collegiate record there was to break.”
Anaya’s hands clasped tighter in her lap.
“What an unfortunate injury.”
Unfortunate.
It was hardly the right word, but she nodded anyway and waited for Ms. Ellis to ask how the sport shaped her—as a person, as a teacher. Or maybe Ms. Ellis wanted to know how the injury itself had shaped her. Anaya had an answer prepared for both.
Instead, the woman crossed one leg over the other and folded her hands on her knee. “Have you ever considered coaching?”
Anaya blinked. “Track?”
“Our girls’ district varsity coach retired this past year. I hear there are some really talented girls on the team. One in particular. To have someone like you as the coach would be wonderful.”
Anaya’s ears flushed. “Someone like me?”
“Someone who has competed at the level in which you have.”
“I don’t have a coaching license.”
“Oh, those are easy to get,” Tim Kelly chimed in. “I’m sure the district would cover the cost.”
“Of course,” Cindy said. “And you’d receive a nice coaching stipend every year.”
Anaya looked from Cindy to Tim. Both needed to work on their poker faces. It was suddenly very obvious. Her cooperating teacher’s letter of recommendation had gotten her here. Coaching track would ensure that she stayed. While this was far from her first choice, Anaya definitely needed to stay.
Three
The back door of the moving truck slid open with a sound like rolling thunder. Jen reached her arms overhead, twisting to stretch her muscles after the twelve-hour drive. Her mother was still climbing out of the driver’s side of Nick’s car, gripping the plant she insisted Jen bring on the long journey. Jen’s bottom felt like jelly and probably looked like a flattened pancake as she squinted down the row of nearly identical split-level homes with single car garages and green, sloping lawns.
Her new neighborhood.
The only sign of life? A black-and-white cat with large, luminous eyes staring out from beneath a row of boxwoods across the street. And a kid several houses away, popping wheelies on his bike.
“It’s a cute neighborhood,” Jen’s mother, Carol, said in a thick southern drawl—one that seemed to grow thicker the farther north they drove. “Smaller than your home in Clayton but probably as good as you’re gonna get in this area. The property values looked sky high on Zillow.”
Nick rubbed his chin and studied their belongings the way one would study a chessboard, trying to figure out the best way to begin. Boxes and furniture had been crammed inside the van so intricately, they formed a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. “Well, Juju-bee, what do you think?”
He draped his hand across Jubilee’s skinny shoulder. She stood there, her braids already fuzzy, sucking on her two middle fingers. The first few weeks home, she had sucked them raw. As soon as they started packing up the house in North Carolina, the habit had returned in full force. “Should we go check out your new room, see where we’ll put your bed?”
Jubilee uncorked her fingers. “Bunka-bed?”
Bunka-bed.
Ever since she saw her twin cousins’ bedroom and the fun wooden ladder leading up to the bed on top, she’d suffered a serious case of bed envy. Actually, envy was too tame a word. She’d suffered a jealous rage. And when neither Jen nor Nick gave in, Jubilee showed them both by getting hold of a permanent marker and defacing the pretty white daybed Jen had carefully painted and assembled when they were still waiting to bring her home.
“Bunka-beds?” Nick scooped Jubilee up into the air and tossed her over his shoulder, tickling her ribcage as he did.
She burst into a fit of hysterical giggles.
“How are we supposed to fit bunka-beds through that door?” he said, continuing his tickling as he carried her toward the house. “We’d have to cut a hole in the roof and lower it in with a rope.”
Playful distraction.
Nick had mastered the technique, because Nick was made to be a daddy. Jen watched him unlock their new front door and carry their laughing daughter inside with a deep, theatrical laugh of his own.
“Of course,” Mom said, “there’s a reason the property value is so high. Did y’all know Crystal Ridge is the number-one ranked school district in the whole state of Missouri?”
“You might have mentioned it.” Once. Or five hundred times.
“Number one.” Mom looked at Jen beneath raised eyebrows, and when she didn’t seem properly impressed, her mother continued. “Missouri’s no small state, sugar.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Then why aren’t you more excited?”
“Because we’re not sure where we’re sending Jubilee in the fall.”
“Come again?”
“We might not enroll her in Crystal Ridge.”
Mom’s eyes grew irritatingly large. “You’re yanking my chain.”
“I’m not yanking anything.”
“Where in the world would you enroll her?”
“South Fork.”
“Jennifer. South Fork?” Carol, of course, knew all about South Fork. Because Carol had spent an inordinate amoun
t of time house shopping online for her daughter as soon as Jen broke the news that Nick had accepted the managerial position at Schnucks, a supermarket in Crystal Ridge. “Why on earth would you send her there?”
“Because, when it comes to Jubilee and school, we have to consider all kinds of things.”
“Like what?”
“Diversity.”
Mama huffed. “Diversity.”
“Crystal Ridge hardly has any.” The small percentage they did have were mostly Asian and Indian. She and Nick didn’t want Jubilee being one of the only black kids in her class. She needed mirrors. People who would look like her. “South Fork does.”
“But isn’t that the wrong kind of diversity?”
Jen cocked her head. “The wrong kind?”
“Please promise me you’ll pray long and hard about it before you make any decisions.” With a dip of her chin, she wrapped her arms around the potted plant and headed to the front door.
Sometimes the stress Jen felt in her body seemed like the black-and-white snow on the old boxed television set in her childhood living room—an army of angry ants, scuttling across a white screen. Daddy would mutter curses under his breath as he moved the rabbit-ear antenna around in search of reception. Whenever his search failed, he’d give the side of the television a hardy whack, as though he might beat the static away. It never seemed to work.
The kid popping wheelies fell over in a loud crash.
The cat darted out from the bushes, around the side of the house—a small bell on its collar jingling as it went.
Jen opened her mouth to call out to the boy, to make sure he was all right. But he stood up sheepishly and quickly pedaled away, leaving her alone in the evening sun. She stared at the unfamiliar street number on the side of the mailbox standing sentry at the end of the driveway.
1749.
Winding Hill Road.
Quickly, without giving herself any time to really consider the ramifications, she typed her new address into a text message and shot it off to the recipient. She had no idea if he’d get it. No idea if his number was still the same.
“That entryway is a lot smaller than the pictures let on.”
Jen’s pulse hiccupped.
She quickly pocketed her phone, ignoring the curious look her mother gave her as she did.
“You’re awfully jumpy,” she said.
“I didn’t hear you coming.”
Mom came back to the truck and stared for an extended moment at the puzzle of belongings before releasing a long, drawn-out sigh. “Oh, Jen.”
“What?”
“How am I gonna live with you so far away?”
“Mama.”
“And just when I finally have a granddaughter.” Her mother shook her head. “And y’all spent the last two months hiding her away.”
“Not hiding her away. Cocooning.” It was an important ingredient to the attachment recipe. One Mom couldn’t seem to understand. Nor could she understand why it wasn’t good for Jubilee to expect presents every time her memaw came to visit. And yet, Carol couldn’t seem to help herself.
“Now it’s just me and your father—who’s been a miserable old coot ever since he retired.”
Dad’s misery seemed to predate his retirement, but Jen kept the thought to herself.
Without warning, Mom wrapped Jen in a tight hug. For as long as she could remember—before Young Living and DoTerra—her mother would rub lavender behind her ears whenever she finished her after-shower lotion. The smell engulfed her now. Just like her mother’s arms.
They squeezed so tight, Jen could hardly breathe.
Four
Camille pressed her sandaled feet on the floor of her Highlander and reared back against the seat. “Taylor, they’re braking!”
Taylor tapped the brakes too hard, then lifted her hand off the steering wheel and gestured to the car in front of them. “I can see their brake lights, Mom. I’m not blind.”
“Hands on the wheel.”
Taylor wrapped her fingers around the steering wheel at a perfect nine and three, her knuckles whitening. Apparently ten and two was outdated.
Camille commanded her muscles to relax. But they refused. Probably because this was a horrible idea. Especially in light of the ominous feeling sitting in the pit of her stomach. When her children were babies and the feeling struck, she would creep into their rooms and place her index finger in front of their tiny, puckered lips to make sure they were breathing. Now she checked batteries. Namely, the ones in the carbon monoxide and fire detectors on every level of the house.
All of them were working.
She made sure to lock the doors before they left. She’d packed plenty of sunscreen to avoid sunburn. All three of her children knew how to swim and swam well.
But still the ominous feeling remained.
It stalked the edges of her mind, hovering malevolently as cool air blew from the vents. Of course, her daughter couldn’t be like most of her friends—content to sit shotgun while their mothers played chauffeur and they texted on their phones. Not so with Taylor. In fact, her daughter’s eagerness to obtain a driver’s license ran in direct opposition with one of Camille’s most strongly held beliefs—namely, that sixteen was a perfectly ridiculous age for anyone to be operating a motor vehicle.
Her fingers dug into leather. “You’re getting really close to those cars.”
Taylor glanced in the direction Camille indicated, where parked cars lined the side of the road. Instead of moving farther away from them, the Highlander drifted in the direction of her gaze.
“Taylor!”
Taylor jerked the SUV to the center of the lane, the set of her shoulders high and stiff. “You know, it’s really hard to drive when you criticize everything I do.”
“It’s really hard not to criticize when you’re about to hit things.”
“I’m not going to hit anything.”
“Everyone just relax!” Paige commanded from the backseat, holding up her arms as if she were stepping between a pair of boxers in a ring. “Nobody’s gonna die. We’re going way too slow to die.”
This, thank heavens, was true. It was the one thing Camille could count on. Her rule-following eldest might not be a natural behind the wheel, but she did take the speed limit very seriously.
“Yellow means stop.”
“I know,” Taylor muttered, slowing to a stop at the traffic light.
Camille sank back against the leather seat, thankful for the short reprieve.
“Listen to this,” Austin said, reading from the book he checked out from the library yesterday. “In 1945, six US Navy bombers disappeared, along with the crew sent to rescue them. Before the twenty-seven men vanished into thin air, one pilot reported, ‘Everything looks strange. Even the ocean.’ ”
“That’s fascinating, honey.”
“It’s the only place on earth besides the Dragon’s Triangle where compasses don’t point to magnetic north.”
“You’re such a nerd,” Taylor said.
“Taylor,” Camille reprimanded.
Austin was unfazed. “Some people believe the lost city of Atlantis is underneath.”
“What’s the lost city of Atlantis?” Paige asked as the radio transitioned from the weather forecast to Lonnie at Lunchtime. Lonnie had a deep, made-for-the-radio voice. When Camille first met him in person to plug the Crystal Ridge Memorial Day 5K several years ago, she’d been shocked to discover that he was actually a small man who wore moccasins and had a soul patch.
“We’re back,” Lonnie said, “and ready to talk about this perplexing transfer law.”
“It’s not a real city,” Taylor said.
“Shh!” Camille turned up the volume, her stomach tying into knots.
“Ever since the Department of Education gave South Fork schools a big, red F, stripping
the district of its accreditation, a group of mothers have been fighting for the right to send their children to a district that’s not failing. The high court has spoken, and it looks like the mothers have won. The question on everyone’s mind is, what now? There’s no instruction manual, folks, but everyone seems to have an opinion. Call me up, listeners, and let’s chat. I’m Lonnie at Lunchtime, covering the latest community controversy, and I want to know: What do you think about this one?”
* * *
“I’m going to the bathroom,” Taylor said as soon as they walked through the pool gate of the Crystal Ridge Country Club.
“Didn’t you go before we left?” Camille asked.
“You’re monitoring my urination now? Awesome. Would you like me to start a chart so it’s easier for you to keep track?” Taylor scowled with the full force of teenage hormones and stomped away.
Camille wanted to stomp back. These days, her eldest made her want to stomp quite a lot. She couldn’t tell what was more dismaying—Taylor’s animosity or the animosity Camille felt in return. Was it normal to have such strong feelings of dislike for your own daughter?
She pushed the feelings down—swallowed them into the pit of her stomach, right next to the ominous one she couldn’t shake—and walked toward her waving friend. Kathleen had saved them a couple of lounge chairs and was currently beckoning them over from the other side of the sparkling pool, holding her wide-brimmed, floppy hat on her head as though some nonexistent wind might blow it away.
Paige skipped ahead, her flip-flops smacking against the hot pavement while Austin shuffled behind, his nose stuck in his book.
“Honey, why don’t you go say hi to Bennett?” Camille encouraged, setting their beach bag beside the chair as Kathleen removed the towels she had draped over it.
Bennett was Kathleen’s middle son and currently showing off for Kathleen’s oldest. Cody was going to be a senior and had the kind of face and build Camille would have swooned over at Taylor’s age. Taylor’s best friend, Alexis, seemed to be swooning now. She certainly laughed loud enough as Cody shoved Bennett into the pool and told him to get lost.
No One Ever Asked Page 3
