26

Even though it was the last day, Rachel’s fourth-period English class behaved perfectly. Perhaps they could sense that she still felt fragile. They helped her clean the classroom and insisted that she sit with her foot up while they took care of everything.

Although she suspected that Chris and Ryan only volunteered to clean the ceiling fans for the chance to stand on the tops of desks, Rachel overlooked their questionable motives in order to check one more item off Yolanda’s end-of-term classroom checkout sheet. Fan blades wiped down with a damp rag. Check.

During Rachel’s lunch break, as she sat at her desk furiously grading term papers, she jumped to the shrill ring of her classroom phone.

“Hello?”

“Do you have things that need to be taken out to your car?”

“Lee? Oh, hey.” Rachel reached to keep the phone cord from swinging into her salad dressing and worked to ensure that her voice sounded normal. “Yes, actually, and I wanted to talk to you—”

“We’ll be right over,” he said and hung up.

“Hello?” Rachel asked the dial tone.

Moments later Lee entered, trailed by three tall sophomore boys. They all looked unaccountably subdued. Rachel was keenly disappointed to see Lee back in his wrinkled khakis, sporting one of his frayed plaid shirts with the bulging fisherman’s vest overtop. However, the clunky glasses and the bushman beard had not reappeared overnight.

Lee cleared his throat. Although he was smiling, he didn’t quite meet her eyes. “I found these gentlemen in the staff parking lot looking for something constructive to do.” Since the school did not have an open campus, whatever the boys had been doing in the staff lot had been unsanctioned and most likely no good.

“That’s so fortunate,” Rachel answered lightly. “I have some boxes that need to be loaded into my car.” She pointed with her fork. “They’re right over there.” She fished out her keys and tossed them to Lee, who caught them in midair with a quick downward snatch.

“I’ll bring these right back,” he said, jangling the keys before turning to motion the boys toward the boxes. He looked everywhere but at her. “Gentlemen?”

When just a few minutes remained before the end of the lunch hour, Rachel heard Lee jogging back down the hall toward her classroom, his rubber-soled shoes squeaking against the floors.

“What happened to the wing tips?” Rachel took a light tone, as if just over twelve hours ago she had not hurled herself into his arms in this very room. “No need to dress up today?”

“No,” he said lightly, pausing in the doorway to toss her the keys. “I don’t have a job interview today.”

Rachel’s lips formed an O. “Did you have one yesterday?”

“Yes.” He still hadn’t looked directly at her. His gaze currently fixed itself on a back corner of the room.

“What? Lee!”

“I haven’t decided exactly what I’m going to do yet,” he said quickly, “but I had a job offer from Stryker Industries for their senior graphic design position—”

“Graphic design?” Rachel reached for her cane and struggled out of her rolling desk chair, nearly toppling sideways in the process.

“Calm down, Miss Cooper,” Lee said wearily. “It’s going to be OK.” He chanced a glance at her face. “Probably.”

The warning bell rang. Rachel heard the rowdy sound of students returning from lunch.

“You,” she hobbled toward Lee and jabbed at him with her cane. “You need to tell me what’s going on. Are you working here next year or not? If not, why didn’t you tell me you were applying for other jobs? Have you applied for other ones too? Are they all around here? Are you moving? And oh yeah, why did you pull that dumb stunt and leave me all those presents?” She tried to slip this last one in casually, but her voice landed on it with too much force, needlessly underscoring it. “You owe me an explanation.”

Lee stood very still before her, looking older and more tired than she had ever seen him. “You’ll get one,” he said, glancing at her with a ghost of his characteristic wry smile, “but not now. I have a class. As do you, by the way, so you’d better go clean that salad off your desk. And check your teeth. I think you’ve got something stuck right there—” He pointed a finger toward his own mouth as if to demonstrate where, but broke off as Rachel swiped at him again with her cane. Unfortunately, she nearly hit Todd Perkins, who chose to enter the room at that precise moment.

“Oh!” Rachel exclaimed as Lee slipped away. “I’m so sorry, Todd!”

“It’s OK.” Todd pushed up his glasses by scrunching his nose. He sounded resigned. “I’m getting used to it.”

~*~

As expected, the final car line of the year went pear-shaped. The students were so busy hugging teachers and friends that forcing them into their cars turned out to be a major chore.

After they had gotten the first rush of cars through with no major accidents, Sharon Day and Rachel were able to relax. Sharon came over to stand beside Rachel. For this last day, she had dressed down in a pair of linen pants and a fitted school polo. How she managed to get her hands on a polo that actually fit was a complete mystery. Rachel’s school shirt always made her look as if she were wearing a blue potato sack with arm holes cut in the sides.

“How did kindergarten graduation go?” Rachel asked.

“The usual,” Sharon smiled mistily. Since this was only her second year teaching kindergarten, how she found justification to judge “the usual” made Rachel want to roll her eyes. A short, uncomfortable silence fell between the two women. Rachel decided to mind her own business concerning Sharon and Lee, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t curious. Finding a way to bring the topic up in conversation, however, could take some tricky maneuvering.

“Who cried more?” Rachel asked, breaking the silence. “The kids or the parents?”

“I think maybe I did.” Sharon sounded embarrassed, but also proud. She pushed back her hair and swiped at the jewels of sweat beading up on her perfect little nose.

Rachel smiled.

Sharon smiled back. Her eyelids fluttered in a million rapid-fire blinks.

“So,” said Sharon.

Rachel braced herself. One question about last night’s disaster, and Rachel felt that she would probably sink right down through the ground.

“What’s your favorite book?” Blinkity blinkity blinkity blinkity.

“My what?”

“Your favorite book.” Sharon bit her lip.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Because you are an English teacher and you like to read and—” she broke off. “This isn’t going well, is it?”

Rachel felt that she’d been caught completely flat-footed. “What isn’t going well?”

Sharon let her hands fall to her sides. She tilted her head back, blinking toward the sky. For a horrific moment, Rachel thought Sharon might cry.

“Excuse me for asking,” Rachel continued, keeping her tone carefully neutral, “but what exactly is going on?”

Sharon turned her gaze from the sky toward a point just over Rachel’s right shoulder. She re-crossed her arms. “Lee said I should try to get to know you,” she said. “He said if I got to know you, I might learn to like you.” She paused to gulp, blushing, “But I don’t know how, because every time I talk to you, I get really nervous and end up feeling really stupid.”

Something inside Rachel shifted. She opened her mouth to say something, anything, that would make it right.

But Sharon turned away suddenly, saying, “Hi, there. Can we help you find someone?”

Striding across the parking lot, holding out his hand to introduce himself to Miss Day, was Detective Smith.