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I CAME TO CAMPUS EARLY, hoping to get a head start on whatever had been piling up in my in-box over the three-day weekend. Unfortunately, many of my colleagues seemed to have had the same thought, and the close parking lot was already full. I parked at the outer edge of the far lot and had just managed to lock up my car and get my coffee cup balanced when Sherry rushed up to me. She was out of breath, as if she had been sprinting. I invited her to accompany me to my office, reluctantly putting my mental to-do list aside and shifting to small-talk mode.
“Well, that was a fun weekend,” I said. “Do you think you’ll do the race again next year?”
“I dunno. I don’t usually plan that far ahead.”
Something in Sherry’s tone didn’t sound right. She wasn’t her usual lively self.
“Sherry, are you okay?”
“Yeah. I’ll be fine. I had some kinda week.”
“I can imagine. I mean, paddling for eighteen miles. And you went iron!”
“Glenn came back early from his trip.”
“Yes, I saw him at dinner—”
“Oh yeah, I forgot. I wasn’t planning on him coming back so quick. I thought he was gonna be gone for another couple weeks. I gotta tell you, I hadda do some quick thinking.”
“It’s okay, Sherry, you don’t have to—”
“Dave didn’t take it too well. I guess I can’t really blame him.”
Who was Dave now? Oh, right. Davison.
“Hey, Dave said he used to be your student. Is that true?”
“Yes, he was enrolled in one of my classes.”
“And you’re going out with his dad now.”
I nodded. “Small world.”
“I had no idea, Dr. B. Good for you!”
“Thanks.” Sherry’s apparent surprise at the fact that I had a personal life made me feel vaguely insulted.
“Dave told me he made a mistake on his first assignment and you let him rewrite it.”
Davison’s “mistake” was that he had copied his friend’s paper in its entirety and turned it in as his own work. Our former dean believed that busting students for plagiarism was insufficiently “student-centered” so I had been forced to give Davison a do-over.
“I told him no way, not Barda. I mean I know you’re a hard—a hard grader.”
“Well, sometimes you have to give people a second chance,” I said.
“Things were moving a little too fast for me anyhow. Dave wanted to bring me home to meet his father. That’s not what I was looking for—hey, careful! Your coffee!”
“Oh, shoot.” I tried to brush the scalding coffee from the front of my shirt. “Meet his father. My goodness, what an idea.”
Fortunately, I was wearing a black blouse. Unfortunately, it was wool crepe, and was puckering where the hot liquid had splashed it.
“Yeah. I’m not looking for anything serious. And tell ya the truth, I didn’t like how Dave decided I was his woman all of a sudden. He was too pushy. Kinda reminded me of my ex.”
“Sherry, you don’t need to—your ex? Was this the one you mentioned in class?”
“It was a lifetime ago, Dr. B. The first time I lived in Mahina, before I moved back to the mainland.”
I nodded, trying my best to seem casual. I was so eager to hear more that I was sure my ears were vibrating.
“I was too young,” Sherry said. “You know what I mean? Too young to get married. Too young to be a mother.”
“A mother? So you have children?”
“One,” she said.
“A girl? A boy?”
“Little boy. It was all too much for me. I couldn’t handle it. And they were better off without me and my problems, to be honest.”
I did some quick arithmetic in my head. Davison was going to be turning twenty-one. I knew that because Donnie had been talking about surprising him with a birthday trip to Las Vegas. I couldn’t understand why people who lived in one of the most beautiful places on earth insisted on vacationing in one of the most aesthetically indefensible, but there it was. I had seen on the class roster that Sherry and I had the same birth year. So subtract twenty-one from my age, she would have been—
“You were so young! I mean, you must’ve been young. Because you’re young now, is what I meant. So have you kept in touch with your son at all?”
“Nah. Honestly, Dr. B., he was kind of a little snot. Sorry, I guess I’m not very, what’s the word?”
“Maternal?” I suggested.
“Yeah. What you said.”
We entered the dim hallway of my building. It smelled mildewy after the long weekend with the air conditioner off.
Sherry shrugged. “I gave it all up for Mad Dog. I never looked back.”
That was an interesting way to spin it. Gave it all up. As if ditching your husband and child were a selfless sacrifice for some greater good.
“Mad Dog?”
“Yeah. My second husband.”
“Oh.”
“Wait, no, third husband. I keep forgetting about what’s his name.”
We arrived at my office. “Well,” I said, “here we are.” I didn’t particularly want to hear Sherry run down her inventory of greater and lesser ex-husbands, and if Sherry and Donnie truly had been married, maybe I didn’t want to hear about that either. I fumbled for my keys before I realized my door was already ajar. Emma and Pat had made themselves comfortable in my office and were helping themselves to my coffee.
“Decision time,” I announced. “You can stand around and listen to us talk about class work, or you can take your coffee and come back later.”
Emma high-fived Sherry on her way out, and Sherry and I got seated.
“I wanted to meet with you about some of this stuff I’ve been finding, Dr. B. I kinda got distracted this weekend cause of the race and the other stuff, but now I’m back, there’s some things I thought you should—”
“Women are drawn to me,” came the voice of Rodge Cowper’s affirmation tape through the thin wall. “I am a self-assured, confident, sexual and dominant male.”
I ignored the voice, hoping Sherry would follow suit.
“What was that?” Sherry asked.
I could no longer pretend I hadn’t heard anything.
“It’s Dr. Rodge. He plays these—”
“Excuse me, Dr. B. This won’t take long.”
Sherry stood up and walked out.
“I am able to pick up and attract any women I desire,” Rodge’s voice announced. I heard a brisk knock on Rodge’s door.
“I read and meditate every day. I am wise and—”
All at once, the voice and the background music went silent. Sherry returned to my office a few seconds later and settled back into the visitor chair. I glanced over at the wall separating Rodge Cowper’s office from mine. Still quiet.
“Thanks, Sherry. So. You were saying, about your assignment?”
“Yeah. I realized, there’s so much information out there for everyone to see, if the wrong person gets ahold of it, they can do a lot of damage. The rest of my group is waiting for me to decide, and I’m feeling kind of overwhelmed, to be honest. I just wanna get through this.”
“You have some ideas, though?”
“Oh, I have some ideas, all right,” she said miserably.
“At this point, I’d say pick something and go with it. If you find you need to make some changes later, do that. No one expects you to get everything right on the first try.”
Sherry blinked and stared, as if I had said something tremendously insightful.
“You’re right. Thanks! Oh, and, uh, Dr. B?”
I looked at her expectantly.
“Never mind,” she said. “It’s no big deal.”