CHAPTER TWO

No street lights lined the country road. Darla glanced back toward the decrepit home once more. Marie could barely afford to pay the rent on this old place. Darla worried about the kinds of neighbors that surrounded Paul here. The area housed thugs and thieves who committed violent crimes almost daily.

She scolded herself. “Marie is just one of thirty teachers at school. The principal can’t handle the personal problems of all of them.”

But she wanted to take care of them all. Marie’s situation pierced her heart more than some of the others, although Darla felt responsible for each of her teachers. All of the students, too.

“Well, quit stalling. It’s not going to get any better out here,” Darla said under her breath. She turned off the radio. Her head was already pounding and only total concentration would help her to drive home in the darkness that consumed the car and everything around her.

She lifted her foot bravely off the brake pedal, backed with care down the driveway and out into the dark street, shifted her shoulders and turned her head as far as possible to the right to peer into the black night.

Once on the road and facing forward, Darla placed the car into gear, pressed the accelerator gently, and cautiously navigated around the potholes in the dirt trail. Her concentration was so fierce she could almost see the rough road ahead in the inky blackness.

Darla pulled around the crater in the middle of her lane, swerved to port and crossed the centerline. Her left front tire fell into a hole the size of Lake Okeechobee and she jerked the wheel too quickly to the right to steer out of it. The car bounced into another pothole, when simultaneously the gale slammed a plastic trash can into the right-front side. A solid but muffled thud added percussion to the slapping windshield wipers and the howling wind.

“Shoot!” Darla swore, grinning when she heard the sanitized epithet acceptable for an elementary school principal. Had she forgotten how to curse, even privately?

The sedan lurched to a brief stop, its right wheel stuck in the deep hole. Darla punched the accelerator to heave out. The wheels caught some traction and the car moved abruptly. She felt a trash bag under the right rear wheel and pressed the accelerator a bit harder, suffering the prolonged, rough bounce of the old seat against the springs.

“What a mess!”

Briefly, Darla considered venturing into the cold rain and cleaning up the raunchy garbage she’d no doubt strewn over the entire road. But fatigue overwhelmed her.

“I’m sorry guys,” she said aloud to the county collectors who would have to clean up after her tomorrow. They would no doubt be able to recall many unsuitable names to call a principal who set such a bad example.

Half an hour later Darla reached her small ranch style house in a modest Tampa neighborhood. She parked in the driveway, regretting that she’d never built a garage, or at least a carport. Raising and educating two sons had produced too many expenses and too little cash.

Eschewing the inevitable losing battle between her umbrella and the wind, Darla struggled out of the car, rushed to the side door, and let herself into her home. Fifteen minutes later, she’d taken a sleeping pill, gone to bed, turned out the lights and laid her head gratefully on the down pillow.

The sleeping pill would leave her groggy tomorrow, but tonight she would rest. As she settled into sleep, a small flash of memory teased her subconscious.

She heard the plastic can bomb her vehicle and felt again the rolling motion her seat made as the car’s right rear tire passed over the lumpy bag of waste.

Her last thought before chemical oblivion overcame her was that she hoped the garbage she’d strewn over the road was not toxic to animals roaming the countryside that night.

How lucky she’d been that she’d only hit a trashcan and not a dog or a cat.