Authors: Callie Wright
Only three days ago, Anne had invited Joanie and Bob over for an early dinner and their son-in-law had been so distracted during the meal, so jumpy—up for another bottle of wine, down for a third glass of it—that Bob had grown exhausted just watching him.
“Something’s going on with Hugh,” Joanie had commented on the drive home.
Going on.
It was the same thing she’d once said about Bob, and she’d been both right and wrong—though through it all Bob had loved his wife.
Now he laid his head next to hers and took her hands in his. They’d attended two or three funerals this year alone and yet he couldn’t come up with a single prayer, one proper snippet of grace to deliver over his wife’s body. He might’ve wished her a safe passage or told her he’d see her soon, but he ran up against an age-old failure of imagination. Still, he could appreciate a sense of calm Joanie might enjoy from having an entire day off: no breakfast to fix, no bed to make up, no old man to worry about. And there would be people she’d want to see. Her parents; her beloved grandmother, Rose; Nora Ames and Pearl Olsen, childhood friends; her sister, Ellie, killed in a car accident only months before Joanie and Bob had met; and Joanie’s high school sweetheart, Cope Ward, starting quarterback, homecoming king, the spitting image of Robert Taylor.
There were so many ways a life could go. If Cope hadn’t enlisted, melting in the Alabama sun at Fort McClellan while Bob, ten years older, settled in back home. If Bob’s crush, Josephine Gibson, hadn’t hastily married Frank Flag the night before Frank had boarded a bus bound for Kelly Field in Texas, a kid who’d never been on a plane but was eager to learn to fly. If Frank hadn’t been practicing maneuvers in the mountains of New Mexico when, a month later, a windstorm churned up under his wings, requiring an emergency landing and sending him home an injured man. If Josephine hadn’t been so loyal—she and Bob had quietly courted while Frank was away, but all that had to stop now. And if Bob hadn’t gone to the hospital to say goodbye to Josephine, he might never have seen her: that lovely young nurse tending to the white bandages that seemed to cover Frank everywhere.
“Bob,” said Josephine. “I don’t think you know my friend Joanie.”
Short chestnut hair, dark eyes, skin the color of the inside of an almond. Bob had waited for her to offer her hand but she was too busy spinning out gauze like cotton candy, so he studied her fingers, long and slightly tapered. The back of her neck formed a cleft at the nape when she leaned over with her silver shears, her pink lips pressed in concentration.
“Be good,” said Josephine, no longer a lover but a friend, already slipping into her role as Frank’s wife, while Bob, who had never been faithful to any woman, silently promised that he would.
1
Tuesday morning Hugh crept out of the house at just after six o’clock wearing a dark fleece jacket and a wool ski hat yanked low over his brow. On Beaver Street, Eric Van Heuse, Teddy’s former Biddy Basketball coach, was out collecting his newspaper, while the Erley children, three doors down, had corralled their overweight tabby on the front walk, fencing the cat with their legs and giving him a push toward their house. If Coach Eric waved, Hugh didn’t see it. He’d hunched his shoulders to the sun and trained his eyes on the ground.
Normally, Hugh happily stopped to talk to every person he met. His wife and children’s irritants—busybody neighbors and the absence of fast food, respectively—were Hugh’s raisons d’être. He was a long-standing member of Save Our Lake Otsego and the Cooperstown Chamber of Commerce; he faithfully attended school-board and town-council meetings; the Seedlings School cosponsored soccer and Little League teams; and Hugh rode on a float in the nearby Fourth of July parade. Today, however, he was keeping a low profile.
He had been up half the night reading about factors influencing memory acquisition in young children, and for a certain boy, visual reinforcement, in the form of Hugh’s face, had to be avoided. Dressing like a cat burglar, taking a roundabout route to work, hiding in his office, and generally steering clear of Graham Pennington, age five, would be Hugh’s tactical offense against the sharpening of any fragmentary memories in the child’s mind. Two weeks had passed since the hospital-room incident, which would work to Hugh’s advantage: with any luck, Graham had already forgotten that he’d encountered his preschool principal beneath his mother’s spread legs.
Hugh unlocked the school at six thirty and was relieved to find it exactly the way he’d left it a week ago. Someone had been as careful with the rooms as he was. Lights turned off, play rugs prepped for morning play, the playground raked, and the toys put away. Everything was fresh and ready to go. Mrs. Baxter had even primed the coffeepot in the tiny teachers’ room so that all he had to do now was flip the switch to set the grounds brewing.
It had been a somber week since Hugh’s mother-in-law had unexpectedly passed, long days filled with funeral and interment plans; cleaning out and listing his in-laws’ house; and installing Bob Cole in their guest room for what looked to be a permanent stay. It was Hugh’s opinion that his father-in-law—eighty-six years old, with congestive heart failure and a walker—belonged in the Thanksgiving Home. Hugh’s wife, however, disagreed. It had been a long-standing plan for Anne’s mother to move to 59 Susquehanna when her father passed, and now Anne argued that they had to extend the same invitation to her dad. Never mind that Joanie, a spry seventy-four-year-old former nurse who baked and cleaned—a welcome addition to any household—had been positively winning in comparison to Bob. Never mind, too, that Anne herself could barely tolerate her father. It was the right thing to do, she’d persisted, and more to the point: What would people think of her if she didn’t?
At six forty-five, the Seedlings School staff began to arrive. First was Mrs. Baxter, a retired Cooperstown Elementary School secretary who had taken over Seedlings’ administrative work five years back. She drove a light-blue Oldsmobile and had light-blue hair and called all the kids Sonny or Girlie, which sent them into spasms of laughter. Close to seventy, she had ambitiously made the leap from electric typewriter to PC and now pecked out Excel spreadsheets and printed up dot-matrix birthday cards for Hugh and the teachers at the appropriate times of the year.
“Mr. Obermeyer.” Mrs. Baxter nodded. “Welcome back.”
“Thank you. Coffee’s perfect.” Hugh raised his mug to her:
#
1
DAD!
Julia had given it to him for Christmas.
Mrs. Baxter shrugged off her blazer and hung it in the closet, then removed her brown-bag lunch—always egg salad on wheat with a bag of potato chips and a Sprite—and placed it in their compact refrigerator. “Is this yours?” asked Mrs. Baxter, holding out a half-empty yogurt cup.
“No,” said Hugh.
“One of the girls,” said Mrs. Baxter disapprovingly, meaning Cheryl, Melanie, or Priscilla, the teachers at Seedlings. “You should speak to them about not picking up after themselves.”
“Absolutely,” said Hugh, who was hardly listening.
“There is one thing I wanted to mention,” said Mrs. Baxter.
“Great,” said Hugh. “Let’s schedule a sit-down. Maybe before lunch.”
Mrs. Baxter frowned, started to speak, but Hugh was saved by the arrival of Melanie and Priscilla, who commuted together and looked so much alike—blond highlights, capacious laps—that the parents constantly confused them. The kids didn’t: Miss Melanie was the nice one; Miss Oak, the meanie.
“Hugh!” said Melanie, wrapping him in a hug. “How’re you holding up?”
“Pretty well,” said Hugh. Then, “Anne’s father moved in.”
Priscilla grimaced, and Mrs. Baxter gave her a tut-tut.
Last to arrive, always late, dashing in closer to seven than Hugh would’ve liked, was Cheryl Landon, whom Hugh had hired away from the Wallace School, in Manhattan, to teach Seedlings’ pre-K. She was the illustrious engine of the Seedlings train, while a rotating cast of sweet assistant teachers—local college students receiving course credit for interning at Seedlings two days a week—were the bright red caboose.
“One minute,” said Cheryl, sailing past the teachers’ room with a plastic storage bin and three wrapping-paper rolls. “I just have to drop off my stuff.”
Hugh tracked her with his eyes, alert for signs of disbelief, disappointment, even disgust, because if Graham Pennington had told anyone about his principal’s untoward appearance during hospital visiting hours, wouldn’t it have been his beloved prekindergarten teacher? Not only was Mrs. Landon warm and affectionate, capable and fun; she was also host to a weekly show-and-tell, with a progressive emphasis on the
tell.
Cheryl reappeared in the doorway with an apology for her tardiness and a kiss for Hugh’s cheek.
“We missed you,” she said, squeezing his hand.
Hugh and Cheryl fell in line behind Melanie and Priscilla as they all made their way to the main entrance. It was almost time for early drop-off, almost time to greet the children.
“Anything happen while I was gone?” Hugh fished.
“Nothing,” said Cheryl. “Your school is a well-oiled machine.”
At seven o’clock, they stepped into the bright sunshine to greet a carpool line that was ten deep and already snaking around the block. Priscilla directed traffic, waving mud-splattered Subarus and Toyotas and Tauruses up to the curb, while Melanie and Cheryl helped the boys and girls out. The early-drop-off program featured an alternative start time for children with working parents, moms and dads who were mid-commute and didn’t have time to bend Hugh’s ear about his personal leave. Not so with regular drop-off. In an hour and a half, Hugh would be mobbed by stay-at-home moms lingering in the Seedlings hallways for the chance to shell Hugh with prying questions. What exactly happened to poor Joanie? Was Anne just devastated? And would his kids eat a tuna noodle casserole? Massive stroke; she is; and unlikely; but these were not the questions that had been keeping Hugh awake at night.
Last week Hugh had been summoned home to care for his bereaved family just as Graham Pennington returned to school from his convalescence. Now there were only ninety minutes left until Hugh came face-to-face with Graham and his mother. Would the boy remember what he’d seen? Had Caroline told anyone what she and Hugh had done? In the two weeks since Hugh had pushed her Indian-print skirt up over her hips and slipped her cotton panties down, he’d thought of little else but Caroline straddling his lap, the sunlight glinting off her unshaven knees. But as much as Hugh wanted to revisit the moment, he was also frightened by it—he could lose his school, his family—and even as he smiled at the early drop-offs and waved goodbye to their parents, he was mentally scouring his past, wondering how it had come to this.
* * *
Hugh had not explicitly set out to teach preschool. After college, he’d studied for a master’s in education with an eye toward lecturing high school honors students at elite private schools in Boston, New York City. True, he had been drawn to education, but how, precisely, he had ended up running a preschool was a bit of a mystery even to him. He’d had plenty of time to plumb his psyche for an answer—during every school tour, at least one parent asked him why he’d wanted to “open a day-care center.” The best he’d come up with so far: “I thought I’d get in my two cents early.”
A more honest answer might’ve been that it had taken Hugh a long time to grow up, and he could still access those childhood feelings of being utterly lost in the social jungle of a school playground. There were clear rules in Hugh’s preschool. No hitting, no spitting, no throwing the sand. Be nice to your friends, use your words, and always wear your listening ears. Seedlings’ rule book was a blueprint for blossoming—kids needed all the help they could get, and Hugh remembered how hard it could be to choose a direction and go.
Hugh’s capacity for decision-making seemed to have shorted out around the age of ten, when his brother, George, had slipped through the ice in the creek behind their rented ski cabin, and Hugh’s parents had more or less followed their firstborn down. Reeling from the loss, they’d sent Hugh to boarding school, then summer camp, then college, until eventually he’d found comfort in the predictability of it all. Hugh was used to school: syllabi, reading lists, and course catalogs; orientation, registration, reading periods, and final exams. He was accustomed to the schedule of Labor Day to Memorial Day followed by summer internships and peppered with brief Sunday-night phone calls home. Hugh had even stayed on after his college graduation to work in the admissions office, conducting information sessions for potential applicants, until the dean politely informed him that he was no longer a recent graduate and it was time to move on. So to complete the circle Hugh had gone to graduate school for a master’s in education, but even he could see that something was missing, that he was missing something—adventure, chance, hunger, thirst. He was on a conveyor belt of September to September and he was too afraid to get off.
* * *
When Hugh met his wife, at a party in Cambridge during his final year of graduate school, he’d been impressed first by her self-confidence, then by her beauty. Newly single—having recently broken up with a cellist who waited tables—Hugh had accepted an invitation from an old boarding-school friend to a wine tasting at his apartment, and the night of the party Hugh showered and shaved and put on his best outfit, then headed across the Charles with a bottle of Cold Duck. He hadn’t been thinking: when Hugh saw that he was the sole hippie element in a sea of blue-blazered men, he quickly returned to the entryway to ditch his belted cardigan.
“You’re not leaving,” he heard behind him—less a question than a command—and he turned, flustered, and found himself looking into the bluest eyes he’d ever seen.
“No, I’m just—this sweater.” Hugh tried to shrug it off his shoulders, but the belt had knotted.
The woman extended her hand, introducing herself as Anne Cole, and Hugh reached to take it. She wore a striped oxford shirt tucked into a tweed skirt, and brown boots with platforms so high she rose to meet Hugh’s eyes. Silently, Hugh admired her manicured nails against his olive skin.