Chapter 3 Distractions
Distractions
“WHATCHA WORKING on now, Isaac?”
Roxy Michaels had wide hips, frizzy brown hair, and her clothing—button-down shirts and stretchy slacks—was constantly askew.
Isaac adored her, and his only regret about their friendship was that they’d met while they were both married, teaching, and respectable, because he thought the two of them would have been fabulous at the club scene.
And because when Roxy met Brian, that might have pulled Isaac into respectability without him having to meet Todd, who literally yanked Isaac out of his post-college ecstasy rave haze with the force of an annoyed parent yanking a child out of traffic.
It would have been great to have been teaching and respectable—both of which Isaac adored—without having to be married first, because the more Isaac lived without Todd, the more he wondered what had happened to Isaac during the last ten years.
That moment in his yarn room had been a revelation.
Here was a guy Isaac barely knew, telling Isaac that the world needed to see more of his heart after being told for ten years that he had to show rather less of it, and Isaac’s only response had been to….
Well, he’d cried, but he’d kept his face averted as he’d focused on the totally mundane and secretly wonderful task of picking out soft, fine baby yarn for the patterns in the books that Luca liked best.
And he’d been so considerate too.
Appalled at his own audacity at taking full advantage of Isaac’s impulsive offer, Luca had been asking about the easiest blankets, the ones that would take less of Isaac’s valuable time.
And the more Isaac thought of making a blanket for Sophia and Geordie’s great-grandbaby, the more he wanted this blanket to be amazing.
In the end their compromise had been… well, Isaac felt a little sneaky, because he felt like he was sneaking more of Luca’s company, but….
“Isaac?” Roxy said, calling Isaac’s attention back to her original question.
They’d both finished their lunches and were cozied up on the couches in the back of the teachers’ room while the rest of the staff got into politics.
Isaac needed to ignore politics. He’d started teaching at a time when gay teachers could be subtly fired for a million reasons that magically had nothing to do with gayness and everything to do with, “Well, he just didn’t click. ”
Yeah, his skinny twinky ass.
Anyway, the quickest way to find that he “just didn’t click” was to suddenly be interested in which administrator was a total tool, who was sleeping with who at the district office, and how they should protest all testing because it didn’t work.
He had a sixth sense for avoiding tools, he didn’t actually give a shit about who was sleeping with who at the district office, and he knew for a fact that some testing worked, so he ignored what didn’t really seem to matter.
Which was why he and Roxy got along so swimmingly. She kept him apprised of all the gossip (okay, it really was kind of fun to know who was sleeping with whom), and she also told him who was a total fucking tool and should be avoided at all costs.
And in return, he continued to keep her apprised on what the world was like when you weren’t elbows-deep in diapers and Desitin after you left your students.
And part of that was talking about his yarn work, because she’d always been the one person interested in it—and she had two different sweaters with flowered embellishments and a complete layette for each of the three kids to show for it.
He would have made something for Brian, her husband, but he worked from home and wore, by her reports, a frayed hoodie and cargo shorts even in the deepest, darkest winter.
And part of his duty as best work friend was to tell her what he was working on and why it was making his face hot—and probably pink to boot.
“Isaac?” she asked, sotto voce. There were always those hidden teachers who were “fine with his sexuality as long as he doesn’t rub it in our faces,” which was code for not mentioning his husband or his dating or even celebrities who were gay or shows that had gay characters.
His first year he’d almost gotten fired for telling a student he liked Glee, and he’d since tempered any public utterances accordingly.
“It’s nothing,” he said, still not able to fight the flush. “Just, do you remember those nice Giordanos who lived next door?”
“That older couple who moved? Isn’t the grandson remodeling their house to sell?”
Isaac nodded. “Yeah, well, he came over to chat while I was out on the porch last night and….” I almost trauma dumped my bad marriage and nonexistent self-esteem all over him.
“And anyway we got to talking, and it turns out his sister’s pregnant, and her boyfriend dumped her and…
well, I offered to make him a baby blanket for her so she could remember that she’s always wanted kids, and she’s going to do just fine. ”
“Aww,” Roxy said, holding her hand to her heart. “That’s sweet!” She checked out the many, many tiny squares he’d already crocheted. “So this is going to be what? I mean, you sew the squares into a blanket but… Isaac, those squares are awfully small.”
They were, in fact, two-round squares in sport-weight yarn.
They were tiny. And Luca hadn’t been blind to that fact when he’d seen the book that showcased blankets that used the small squares as pixels on a grid to make pictures.
In this case, a rainbow under the sun. He’d said, “Oh, this is cute—but look at it. It’s probably super labor-intensive, right?
” And without waiting for an answer, he’d set the book aside.
And then Isaac had apparently suffered a nonlethal brain lesion or had an out-of-body experience, because like that, he lost his mind.
“Yes,” Isaac said to Roxy now, “but I’m not the only one making them. Or I won’t be. Luca—that’s Allegra’s brother—is coming over Saturday, and I’m going to teach him how to crochet so he can help me make them.”
He saw Roxy’s eyes widen. “Luca?” she said.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said with dignity, finishing off a square and snipping it with the little attachment he kept on his key lanyard. So far everybody thought it was a charm—only Roxy knew it was scissors.
“Okay, then,” Roxy said. “Let’s walk around the quad and not talk about it.” And with that, she packed up his lunch detritus—reused Ziploc bag, aluminum water bottle, and insulated lunch box—and grabbed it by the handle before standing up, allowing him the moment to pack up his knitting.
“Where you guys going?”
Both of them turned toward Paula Lamphere, their department head, and pasted on smiles.
“Out for a wander,” Roxy said breezily. “There’s ten minutes left, so I thought we’d walk around the quad before we stare wistfully out the window for the next two hours.
” It really was a beautiful day. Roxy taught Geometry and Algebra II, so she was stuck inside like Isaac, but they understood one of the senior English teachers let her kids sit out on the sidewalk on days like this, while she read book excerpts to them and led discussions.
It was the only time Isaac wished he’d majored in the humanities, actually.
“Just make sure you get to your room on time,” Paula said, as though she was speaking to students.
“Of course,” Isaac said, his hand on Roxy’s bicep before she could shoot off at the mouth. Hating Paula was one of those things they both saved for “walks around the quad.”
“Sure, Mom,” Roxy muttered under her breath as the door swung shut behind them. “Be sure to round up your flying monkeys before you go back to your classroom.”
Isaac snorted at their standing “Wicked Witch of the Math Department” joke, then coughed and then had to endure three of his students staring as Roxy pounded him on the back.
“Okay,” she said when he was done. “That’s it. We’re heading for the soda machine—I swear, all water and no cola makes Isaac a very dull boy.”
“I thought you were going to say coke, and I was gonna say not in this decade,” he told her, and it was her turn to spit-take.
By the time they had their shit together, they were halfway to the H-building and the last soda machine on a high school campus in California, because sometimes parents liked to suck the joy out of kids’ lives, that’s why.
“So,” Roxy said as they caught their breath, “tell me about this Luca and trauma dumping. After all of that, you owe me some tea.”
Isaac laughed a little. “He was nice,” he said after a moment. “I… I was having a bad Todd moment. I kept hearing his voice in my head. He was telling me what to knit.”
“Asshole,” she muttered, and then gave one of her mom smiles when he looked at her sharply.
“He liked to keep me from spending too much on—”
“Isaac?” she asked.
“Yes?”
“Do you have lots of money in the bank?”
“Yes.”
“Buy all the fucking yarn you want. Buy some more art. Buy more of those glorious stained-glass pieces. Whatever you do, don’t knit whatever shit-brown masterpiece your ex-husband told you would make your poops better, okay?”
Isaac gave her a bemused smile. “You know, that’s funny—that’s almost what Luca said. Except for the reference to poop, but then—”
“He’s not up to his elbows in diapers when he gets home from work,” Roxy muttered with a sigh. “So anyway, this Luca guy, he asked you to—”
“I offered,” Isaac told her. It was important, and Roxy knew that.
Paula asked Isaac to knit her a sweater the year before, said the kids would love it if they knew their favorite pre-algebra teacher had done that for the department chair!
Roxy had almost gotten herself fired by producing a breakdown of the cost of making the sweater, by material cost for both the cheap stuff (as Paula told him not to use) and the expensive stuff, and then added an hourly wage.