Ben
We'd all pulled into the school lot within ten minutes of each other and we were all leaning against our own vehicles like a row of men who'd been shot but were too polite to fall down about it.
Beth and Emma and Noah were running around in the strip of grass at the edge of the lot, taking turns shrieking, doing the thing kids do where they invent a game that has no rules, no point, and no clear winner, and is somehow the best game of all time.
The light was that early-evening kind that makes everything orange and softer than it should be.
The play meeting started in fifteen minutes. None of us had moved toward the doors.
"You look like absolute dog shit," Cole told me. It was the first thing he'd said since we got there.
"Yeah, well. You look like a man who lost a fight with a paper shredder. So."
Cole let out a breath. "I'm not used to feeling this shitty. Don't know what the fuck to do with it."
Luke didn't say anything and instead was staring at his shoes.
I exhaled and watched my breath in the October air.
"Beth asked me three times yesterday why Miss Morgan keeps being sick and when she's coming back to class.
" I sighed. "I wonder if that means she's taken a week off to have a fling with her new beau.
" The acid in my own voice surprised me.
"Beth said Mr. Donaldson smells like a basement, and that she just wanted her teacher back.
What the fuck was I supposed to say to that? "
"Emma asked me last night if Miss Morgan was mad at her," Luke said to his shoes. "I told her no, of course not, Miss Morgan loves you. And then I lay in bed for three hours thinking about the fact that I have no idea who the woman I fell in love with is."
Cole said nothing. His jaw was doing its grindy thing.
"Daddy."
Beth had appeared at my hip without me noticing. She was looking up at me with her hands on her hips, which she'd inherited from a grandmother who had never let me get away with anything either.
"Hey, kid."
"You're doing your sad face. Uncle Cole's doing it too. Uncle Luke is the worst at it." She turned and inspected Luke. "Uncle Luke. You look like the dog in that old cartoon."
"Which dog?"
"Eeyore."
"Beth," Luke said. "Eeyore isn't a dog."
She blinked at him. "What is he, then?"
"He's a donkey."
"Oh." She frowned and then casually shot back. "Then you look like a sad old stuffed donkey."
"Yup, that's my girl," I said.
"She's not wrong though," Cole smirked for the first time since Friday.
"Yeah, thanks for that Beth. I do feel like a stuffed donkey."
She nodded firmly. "Well stop it. You're making the parking lot weird." Then she sprinted back to Emma and Noah without waiting for a reply, because her work was done.
We tried, for ten seconds, to fix our faces. We were not good at it. Beth turned around once from twenty feet away to look at us, shook her head like we were a deep disappointment, and went back to her game.
"I do not want to go in there," I said. Quieter than I meant to. "I want to see her so fucking bad I've been counting the hours since six this morning, and at the same time I am hoping she has the flu so I can have one more day before I have to stand in a room with her."
"Me too."
"Me three." Luke's voice cracked on it. "I keep thinking about her face. I keep-"
"Stop." Cole grumbled. "We go in we finish the volunteer work we signed up for and then we get the fuck out of there. End of story."
"Yeah."
"Yeah."
We pushed off our tailgates, called the kids, and walked into the building like men headed for a firing squad.
Callie's director chair was empty. Mr. Donaldson the substitute was at the front of the auditorium holding a script upside down.
Karla Chism was next to him in a cardigan the color of a parking violation, snapping at parents about where they were and were not allowed to sit.
The kids on stage were running in roughly the pattern of a kicked anthill.
The whole room smelled like pandemonium and Goldfish crackers.
I scanned for Callie but she was nowhere in sight.
I looked at Cole. Cole looked at Luke. Luke looked like a man who had just figured out he'd missed his own funeral.
And then, just when it could not have gotten any worse, a five-foot-two hurricane in a Hawaiian print dress with wrath written across her face came beelining straight for us.
A small hand closed around my elbow.
"Outside."
Tessa's hair was up. Her amber eyes were doing a thing I had personally never witnessed on a human being and was actively praying I would never witness again. Her hand on my elbow was clenched like a vice grip.
"Tess, we were just-"
"Outside. All three of you. Now. Right now."
She turned and pulled me, fully expecting that the three biggest men in the room would in fact follow a hundred-and-thirty-pound woman in a tropical dress out the side door without argument, which we did, because something in our bones knew we were in deep shit.
We exited via the side door into the alley between the auditorium and the dumpsters. Tessa pulled the door shut behind us. We were alone with a woman who looked like she was about to castrate us in the back alley of an elementary school.
"Sit." She pointed at the curb.
"Tessa-"
"Ben. Sit."
I sat. Cole sat. Luke sat. Three grown men on a curb behind an elementary school in a row, looking up at a woman who had clearly planned to destroy us.
"I am going to say this once," Tessa said, "and I am going to say it without raising my voice, because there are children inside, and because my husband would prefer I not give myself a stroke. Are we clear."
"Yes ma'am," the three of us said in unison.
"Wonderful. Then let us begin." She inhaled.
"You absolute walking concussions. You stuffed-bear-carrying, bouquet-ruining, Sale-Pending-causing, trauma-haunted, single-father horndog disasters.
You showed up to my best friend's house on the worst goddamn day of her entire goddamn life and called her a whore in her own driveway. Do you know that?"
Luke made a sound.
"DO YOU. Hand up if you knew. No? No hands?
Wonderful. Allow me. That morning. The morning of the worst day of her life.
Callie was called into Darren Beauford's office, who proceeded to invite her on a dinner date, and when she politely declined the offer of suckling on a cologne-soaked toad, he fired her on the spot.
Effective immediately. Thirty minutes to clean her room.
She did. She did it without letting her son see her cry.
Then she came home. Then she let my husband, Vaughn, the man she has known for twenty years, the man who carried in her boxes because nobody else was there, hold her up in her own driveway while she finally let years of repressed sadness go.
That, gentlemen, is what your erections rolled up on with a stuffed bear.
My fucking husband was helping her and you proceeded to call my best friend a whore and insinuate she was fucking my husband you absolute shit for brains cocksuckers. "
"Oh shit, that man was your husband? Tess-" Cole tried.
"Do not."
Cole did not.
"You." She pointed at Luke. "I have watched my best friend fall in love with you, in this stupid sweet careful way she does, because she has always had a thing for men who fold their laundry.
And you, who have done two years of therapy looked at her face and decided what your ex-wife would have done was what she had done.
I want you to think about that. I want you to think about that for the rest of your life, and then I want you to go to one more year of therapy, just on principle. "
Luke was openly crying now into his knees.
"You." She pivoted to Cole. "Cole Ramirez. You sat down to dinner with her son. You let that boy hold your dog tags. Callie told me you'd never let a woman near your kid the way you let her near Noah. And then you stood in her driveway and looked at her like a suspect.”
"I know," Cole said. He had the very still look of a man stuck at the bottom of a well.
"And you." Me. Me me me. "The one who thinks he is so fucking charming.
The man whose entire personality is making everyone laugh.
You looked at the only woman who has ever made you laugh for once, and the second you weren't sure of yourself, the second the script changed, you reached for the cruelest joke in the bag.
You wouldn't know a real feeling if it slapped you across your stupid handsome face and called you Daddy.
I would feed you to the goats from her field trip if I thought you'd be nutritious for them, but you wouldn't be, because there's nothing to you but bad timing and a crooked smile. "
She exhaled hard, the fury seeping out of her.
"I am exhausted. I have been holding Callie up for days while she sleeps two hours a night and homeschools her kid and cries in my shower about selling her house and losing you three morons, thinking I can't hear her.
I have been bringing her crackers and refilling her water and watching her stare at a ceiling that is not hers.
I have been carrying her, while you three have been what… having your poor little pity party?"
She closed her eyes and then opened them.
"I have spent the last week," she said, quieter, "building a paper trail on that polo-wearing parasite.
I have voice memos. I have emails. I have a teacher named Renata Abbott who I tracked down last week, who left this district last year under identical circumstances, who is willing to talk.
I have the recording Callie was smart enough to make in his office on Friday. And I have it all documented here."
She pulled a thick manila envelope out of her shoulder bag. She handed it to Luke, with the gravity of a sergeant handing out a rifle.
"You three want to be useful," she said.
"You want to be worthy of her. Here is your shot.
You finish what we started. You do not text her.
You do not call her. You do not, so help me god, come to my house.
You do the work first. You earn the right to stand near her again.
And then, and only then, you go ask her if she will have you back. Are we clear."
"Yes ma'am," Cole said.
"Yes ma'am," Luke said. He was wiping his face.
"Yes ma'am," I said. My voice was wrecked. I had never hated myself more.
Tessa looked at the three of us on the curb. Her face softened at the edges for a second.
"I cannot believe I am telling you this," she said. "She would kill me." She paused. "She is so angry. And she is so hurt. And she misses you so much she cannot breathe. You did this to her. You also have one chance to fix it. Do not blow it."
She turned and started walking back toward the side door. Stopped. Turned back.
"And Cole."
"Ma'am."
"That man. Beauford. I want him finished. The kind of finished a man does not come back from. Are we clear."
Cole's voice when it came back was the calmest and most resolute I have ever heard.
"Yes ma'am."
"Good." She opened the door. "Get up off my curb. Take your kids home. Tomorrow you start."
The door clicked shut. We sat there for a long minute, three men on a curb behind an elementary school, holding the envelope and our own shame and guilt.
"I'm going to kill him," Cole said.
"You're going to do better than that," Luke said. "You're going to put him in a box he built himself. Cole. Look at me. We're going to bury him."
"With my cousin's lawyer," I said. "I'll call him tonight. He owes me a favor from last spring."
"I'll build the package." Luke was opening the envelope already, hands shaking, the contents fanning out across his thighs. "By Sunday this guy's whole life is in a folder. By Monday he's on leave. By Tuesday I want charges."
"I'll handle the people side." Cole said. "I’ll make anyone knows what a slime ball he is talk."
We sat for another second.
"Hey," I said.
They looked at me and could probably see the emotional wreckage written across the lines of my face.
"We love her and we let her down."
"Yeah."
"Yeah."
We got up off the curb.