Chapter 1
CHAPTER ONE
Sophie
There are twenty-two name tags taped to the desks in my classroom and the same amount of folders waiting on each chair.
In nine minutes, the doors are going to open on a new school year, and all those seven-year-olds are going to walk through them and decide for themselves what kind of year they're going to have.
I stand at the window with my homemade iced coffee in my hand and watch the parent line forming in the parking lot.
This is the part of teaching I love best, more than I'm supposed to admit—the first morning, before anything has happened yet.
The bulletin board still smells like fresh felt, the pencils in the cup at the front of each desk are sharpened to identical points, and my lesson plans for the week are printed and clipped and waiting in the drawer.
Somewhere on the other side of that door is my new class, and they're all still, for a few more minutes, perfect.
I take a slow breath and press my hand flat against my skirt to settle it.
The hymn we sang at choir practice last night is in my head, and I don't realize I'm humming it until I catch myself.
I make myself stop as the bell rings.
I turn from the window, and the door bangs open into the hallway.
Small voices and backpacks and the clatter of new shoes come barreling toward me in the chaos of kids who haven't yet remembered they're supposed to walk when they’re inside.
I love them already. I haven't met them, and I already love them.
I greet them at the door one at a time, check the name tags against the faces, crouch down to be eye level, and shake small hands that are mostly sticky.
Caleb Bradley comes in with his mother.
She's a thin woman in a pressed blouse with her hair pulled back tight, and she doesn't quite look at me as she nudges him through the door.
He looks up at her and then at me and gives me a careful, considered little nod, like he's been told to mind his manners.
"Caleb," I say and bend down. "I'm Miss Crockett. I've been looking forward to meeting you all summer."
"Miss Crockett," he repeats. He has a missing tooth on the bottom right, a Spider-Man backpack, and a serious expression that breaks open into a small reluctant smile when I tap the spider on his bag and tell him I like his backpack.
His mother says, "Have a good day, baby," and is out the door before he's all the way to his desk.
Some moms are like that on the first day. They can't bear to watch their babies walk in without them.
I get the rest of them through the door, into their seats, and through the welcome song, the read-aloud, and the first quiet bathroom break.
Caleb is good as gold all morning.
He raises his hand when he knows an answer and waits to be called on.
He shares his crayons with the girl across from him without being asked.
At recess, I watch him from the playground bench. He runs slower than the other boys, careful with his small body.
I think about him at lunch. I think about him during the math lesson after lunch.
By the time the dismissal bell rings, I've thought about every child in my room by name and habit. Caleb is one of the easy ones, and I'm already planning for him.
The parents start arriving at three for pickup.
I have my line ready outside the classroom door, and I'm calling kids by name as their adults come around the corner.
Caleb is third in line behind a red-headed girl named Marcy and a boy named Eli, and his mother isn't there.
She's not in the hallway or the parking lot. The car line moves, and Caleb is still beside me at three-fifteen.
"My mama said she'd be here," he tells me.
"She'll be here, sweetheart. Sometimes the line is slow."
The line's moving fine—that isn't the problem.
I keep my hand on his shoulder, watch the door for her, and feel something I don't have a name for set up shop behind my ribs.
At three-twenty, Marie Bradley finally appears.
She doesn't come down to where I am.
She stops at the office instead, and through the glass, I watch her talking to my principal, Karen. She’s not crying, but her hands are doing something with the strap of her purse, twisting it around her fingers.
Caleb is the only child left in my line.
"Caleb, honey, why don't you walk with me to the office? I'll bet your mama's almost done."
We walk down together. He holds my hand and stays quiet.
Karen meets us in the hallway. Her face does the thing it does when she's about to be kind to me in front of a child. "Caleb, baby, why don't you go on in and see your mama? She's right in my office."
He goes. Karen waits till he's all the way through the door, then she takes me by the elbow and walks me three steps down the hall, where we can't be heard.
"Sophie."
"Karen."
"Marie's pulling him from your class. She'd like him in Mrs. Vinson's room instead."
I look at her.
I'm supposed to say something. I can feel my mouth opening, but there's a place where the words are supposed to come out, and there are no words there for a long moment.
"Did she say why?"
"She didn't say anything that made a lot of sense, honey. I think she's just got something going on at home. We're gonna move him over tomorrow."
She squeezes my elbow. Her face is very kind, and there's no answer in it—only a question she's not asking me.
I make myself smile and thank her, and I walk back to my classroom.
I close the door and stand at my desk for a long minute looking at the chair where Caleb sat today.
Twenty-one name tags now.
The hymn from this morning surfaces again. I don't have the energy to make myself stop. Heck, maybe it’s to calm me down.
Why would she want to move him?
Did I do something?
How could I have? School just started today.
I lock up at four. I'm the last teacher in my hallway.
I tell myself it's because I wanted to redo the seating chart, which is true, and I tell myself it's not because I wanted to be alone for a while, which is also true.
The drive home is about twelve minutes.
Hoagie meets me at the door with his whole body, and I sit down on the floor in the entryway and let him climb into my lap, all seventy pounds of him, and put his head against my chest, because he reads me better than most people in this town.
"It was some day, buddy."
He thumps his tail against my thigh.
I tell myself a lot of things while sitting here.
Sometimes parents change their minds. Sometimes a child just needs a different teacher, and it has nothing to do with anyone. The Lord works it out.
I almost believe myself.
* * *
By Friday afternoon, I haven't heard a word from Marie Bradley.
Caleb hasn't come back, and the chair where he sat is being occupied by a girl named Hazel, from when I re-did the seating chart.
I do my job. I read to my class and do math centers, and I write twenty-one weekly progress observations in my head as the week goes on, and I don't let myself think about the little boy who was removed from my class.
Maybe I shouldn’t be wondering what the reason is, but I am.
I'm at the door of my classroom at three on Friday, calling kids to their adults, when Lizzie Sue Hodgkins finds me.
She's collecting two of her four boys, both of whom are racing past her with their backpacks dragging, and she peels off from the pickup current and floats up to me with a smile she calculated. "Sophie, honey, do you have a minute?"
"Of course, Lizzie Sue."
She steps in close and lowers her voice, puts a hand on my forearm—light and friendly and not quite letting go. "Can I just say something as a friend?"
My neck tightens. I've felt this before—at the start of a sermon that's about to turn ugly.
I keep my voice even. "Of course."
"I just want you to be careful out there, sweetheart." She gives my arm the smallest squeeze. "You know how people talk."
I look at her. She holds the smile.
"Lizzie Sue, I don't know what you mean."
"Oh, honey." Her eyes go soft and sad. "Don't make me say it. I just love you, that's all. I just want you to be careful." She releases my arm and pats it once. "You take care, now."
She heads back to her boys and is gone into the parking lot before I've closed my mouth.
* * *
Saturday morning at the Piggly Wiggly is the closest thing this town has to a town meeting.
I keep my list short and my head down, find Hoagie's food in aisle seven, and I'm reaching for the eggs in the dairy case when Patricia appears at my elbow.
Patricia is in her sixties, a friend of my grandmother's. She's known me my whole life and taught my Sunday school class when I was nine.
She studies my face for a moment too long. "How's your sister, darling?"
There's a thing she does with the word sister that I've never heard her do before.
A small emphasis, a hesitation around it, as if the word is being borrowed for a different purpose than the one it usually has.
I make my mouth move. "Hannah's doing well. She's working at the library in Tallahassee."
"That's good. That's so good." Patricia pats my arm. "I'll keep her in my prayers." A pause. "You too."
She's gone before the rest of the eggs are in my cart.
I feel, in a way I can't yet say out loud to myself, that something is happening, but I can’t put my finger on it.
I drive to church on Sunday in the navy dress I wear every week, the one with the small white buttons.
I sit beside my mother in the pew where we've sat since I was eight years old, and I play my guitar at the 9 a.m. youth service the way I've always done since I was sixteen.
At 11 a.m., Reverend Hardin steps to the pulpit, and the moment he opens his Bible, I feel my stomach drop.
His sermon is on Exodus 20:16. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour. He preaches it for forty minutes.
I keep my face arranged.
He preaches about the sin of false witness, and then he preaches about the responsibility of the godly community to address sin when they see it, and how that responsibility should be carried out with love and with the right kind of concern.