12. Lucy #2
The lot behind the school was a strip of asphalt between the building and a chain-link fence, and by nearly ten, so many people were milling around that nobody could get out of the parking lot.
Renata brought the third grade out for ten minutes before she took them back inside.
She stood by the door with the clipboard against her chest and let the children find their families.
Grace came out with Kayla. Kayla's mother collected Kayla off the step, and the two girls stood a foot apart without saying goodbye, then walked away in opposite directions.
Grace found them by the fence and started talking before she reached them.
She informed them that the boy had talked about the Titanic, even though they'd told him twice at practice to skip the iceberg.
How a girl in the second grade cried at the door and then went up and said hers with her face still wet.
How the tape on the floor was the same tape they used in gym, and you were supposed to get your toes on it and not over it, and hers had been half off the whole time and nobody said one word to her about it.
"And that was the right count," Carrington said.
"I know," Grace said.
"Kayla's got the ocean book," Grace said to Lucy. "Kayla says I can bring it home, but her mom says not until Kayla's done with it, and she's never going to be done with it because she keeps going back to the whales."
A woman in a fleece and a lanyard with a laminated card in it walked down the line of cars with a clipboard on her hip and a pen behind her ear, talking to three families every minute, rushing before everyone left.
"Grace Cole," the woman said, finding the name on her sheet. She turned the clipboard around and held out the pen. "Both parents' names, then whatever you're bringing to the picnic. Anything but brownies. I've got nine brownies."
Lucy took the pen. She wrote Lucy Harper on the first line and Carrington Cole beneath it, and in the column marked bringing, she wrote fruit.
Carrington stood a foot away, watched her write it, and said nothing at all.
"Great," the woman said, taking the board back, already turned toward the next car. "The twenty-fourth, eleven o'clock, the shelter with the roof."
"Thank you," Carrington said.
"Are we bringing fruit?" Grace asked.
"I guess we're bringing fruit," Lucy said.
"Okay," Grace said.
Renata raised two fingers at the door. The third grade took about forty seconds to decide to obey her, then drifted over.
"Go on," Lucy said. "Your lunch is in the blue bag."
"I know," Grace said. "Bye." She said it to both of them at once, without deciding which of them to look at, and went.
Renata counted them through the door and raised the clipboard at Lucy over their heads. Then they were all inside and the door shut.
Carrington's car had waited at the curb the whole time with a driver in it and the engine running. Ten past ten.
"I'll have her home at four," Lucy said.
"Thank you, Ms. Harper," Carrington said, and climbed into the car.
Lucy stayed where she was. Two cars down, the woman in the fleece asked somebody else for both parents' names.
Grace went to sleep that night at eight-thirty. Two pages of the fox book, the closet latched, the nightlight already burning in its socket by the door, the curtains open at the same gap since April.
The strip of paper had ridden home in her coat pocket and returned to the nightstand, squared against the base of the lamp. Grace nudged it a quarter inch out of line and left it there.
"Kayla's dad brings the drinks every year," Grace said. "He does the whole cooler."
"That's a good job," Lucy said.
"He does it because he's not allowed to cook," Grace said.
"Also a good job," Lucy said, and killed the lamp.
"Is Aunt Carrington coming to the picnic?" Grace asked.
"I don't know," Lucy said.
"Okay," Grace said, and turned over to face the wall.
Lucy walked down the path at a quarter to nine. She washed the cup in the sink and left it upside down on the towel. She started a load of Grace's uniform shirts, ate half a sandwich standing at the counter, and shoved the other half into the fridge under a plate.
At nine, she sat down at the table. The log had lived on the counter since February, four or five handwritten lines every night about how a seven-year-old's day had gone.
But now that it was optional, there was nobody left to read it.
She carried it to the drawer with the take-out menus, dropped it in, and shut the drawer.
Then she wiped a table that was already clean, stopped the machine ten minutes early with the shirts still spinning, and hung six of them on the rail by the door.
At ten, she took a paperback she'd already read twice to bed, read four pages of it, and could not have said what happened on any of them. She turned the lamp off and laid in the dark, staring at the ceiling, restless. Then she switched the lamp back on and got out of bed.
The cottage kitchen window faced back up the path toward the corner of the main house. At eleven, she reached over to switch off the light above the stove.
Lucy put her shoes back on. The low path lights burned along the edge of the gravel, buried at the ankle.
The gravel gave under her shoes, and no matter how softly she stepped, she couldn’t help but to make noise.
Halfway up, she stopped and stood there long enough for the cold to work its way through her sleeves, then she walked the rest.
When she reached the top, she knocked.