Chapter 5
Chapter Five
WILLA
Cooper Mercer raises his hand on a Wednesday in the middle of November, and I have to hold still so as not to make it a thing.
We are doing the unit on community helpers, which is a unit I have taught nine times and could teach unconscious, and I have asked the room who knows somebody whose job helps the whole town, expecting the usual, firefighter, doctor, the one child every year who says professional wrestler, and Cooper’s hand comes up.
Just comes up, into the air, the way a hand is supposed to, like it is nothing, like he has been raising it his whole life, and I call on him with my whole heart in my throat and my face arranged to show none of that, and he says, “Beekeepers. Because without bees you don’t get most of the food.
My uncle says one in every three bites is bees.
” And the room goes oh, impressed, and Davey Pruett says he is going to count his bites at lunch, and Cooper sits there having said a true and useful thing out loud to twenty people and the sky does not fall, and I write one in three bites on the board like it is a normal fact from a normal child and not a small private miracle I will be telling four grown men about by suppertime.
Because I will be telling them. That is the routine now, and I should probably examine when exactly it became a routine, except that examining it is precisely the thing I keep declining to do.
It went like this, the way these things go, which is to say gradually and then all at once.
The one reading visit became a standing reading visit, Tuesdays and Saturdays, because a boy who is finally talking should not have the talking interrupted by a gap in the schedule, that is good pedagogy.
And the Saturday visits started running long, because Jonah cooks and the food does not know how to be a small amount and it would be rude, and a person should not be rude.
And somewhere in there I started bringing Cooper books from my own shelf, the good ones, the ones about boys and dogs and dead grandfathers that make a careful child cry in a safe way, and somewhere in there I started knowing without being told that Sam takes his coffee with too much sugar and Beau does the dishes badly on purpose so Jonah will redo them and Asa goes out to the hives when a conversation gets within a country mile of his own heart.
I know the rhythms of that house now the way I know the families at this school.
I have, without anyone voting on it, joined the triangulation.
Where is Cooper, is he all right. I do it now too.
“You’ve got bee glitter on you,” Delphine says, in the break room, not looking up from her phone.
I look down. There is, in fact, a small amount of gold leaf on my cardigan, from a project, and also possibly some actual evidence of beekeeping, and I brush at it.
Delphine Arceneaux teaches art two doors down and has been my break-room companion for two years, which in teacher time is a marriage, and she is the only other person on this faculty who understands that the parent emails are a coordinated psychological assault and not, as administration insists, “valued communication.” She has paint under her nails permanently, in colors that change weekly, and strong opinions about all of them, and she watches a quantity of television so aggressively terrible that describing the plots to me on Mondays has become its own art form.
“It’s not bee glitter,” I say. “It’s regular glitter.”
“Mm,” says Delphine, in a tone I do not care for, and goes back to her phone, where she is, she informs me, watching a woman on a dating show choose between two men who are both named Tyler, a situation Delphine finds morally instructive.
I have, in my bag, a folder of Cooper’s drawings, because his classroom teacher wanted the art teacher’s professional eye, which is a real and legitimate reason and also a thing I could have emailed.
I put them on the table. “Will you look at these. The Mercer boy. He draws bees on everything and I want to know if it’s, you know.
If there’s something there or if he’s just a kid who likes bees. ”
Delphine sets down the Tylers. She goes through the drawings slowly, the way she does not do anything else slowly, and her painted face changes, and she pulls one out, the field with the boy in it, the swarm, the boy smiling. “This kid is eight?”
“Eight.”
“He’s not drawing bees because he likes bees.
” She taps the air over the swarm, careful not to touch it.
“Look where he put himself. Look how much air he gave the bees and how little he gave the boy. He’s drawing the thing that’s holding him up.
The bees are the people. You understand what I’m telling you.
” She slides it back into the folder, gentle, and looks at me, and Delphine does not go gentle often so when she does it lands. “Who’s holding this kid up, Willa.”
“Four uncles and a goat,” I say.
“And you,” says Delphine, “by the look of the bee glitter,” and before I can argue she has picked the Tylers back up, which is how Delphine ends a conversation she has decided to win, and I sit there with a folder of a grieving child’s whole architecture in my hands and I do not have one thing to say.
Here is the thing I do not say to Delphine, because Delphine has a thing about packs that I have never gotten the whole story on and am too fond of her to poke, and because I do not have words for it that would survive being said out loud in a break room that smells of burned coffee:
I am very good at holding people up. It is, if I am honest, the load-bearing fact of my entire life.
I am the one who comes to the thing. I am the one who knows what you take in your coffee and which anniversary is coming and how to handle Earl Tubb, the one who returns the casserole and sits up on the phone and crouches down to a child’s level before she says a word, and I have built a whole good life out of being that, out of being the one everybody can lean on because she does not appear to need leaning on herself, and for a long time, years, that has been enough, it has, I am not lying when I say I am happy, I am the happiest person I know.
But I have started, lately, on the drive home from a farmhouse full of other people’s healing, to notice the porch light I leave on for nobody.
I have started to notice that I am extremely well-practiced at being the person who makes the love story happen, the one who tells Roz she is going to fall for all four of them and is right and insufferable about it, the supporting character, the best friend, the woman everyone is so glad to have at the wedding and nobody, in twenty-two years, has ever once stood at the front of a church waiting for.
I arrange the happiness. I have never been the happiness.
And I have always told myself that was a personality, a calling, a thing I chose, and lately, in the car, in the dark, I have started to wonder if it was a thing I decided once, a long time ago, the way Roz decided hers on a kitchen floor, and then spent two decades calling it sunshine.
I do not say any of that to Delphine. I take my folder and my bee glitter and I go teach long division.
I do, however, make the mistake of going to see Roz.
I should know better. I taught her everything she knows about this exact maneuver.
But it is Friday and the shop is warm and full of the good green smell of it and Roz is back in her bonded contentment doing the books with a cat asleep on the order ledger, and I drop in to return a thing and stay because the chairs are comfortable, and I tell her about Cooper raising his hand, because I tell Roz everything, it is a compulsion, I have never successfully not told Roz a thing in my life.
“He raised his hand,” Roz says. “That’s wonderful, Willa.”
“It really was. You should have seen his uncles when I told them, Sam nearly cried, and Beau did this whole,” and I do the Beau, the grin, the bit, “and even the big one, Asa, he gets this look, he doesn’t say anything but he gets this,” and I stop, because Roz has put down her pen.
She has put down her pen and she is looking at me, and it is a look I know in my bones, it is a look I have aimed at her across this same counter, and oh, no. Oh, I have walked directly into it.
“What,” I say.
“Nothing.” Roz picks the pen back up. “Tell me about the big one’s look.”
“That is not nothing. You did the pen.”
“I do not have a pen thing.”
“You have a pen thing, you absolutely have a pen thing, you put the pen down so you’d have both hands free for being right at me, I invented that move, do not run my own move at me in my friend’s flower shop.
” I am aware I am talking too fast. I am aware the shop has gotten warm.
“I am helping a child, Roz. That is all this is. The boy lost his whole world and he’s finally talking and I am his reading teacher and I am helping him, and his family is grieving and kind and I am being neighborly, which, I will remind you, is a thing you do not have to teach me, I have been neighborly since birth. ”
Roz lets all of that land on the counter and sit there.
“You said fine twice,” she says, gently, to her ledger.
“Back in October. About the four uncles. You stood in my kitchen and said you were fine, and then you said it again. I wrote it on my calendar.” She looks up.
“You taught me that one, sugar. You sat on my floor and you told me that fine is the white flag I run up when a thing is too true to look at, and you were right, you were so right it changed my whole life, and now I am going to sit here in my warm shop with my cat and my whole impossible family two streets over, all of which I have because you would not let me lie to you, and I am going to wait. I am not going to push. You hate being pushed even more than I do. I’m just going to put my pen down, and wait, and love you, and be here on the day you’re ready to say the true thing instead of the neighborly one. ”
The cat shifts on the ledger. The cooler hums. I have a whole speech ready, I always have a whole speech ready, and not one word of it will come up out of me, because Rosalind Beaumont has handed me back, with interest, the exact thing I handed her on a kitchen floor, and the worst part, the genuinely unfair part, is that she did it kindly, she did it the way I would have wanted to be done to, and there is no defending against being loved on your own terms by somebody who learned the terms from you.
“I have to get back,” I say, which is a lie, it is four-fifteen on a Friday and I have nowhere to be, and Roz, who knows it is a lie, who knows me down to the studs, just nods and says, “Drive safe. Tell Cooper I’m proud of his hand,” and lets me go, because she meant it, the part about waiting, she is going to wait, and a waiting Roz is a far more dangerous thing than a pushing one, I should know, I built her.
I drive home. The porch light is on, because I left it on this morning, for nobody, the way I do.
I stand in the yard a minute in the cold and look at it, my own light, burning away on my own empty porch, and for the first time in I do not know how long, I let myself look straight at the thing it is, which is a light I keep on so that the house looks like somebody is waiting, in a house where the somebody and the nobody are the same person.
Then I go inside, because it is cold, and because looking straight at things is Roz’s department now, apparently, and I have division to grade.
I leave the light on. Of course I leave the light on. I always leave the light on.