Chapter 11
chapter
eleven
Jules
Three weeks in, I make the mistake of complaining.
We're lying in my bed, and I'm ranting at the ceiling about the district cutting my supply budget again.
I've been buying brushes out of my own paycheck from an online discount store, and the quality is crap.
My second graders mash the bristles flat within a week.
Payton listens the way he does everything, with his whole self.
I don't think about it again.
Until Saturday morning, when I open my front door to get the mail and nearly step on a bouquet.
Wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine like something from a florist, but instead of flowers, it’s a dozen good brushes: sable rounds, a fan brush, two filberts, a flat I've been eyeing for a year.
Beside them sits a coffee can stuffed with fifty kid-sized brushes, the sturdy kind. The note is tucked into the twine.
Not flowers. I follow the rules.
—P
I laugh out loud. Mrs. Delgado, watering her roses next door, looks at me like I've finally lost it.
Me: These are flowers.
Payton: They're brushes.
Me: They're wrapped like flowers.
Payton: Loophole.
Me: I should make you take them back.
Payton: You gonna take them from the second graders?
Damn him.
I put the coffee can by the door to take to school on Monday. The good brushes go in an empty mason jar on my kitchen windowsill, where the morning light hits them.
Right where a normal person would put flowers.
I don't think about that either.