Chapter 9
COLLEEN
Iwas in the building at six-fifteen.
I unlocked the front office and turned the copier on so it'd be warm. Four bus-change binders on the counter, tardy slips in the left tray, health-office passes in the right. Then I opened the bottom drawer of my desk and counted forty-one granola bars.
By seven-forty there were four hundred six children in that building, and I couldn't tell you about a single quiet minute after that.
A kindergarten mother came in crying harder than her child, which happens every year, and every year I hand the mother the tissue first, because the child is standing right there deciding whether this is a crisis.
Then a second one. Then a father who didn't cry, who stood in the front hall nine minutes with his hands in his pockets, staring down the kindergarten hallway.
I came out and told him she was fine, she already had a friend, the friend's name was Ruby, she had a shark backpack.
He said thank you twice, badly, and left.
At seven-fifty-five a fifth grader threw up in the vestibule.
At eight-oh-five Mrs. Delacroix turned up in my doorway — brand new, twenty-three years old, class list in her hand, chin going. "There are two Jaydens," she said. "My roster has twenty-six names. The room has twenty-four chairs."
I stood up and put a hand on her arm. "Are the twenty-six children in the room right now?"
"Twenty-four are."
"Then you have exactly enough chairs. I'll find the other two." I took the list. "Go teach. Go on."
The other two were on the bus. Route 12, eighteen minutes late, the way Route 12 is always eighteen minutes late on the first day, because a new driver doesn't know yet that the Colvin cul-de-sac has to be taken in reverse.
At eight-forty a five-year-old named Micah showed up alone at my counter with his name in marker on the back of his hand, no backpack, no idea what class he belonged to.
His mother had put him on a bus meant for a different school.
I gave him a granola bar and let him sit in the swivel chair.
I found his teacher in six minutes, then called his mother at the salon where she works, because I've got her work number in the binder, because I built the binder.
At nine-fifteen Dr. Okonkwo came past my desk with her radio in her hand. "Bus twelve?"
"Here. Both kids delivered. I called transportation about the cul-de-sac."
"Frozen lunches for the west wing?"
"On the truck, an hour out. I moved fourth grade's lunch to twelve-twenty."
"How did you move fourth grade's lunch?"
"I asked Trina."
"You asked Trina," she said, and kept walking.
At nine-forty my husband came through the front doors.
I'd left my reading glasses at home and had known it since seven-thirty. I'd been squinting at bus rosters for two hours without thirty spare seconds to be annoyed about it.
He had them in his hand. Work clothes, boots off — he'd left them out on the mat like a man going into a church — so he was standing in the vestibule in his socks with my glasses case, looking around at all that noise.
"Front counter," I called.
He came over and set them down. "You left them on the microwave."
"How'd you know I needed them?"
"You always need them."
The phone rang. I put one finger up, answered it, told a grandmother that yes, she was on the pickup list, yes, we had her ID on file, no, she did not need to bring the birth certificate.
I hung up. Two teachers came in behind me for the laminator.
A boy arrived at the counter holding his own tooth.
Hank stood at the end of the counter and watched all of it.
"Do you need anything?" he said.
"No."
"I could get the box of tissues out of the truck. You've got that little one in the?—"
"Hank."
"Yeah."
"I've got four hundred of these today," I said. "I'm all right."
He nodded, and stayed where he was.
A bell went upstairs. Down the hall a class came out of the gym all at once, which is a sound like weather. Hank's chin came up at it, the way it does at thunder.
Dr. Okonkwo came out of her office with the radio in one hand. "Colleen, twelve's driver is on line two about the cul-de-sac, he says he can't reverse it with the—" She saw Hank. "Oh. Hello."
"Hank Baker."
"Fatima Okonkwo." She shook his hand for about a second and a half. "You brought her glasses. Thank God. Somebody in this building ought to be able to read." Her radio went off against her hip. "Excuse me."
She was gone down the third-grade hall.
I picked up line two and told Bill he was right, he couldn't reverse it with a full bus.
What he was going to do instead was pick up the cul-de-sac first thing tomorrow, with nine kids on board instead of forty.
I said it twice, slower the second time, because Bill is sixty-six years old and it was his fourth day.
While I had him, the nurse came for the tooth, a father came in to change a pickup, and Trina put a sticky note in front of me that said MRS. HALLORAN WANTS TO KNOW ABOUT THE PEANUT THING. I wrote she's fine, room 4 is nut-free, I called her Sunday on it, and Trina took it away.
I hung up and sent the boy to the nurse with his tooth in a paper cup.
When I looked up, Hank hadn't moved. He was standing in the middle of my front office with his hands at his sides, wearing a look I hadn't seen on him before.
"I'll get out of your way," he said.
"Okay."
He put two fingers on the counter for a second, on the wood.
"Coll." He cleared his throat. "This is a lot."
"It's Tuesday," I said.
He went out, put his boots on, drove away.
At noon Trina asked me who the man in the socks had been. I told her that was my husband. She said he was better looking than she'd expected, which I've decided to take as a compliment to somebody in that marriage.
I got home at six-forty with my feet aching, my voice half gone, sat down on the back step in the last warm evening of the year, and called Meg.
We did the wedding photographer first, then her sister-in-law, then whether she should ask for the promotion or wait to be offered it. With a twenty-four-year-old you wait.
"Mom," she said finally. "Owen told me about the banner."
"Of course he did."
"Are you okay? Is Dad — I mean, what is happening over there?"
I watched the neighbor's flag move. I'd thought about how to answer this in the car, in the shower, standing at the copier.
"Your father was lonely," I said. "For a long time. He didn't tell me."
"He didn't tell you."
"Not once, Meggie. Not one time in eighteen years, in words." I pulled my cardigan closed. "I'm not going to stand here and take that on. He was a grown man in a house with a woman who was awake. I can't hear something nobody says."
"Okay."
"But I'll tell you the part that's mine, because you're getting married in April and it's worth having.
" I took a breath. "Somewhere in there we stopped reaching for each other.
Not all at once. He'd go out to the garage after dinner and I'd be relieved, because it meant I could get the lunches done.
He'd get quiet and I'd think, well, he's tired.
And I noticed. I want to be honest, I noticed. I just stopped asking why."
"Why'd you stop?"
"Because life was full. And because the silence was easier than whatever the answer was going to be."
She was quiet a second.
"That's a little bleak, Mom."
"It's a marriage, honey. There's some maintenance."
She laughed at that. Then she said, "You sound better than I thought you'd sound."
"I've had a day."
"How was the first day?"
"Four hundred and six," I said. "Nobody lost. One tooth."
I stayed out on the step after we hung up, until the mosquitoes found me.
Then I went in, opened the laptop at the kitchen table, and booked a trip.
Four days. Thursday to Sunday of the school's October break, the twenty-second through the twenty-fifth, the only stretch of that month my building doesn't need me.
A rented cottage on the water at Rock Harbor, ninety minutes north — the one with the blue door I've pulled up online every October for six years and then closed the tab on.
I didn't check the balance in the joint account first. I put it on my card.
Then I printed the confirmation, because I wanted it to be a piece of paper.
Hank came in at eight with a sack from the good sandwich place, having decided somewhere in his own day that I'd be too tired to cook.
I handed him the page.
He set the sack down and read it, then read it again all the way through, moving his lips a little the way he does with anything printed. I stood there with my arms crossed, waiting to see which man was going to answer.
"October twenty-second," he said.
"Thursday to Sunday. It's break. The building's closed."
"That's the cottage with the blue door."
"It is."
He folded the paper along its crease and handed it back to me.
"What should I pack?" he said.