Strawberries And Smoke

The book was coming apart at the spine. Avery had pressed the purple marker down so hard that her name had bled through to the following page, the A drawn like a tent with the crossbar sliding off to the right, and the corner had curled up from two hours on a bench in the sun. An eraser crumb was wedged in the gutter of page four. I dug it out with my thumbnail at a red light and then sat there feeling ridiculous, a grown woman cleaning a child's homework like it was a wound. I could have left it in the office. That's what I told myself at the bottom of the hill, the school gates shrinking in my rearview, the sun going orange behind the ridge. There was a tray by the front desk with a label on it, and the secretary would have rung the house in the morning, and none of it would have been my business. Instead I pulled over, looked up an address on the emergency form, and drove up a road I hadn't known existed. Past gates with intercoms. Past a horse in a field wearing a blanket against the cold. I talked to myself the whole way, which is what I do when I'm about to do something and want it finished before I lose my nerve. Eight windows on the front of the house. Two lit. The gravel gave under my tires loud enough that I reached over and turned the radio off, as though the house could hear it. The door was oak, and the knocker was brass and shaped like a hand, and I used my knuckle instead. He opened it before the second knock landed. He was taller than I remembered, or I had spent nine years getting smaller; either way he filled the whole frame. The glasses were gone. There was a carabiner of keys on his belt and he was already turning one between his thumb and forefinger before he'd finished looking at me, and I knew that fidget the way you know a song that comes on in a supermarket — all at once, against your will, in the middle of the cereal aisle. His throat moved. His eyes went to my chin, my shoulder, the gravel behind me, anywhere. "Her homework," I said, and held it out. He took it in both hands, as if it were heavier than it was. "I — thank you. She's been obsessing over this art assignment all week. I didn't even notice it was gone." He turned the book over, and there on the back, in purple, was a house with three windows and one small figure standing alone on the lawn, and he looked at it a beat too long. "Can I — can I get you a glass of water? It's a long drive up the hill." "No, thank you." I heard my own classroom voice come out, bright and helpful and completely false. "I'd be heading back." Behind him the hallway was marble and the light in it was warm and low, and there was a smell of something roasting, and a pair of small socks lay abandoned on the floor by a bench. Avery came down the stairs in those socks and slid the last foot on the polished stone, and her face when she saw me was the best and worst thing that happened to me all week. She got as far as the rug and then stopped and put herself half behind his leg, one eye showing. "Hey, bug," I said. "You forgot something." He put his hand on the top of her head, and I watched his jaw tighten, and I understood that he was doing the same thing I was doing, which was holding very still so that nothing showed. "Avery. Say thank you to your teacher. They brought your homework all the way up here." "Thank you," she whispered. "It's a beautiful house," I heard myself say, for no reason at all, and then I left, and my shoes were too loud on the steps, and I got into my car and drove down the long curved driveway with my hands at ten and two like a woman taking a driving test. At the bottom, the lawn. Lila was standing on it with a hose in her hand, in jeans, her hair still the color it had been, its same thick shine. Water arced out and broke apart and hissed on the grass. Nine years, and she was still beautiful, and she was out there watering a lawn in the evening like a woman in a magazine, and the part of me that had once loved her more than I loved anyone stood up in my chest and looked out through my eyes and did not know what to do with itself. I smiled. I don't know why. I lifted two fingers off the wheel and gave her the smile you give a neighbor, and she straightened up, and the hose kept going, soaking the toe of her shoe, and then I put my foot down and went away. --- The week went like this. Monday, the laminator jammed and I fixed it with a butter knife. Tuesday, I sat in a plastic chair meant for someone eleven years old and read a picture book aloud and did all the voices, and a boy named Sam laughed so hard he fell off his cushion. Wednesday, the flyer about the conference sat on my desk and I did not look at it. Thursday, I went home and stood in my hallway where the twins' shoes should have been and there were no shoes, because my mother had them, and the hallway smelled of nothing, and I made a cup of tea and did not drink it. Friday, I put a clean tablecloth on the reading table and lined up the good pens and set out the conference folder, and told myself it was just a meeting. The chairs were wooden and the one on the left wobbled. Lila took it and crossed her ankles and told me, with feeling, how well Avery was adjusting, and how the art program had been so good for her, and how they were thinking about enrolling her in the Saturday classes if the school recommended it, and I wrote *Saturday enrichment* on my pad in my best handwriting. Zane stood at the window. He had not sat down. He'd asked, and I'd said *this one folds out*, and he'd said *I'm fine*, and now he stood with his hands in his pockets looking out at the daisies the second grade had planted and killed and planted again, and every thirty seconds his right hand came out of his pocket and settled back in. "How long have you been teaching here?" Lila asked. "Six years." "And did you always want it? Teaching?" "I did." "You grew up around here." "Twenty minutes east. My mother still lives in the same house." She nodded, and the air in the room changed, the way it changes at a stoplight before it turns. "And do you have family nearby? It must be nice, doing this and going home to something." There it was. She hadn't moved a muscle and she'd managed to put her hand inside the drawer. I laid my pen down. I looked at her, at the small gold ring on her fourth finger, at the way she held her purse strap with both hands in her lap like she was on a bus. "I had a friend once," I said. "In college. She taught me quite a lot. About loyalty." Lila's hands went still. "And after that, there was a man who was very good at being sorry. I learned my lesson from both of them." I picked my pen back up. "Avery's reading is two grade levels ahead. I'd love to talk about that." At the window, Zane had stopped moving entirely. I could see the shape of him in the glass. Nobody said anything for a moment. The radiator ticked. "Man is evil," Avery said. She said it from the little chair by the bookshelf where I'd put her so she could color while we talked, and she didn't look up from her page. Her voice was so clear and small it went through the room like a pin. "*Avery!*" Lila sat forward. "We do not say things like that. Where did you learn — don't ever let me hear that again." Avery shrank into the chair. Her chin went down. She had a purple marker in her fist and she was holding it so hard her knuckles had gone pale and the cap was still on. "Hey," I said softly. "Hey. Come here, you." She got up and came around the table and put her arms around my waist and pressed her face into my cardigan, and I put my hand on the back of her head the way I would have with my own, and I could feel her heart going in her small ribs. "Leave her be," Zane said. "She's just a kid." His voice was low and flat and I had never heard him use it before. Lila turned and looked at him the way you look at a door that has closed on a finger. He crossed the room and knelt down in front of my chair, and he did not look at me, only at her, and he brushed her hair back from her face with one finger. Avery turned her head off my cardigan just enough to say, into the cloth, "Can my teacher come to my birthday." Nobody answered her. I could feel the question hanging in the air like something breakable. Lila stood up quickly and her chair scraped. "I'll be outside," she said to no one, and got her purse, and her footsteps went down the corridor and the door at the end of it clicked shut. He was still kneeling on my classroom floor. "Mr. and Mrs. Havens," I said. He looked at me then. I had the pleasure, small and mean and bright as a mint in my mouth, of watching his face take it. "We're not married," he said. "I know." His hand came up and it brushed mine on the arm of the chair and he flinched — actually flinched, the way you do at a hot pan — and a flush came up his neck and into his cheeks, and he got to his feet and stepped back and cleared his throat. "I didn't," he said. "I never — " He stopped and started again. "Thank you. For everything. With her. She never opens up to people like this." Avery lifted her head and asked again, in a whisper, whether I would come. I had a hundred good reasons. I used none of them. I took the little handwritten invitation she dug out of her pocket, folded into quarters and soft as cloth, and said I would be there Sunday at two, and if her mother would like to confirm anything she could call the school office, and I said it all in my teacher voice, and I walked them both out to the corridor where Lila was waiting with her arms crossed. --- At home it was dark and I didn't turn on the overhead light, just the lamp, and I sat down on the couch with my shoes still on and my bag still over my shoulder and stayed there long enough that the ice in the freezer dropped a tray of trays. My mother called while I was deciding whether to eat a bowl of cereal for dinner. "Say hello to your mother," she said, which she has said instead of *hello* for thirty years. "Hello, Mother." "J Ariel has decided she is a wolf. She has been a wolf since Tuesday. Uriel will not eat his crusts and he will not explain why." Behind her I could hear the back door bang and a shriek of laughter, and the specific thud of a small body hitting a screen door at speed. "You sound tired." "I'm fine. I had a parent conference." "How did it go." I looked at the ceiling. I looked at the empty hallway where there were no shoes. "It went fine." She was quiet a moment. My mother can be quiet in a way that takes up the whole line. "Did she come to the meeting," she said. "The one who took him." "Yes." "And?" "And he's the same." The word came out of me at a slant. "He's got a nice house and a fidget in his hands and a child who says men are evil, which she did not learn from me." "Mm." I could hear Ariel in the background explaining herself to someone at length, in the voice of a wolf, and Uriel laughing at her. "Mom." "I'm here." "They're going to ask me on Sunday where their father is." I pinched the bridge of my nose. "Avery's birthday party. I said I'd go. He'll be there. Lila will be there." "You could tell him." Her voice had gone careful and level, which is how she sounds when she is telling me something she knows I won't hear. "It's been a long time to carry a whole house by yourself." "No." "Girl — " "I don't want to tell him." The words came out flat. I could hear how flat they were. "I don't ever want to tell him. I made the decision when I was twenty-one and alone in a bathroom, and I have been right about it every day since, and I am not going to change my mind because he has nice doors." She let out a breath down the phone. "Then I'll bring them Friday. June's birthday's coming up and she wants a cake with a wolf on it, so warn your neighbors." "Okay." "Okay. Eat something that isn't cereal." "I'm eating cereal." "Of course you are." I said goodbye. I put the phone down on the cushion beside me and sat with my hands in my lap, and the lamp made a circle on the ceiling, and I thought about a boy of mine who would not eat his crusts and a girl of mine who was a wolf, and how neither of them had ever seen the face of the man on the porch, and how I had stood in a classroom that afternoon and told a woman about loyalty while the child on my hip hummed. A knock came at the front door, hard and quick, three times. I got up. My back had stiffened from sitting and I went down the hall with one hand on the wall. I stopped at the door with my hand on the cold brass knob and looked out through the frosted panel at the tall shape on my step and the shape of the shoulders I would have known at the end of the world. I turned the lock and opened it six inches. He had his hand in his trouser pocket and the other one was holding something. A paper. The party invitation, crumpled from a week in a pocket, the corner gone soft. "I wanted to give you this in person," he said. I reached out and took it, and his fingers brushed mine, and I watched him feel it — the small, involuntary pull, the hand that did not want to let go. "I gave it to Avery at the meeting," I said. "I gave it back to her." "This is a different one." He turned it over. His thumb was on the corner. "I didn't — I didn't write anything on it. I'm not going to write anything on it. I just drove here with it in my pocket and I don't have a good reason and I'm not going to pretend I do." He lifted his head and looked at me fully for the first time that night, and it was worse than being looked away from, because I knew exactly what it cost him and I was not going to help. "I'm sorry," he said. "I've been going to say that since you were standing in my door on Tuesday and I've been rehearsing it in my car. For all of it. For — the way I — " Then he stopped. Somewhere behind me, down the hallway, my mother's voice said my name. It came again, muffled and distant and absolutely clear, the way a mother's voice carries through a door: "*— sweetheart, June's asking if you're coming Friday, do you want to talk to her?*" Zane's head turned toward the sound. Only the smallest amount, an inch, the way a man turns toward a horn in traffic. The invitation went slack in his hand. The porch bulb buzzed above us, and somewhere down the street a dog was barking at nothing, and I stood in my open door with my hand on the frame and did not answer my mother, and did not close the door, and he stood on the step and looked at the black gap of my hallway where a child he had never met was waiting to be told a name he did not know.