Page 56 of Single Dad Problems
"Everything's okay, Ollie." I held out my hand and he took it, the way he always takes it. "Change of plans, though. Tessa and Vaughn are going to help me get some things out of my classroom. You can be in charge of the box lids."
"Lids are the most important part," he said.
I waved Tessa and Vaughn in from the parking lot and told them only what the clock required. Tessa took one look at my face and understood the rest, and I watched her decide not to detonate in front of Oliver, which cost her roughly everything. Vaughn just rolled up his sleeves and said, "Point me."
We cleared eight years of my life out of that classroom in twenty-six minutes. The plants. The class library I'd bought paperback by paperback with my own money. The laminated solar system Oliver helped me hang in August. Twenty-six minutes, four people, eleven storage boxes, and a man somewhere down the hall timing us, and I kept the face on the entire time, because my kid was carefully managing the lids and my best friend was pregnant and furious and lifting things she shouldn't and one second away from running down the hall andmurdering Darren, and somebody had to be the calm one. I had to be the calm one.
It wasn't until we were loading the last storage bins that I let myself tell them the rest of what Darren had said, while Oliver buckled himself into my back seat with his book. Tessa's face went through six distinct weather systems and blew straight past a tornado warning.
And then, on the drive home, with eleven storage boxes rattling in the trunk and my knuckles white at ten and two, Oliver turned a page and said, to the window:
"Principal Beauford fired you. That's what the storage boxes are."
"Yeah, bud. He did."
"Do you remember when that teacher got fired last year? Ms. Abbott. She did the music. She was so nice. She let me hold the triangle without making me play it." He looked out at the passing houses. "I saw her from the bus window on her last day. She was putting boxes in her car and crying. Then nobody ever talked about her again."
I almost missed the stop sign.
Ms. Abbott. I barely remembered her. She was a pretty, quiet woman who wore cardigans who was gone over a summer with one of those vague she's-pursuing-other-opportunities emails. Gone like a light going out. With boxes. Crying in the parking lot.
The same type boxes that were in my trunk right now.
Tessa and Vaughn were already in my driveway when we pulled in, and I was out of the car before the engine stopped ticking, and I said one sentence: "Oliver just told me Darren did this to Ms. Abbott last year." And watched my best friend transform.
"Renata Abbott." Tessa said the name like she was loading it. "I did bus duty with her. She left and nobody said why and I never pushed cause she seemed so fragile, but that's how hegets away with it." She cut herself off and held out her hand to Vaughn. "Keys. Give me the keys. I'm going to find her. Right now, today, before that cocksucker finishes writing his version of this weekend."
"Tess, you don't even know where she is."
"I know her sister does the flowers for the farmer's market and I know everything about everyone, it's my only hobby." She kissed my cheek hard, kissed Vaughn harder, pointed at the boxes. "You. Carry. You," pointing at me, "water, food, couch. I love you. I'll call you tonight."
And she was gone, reversing out of my driveway like a woman with a warrant.
Vaughn carried in a couple of storage bins while Oliver supervised lid integrity, and then Oliver announced he was going inside to finish the octopus chapter, and the screen door banged behind him, and suddenly it was just me, standing in my driveway next to a stack of my whole career, in the afternoon light, with a bearded giant watching me quietly from the porch steps.
"He's inside," Vaughn said. "Tessa's gone. Nobody's timing you anymore, kid."
And that did it.
The face I'd been holding came apart all at once, and Vaughn crossed the driveway and folded me into a hug the size of a building, and I finally, finally lost it. The job, the folder, the thirty minutes, the plants, the maybe-baby I hadn't even let myself think about the whole day, the three men I had completely and catastrophically fallen for, all of it coming out of me in big ugly shaking sobs against a leather vest while this gentle mountain of a man just stood there and held on, one big hand patting my back, slow and steady, like he had absolutely nowhere else to be.
He didn't tell me it would be okay. He didn't say anything. He gave me what nobody had given me in eight years, which was somewhere solid to fall apart, and I shook against him like a woman coming down off years of pretending to be fine, right there in my driveway, in the full judgment of the afternoon sun and whatever neighbor was definitely watching from behind their curtains.
I never even heard the truck coming up the street.
45
Luke
It had been less than twenty-four hours since I'd seen her, and I was not handling it well.
I was aware that was insane. I was aware that less than twenty-four hours is not a long time, that grown men go weeks without seeing women they're interested in and survive, that my therapist would've had actual opinions about the way I'd been checking my phone waiting for her to respond to the text I had sent this morning.
I hope you're okay, we want to talk.
A text that she still hadn't answered.
I was also wedged in the front seat of Cole's truck between him and Ben with a six-foot stuffed bear on part of my lap and four dozen roses shoved under my feet, so clearly awareness was not the issue.
