Cold Springs(124)

“The other parents,” Chadwick told her, “can kiss my boot cast.”

Norma wiped at the corners of her eyes. “Shit. I'm going to hope John was wrong about only getting one home, okay? I'm going to hope that for both of us.”

She stood on her tiptoes, kissed him roughly on the cheek, then pushed him away. “Now get the hell out of here, will you? Hijo, you're worse than a broken mirror for luck.”

He knew it would be the last time he'd ever see her, and she left his life just as she'd arrived—dismissing him, heading off to the party with the same determination as when she'd grabbed his wrist in a Los Angeles beer joint, twenty-eight years before, and dragged him out on the dance floor.

He stood alone at the lip of the broken asphalt, feeling warmer than he should have in the January chill. He didn't notice Ann until she walked back to the speaker's podium and turned off the microphone.

“Closure?” she asked him.

“As much as I can hope for.”

She slipped a tape into the cassette player of the PA system, turned up the volume. The ethereal guitar work of Pat Metheny—as desolate and expansive as the Texas plains—drifted across the courtyard. Jazz drums set children bouncing on the play structure's clatter bridge.

“She'll do it, you know,” Ann told him. “Norma will get custody of Race. They'll take care of each other. He'll graduate at the top of his class.”

Chadwick listened for jealousy, or resentment. Ann would've been entitled. She'd been shunned by her own daughter, forced to officially expel her from Laurel Heights, thanks to the incident with the gun. Now she would pay the bulk of her salary for months, possibly for the rest of Mallory's high school career, to get Mallory through a program where Ann had no part, where her daughter would become someone she did not know, while Race Montrose finished his high school career in the program Ann had built.

But there was no bitterness in her voice. Nothing except that new sense of authority—clean and hard and hollow like the bore of a cannon.

“Mallory will make it, too,” Chadwick said. “Maybe not the way you envisioned, but she'll make it.”

Ann was conscious of her audience—the whole school community on the yard, the gossipers watching. Still, her eyes betrayed a touch of strain, of need.

“You belong in the classroom,” she told him. “There's no reason for you to stay away from San Francisco now. You could teach here again. This is your home.”

He watched children playing in the yard, three young girls turning the tire swing so fast they were a blur of ponytails and skirts. He tried to imagine these girls older, in trouble, on drugs, being picked up in the middle of the night by a stone-faced escort—someone like him. He couldn't imagine it. That was the problem—you never could, until it happened.

“This used to be my home,” he said. “Not anymore.”

“And me?”

The Pat Metheny song kept playing.

Chadwick said, “You're the most important person in the world to me.”

“But you're leaving.”

“Yes.”

“Because I didn't trust you—the morning you went after Mallory?”

“No. Because you wanted to trust me. Because I want to trust you, too. I've looked up to you for most of my life. No relationship could hold up under that much pressure.”

“I love you,” she said.

He didn't meet her eyes. He didn't want to admit how close he was to caving in, his willpower whittled so thin it bent like a willow branch. It wasn't fair to choose between Laurel Heights and Cold Springs—between what he wanted, and what was good for him.

“I remember a seventeen-year-old girl,” he said, “who would've scolded you for saying that.”

“The girl grew up. But not in the way I envisioned.”

Chadwick thought he heard relief in her voice. There was nothing else for her now, nothing between her and her school. Chadwick had snipped the last possible tether.

He held out his hand, and Ann grasped it. He could've been a visiting parent, or a reporter, or anyone who had come to the school for official business, and was now on his way out.

Mark Jasper came up, wanting to introduce Ann to someone, and Chadwick moved back toward the building, taking his time on his wounded leg. He climbed halfway up the stairs, where Olsen sat eating a sugar cookie.

“Well?” she asked.

“Two women—neither one slapped me.”

“A record.”

Over on the deck, the upperclassmen were clowning around, slipping pieces of ice down each other's shirts. Race Montrose stood to one side—not getting teased, not participating, just standing there in his church clothes, staring into his lemonade.

“You said hello to him?” Olsen asked.

“Not yet.”

“You need to.”

He met her eyes, and the truth clicked, like the gears in one of his father's clocks. He knew he hadn't been imagining her hesitation all week. He knew what she'd been struggling to say, and it was the same thing he'd been struggling to say for years. She was giving him a chance to go first.

“I lied to you,” he said. His voice seemed to be coming out of someone else's mouth.

Olsen brushed a crumb from the edge of her mouth. “I know.”