All We Ever Wanted(16)
I suddenly thought of Beatriz again—her face on the night I told her it was better for Lyla to have no mother than her as a mother. It wasn’t true; I shouldn’t have said it; and I wished so deeply that we had her around now. That we weren’t so alone.
“We’ll see, Lyla,” I said, often my go-to answer. Then I stood and told her I’d be back later, pushing down all my terrible, guilty emotions and focusing on what needed to be done. For my daughter’s sake.
“Where are you going?” she asked, her voice high and sad.
“To the workshop,” I said, pretending to be matter-of-fact. “You might want to drink a lot of water.”
First thing Monday morning, I got the call I’d been both expecting and praying I wouldn’t receive. Although I had rare occasion to talk to him, Walter Quarterman’s name was programmed into my phone. I saw it appear on the screen, but I was too scared to answer. Instead, I waited, then listened to the voicemail he left, asking if Kirk and I could please come in and speak with him that afternoon about a “serious issue that has arisen.”
Walter, or Mr. Q as the kids called him, was the long-tenured and enigmatic headmaster of Windsor Academy. On the surface, he was a stereotypically serious academic with white hair, a bookish beard, and wire-rimmed glasses. But at some point, we’d all discovered that he’d been quite the hippie activist in his former life, the kids unearthing (and publishing in the student newspaper) a photo of Mr. Q protesting the Vietnam War at Yale, his beard darker and longer, his fist in the air as he carried a sign that read: HEY, HEY LBJ! HOW MANY KIDS DID YOU KILL TODAY? It made him something of a cult figure with the students, though many of the parents appreciated his politics less. In fact, Walter took some heat during the 2016 presidential campaign, when he made a few not-so-subtle anti–Donald Trump references about wanting to build bridges at Windsor, not walls, irritating many in our conservative, predominantly Republican enclave of Nashville.
Kirk was among that miffed contingent, and he was even more riled when the subject of transgender bathrooms was raised later that year. I understood where he was coming from, at least as a practical matter, as there was only one transgender student at Windsor that we knew of. But mostly I was all about taking the path of least resistance, whether at Windsor or in our community, and especially with my husband. Only occasionally did I take a real stand with Kirk, at least on anything smacking of political correctness, such as my insistence that we make our holiday cards as inclusive as possible.
“But ‘Happy Holidays’ sounds so cold and corporate,” Kirk had said when the debate first arose several years back. I resisted the urge to tell him outright that he needed to stay in his lane. He did our finances, and I handled cards and gifting, holidays and decorating, and really anything related to celebrations or making our lives feel more special. It was a nineteen-fifties sort of split, but it had always worked for us.
“Okay. What about ‘Merry and bright’ or ‘Comfort and joy’ or ‘Peace on earth’?” I had thrown out to appease him.
“I hate all of those things.” He’d smirked, obviously trying to be funny.
I’d smiled—because he was pretty funny—but pointed out that we had Jewish friends. My own dad was Jewish.
“Not really,” Kirk had said.
“He’s as Jewish as you are Christian,” I’d said.
“Yes, but we’re sending the card. And we’re Christian. Get how that works?” Kirk had asked with a trace of condescension.
I’d dug in. “But we’re wishing them a happy holiday. You wouldn’t think it bizarre if the Kaplans sent us a card wishing us a ‘Happy Hanukkah’?”
“I wouldn’t care,” Kirk had said with a shrug. “I don’t care if someone sends me a Kwanzaa card if that’s what they want to do. But I don’t want anyone to tell me what to do, either.”
Maybe that was it in a nutshell, I remember thinking. Kirk really didn’t like to be told what to do, a trait that had become more extreme over the years. It was probably a function of getting older—I think we all become exaggerated versions of ourselves, and Kirk had always been independent and strong-willed. But sometimes I worried that it had more to do with his love of power—power that seemed to increase along with financial wealth. I’d recently called him out on this, accusing him of having the “old-rich-white-guy mentality,” pointing out that it was often that guy who was cutting a line at the airport, or blathering away on his cellphone after the flight attendant asked for devices to be put away, or pretending not to see you when you were anxiously trying to merge in traffic (all of which I’d observed Kirk do on a fairly regular basis). His response was simply that at forty-six, he wasn’t yet “old.”
All of this is to say that I wasn’t completely surprised at his reaction when I called him at work to tell him about Walter’s voicemail.
“Does it have to be today?” he said.
“Um, yes. I think it does,” I said. “Our child is in trouble.”
“I know that,” he said, tapping on his keyboard. “We’re the ones who spent the entire day yesterday crafting his punishment. Does Walt know how hard we’re coming down on Finch?”
“No. Of course not,” I said with a loud sigh, thinking that it was Walter, not Walt. “Because as I told you, he left a voicemail—I haven’t spoken to him yet.”