Extra Credit (17 page)

“Listen,” I said. “First things first. Aaron—”

“Alex.”

“Right. Alex. You need to stop having him tutor you.”

She waited. “And?”

“I wouldn’t be upset if you broke up.”

“But I love him!” she cried, a bit more melodramatically than the circumstances called for, but I was in no position to judge. I’ve been known to dabble in a little melodrama myself every now and again.

“Fine,” I said, if only to get her to keep her dramatics to a minimum while she was in my office. “Just stop having him tutor you. Tell him that I’ll do it, or that you’re doing better, or that you don’t think you need his help anymore.”

She sniffled loudly into a lank tissue that she pulled from her pocket. “Which one?”

“Which one what?”

“Which excuse should I use?”

I enunciated, speaking slowly and clearly. “I. Don’t. Care.” I put my head in my hands. “Any one of them is fine.”

“Are you going to tell my father?” she asked, standing and slinging her heavy bag over her shoulder.

I thought about that one. “For now? I don’t think so. But I’m warning you, Meaghan. Stay away from that kid,” I said, not wanting to screw up his name again. I thought back to the night before and how Crawford surely would have asked about the situation with Meaghan had Christine not called with the news of the break-in. Her mother’s bad luck had helped Meaghan luck out. “I know you love him, but he can’t love you if he would put you in this position.”

“You hate him,” she said.

We were back to that old accusation. I decided to come clean. “Right now, yes, I do.”

She looked crestfallen. “He’s really nice.”

“I’m sure he is,” I said.
He’s also closer to thirty than he should be while still in college,
I wanted to say but didn’t. “In my opinion, though, he’s been at this school way too long, and if he’s involved in a cheating scandal? Well, let’s just say that however nice he is, he’s going to get in big trouble.”

She understood. Before she left my office, she squinted at my computer. “Why are you looking at porta-potty companies?” she asked.

I had forgotten that I had left Sans-a-Flush’s Web site open. I clicked back to the school’s home page as quickly as I could. “Oh, nothing. Sister Mary asked me to look into rental toilets for the next Spring Fling.” The lie was so flimsy that even Meaghan didn’t believe it. I stopped her before she could question me further about the location of the toilets since there were clearly enough commodes in the building to accommodate the Spring Fling attendees. I told her to take off, keep her nose clean, never accept wooden nickels, and make lemons out of lemonade before she left.

She slunk off, her six-foot frame slumped over and defeated. I felt bad for a minute and then turned my internal rage to that dopey boyfriend of hers. It was Erin’s boyfriend we thought we were supposed to hate, what with his assorted piercings and body art, but the kid turned out to be a gem who not only put up with Crawford’s bitchy little offspring but did well in school and kept her on the straight and narrow. I always thought that Meaghan would have better taste in men than this bore she was besotted with, but I had been wrong on that account.

I swung my chair around and stared out the windows, looking out toward the sisters’ cemetery. A lot of women, many of whom had taught me and had been my colleagues, were buried in that cemetery, and sometimes, when my head was clouded, I strolled through and looked at the headstones, looking for wisdom and a little clarity. Sometimes, I actually found it. I decided that today was one of those days when a little stroll might be necessary.

As I straightened up my office, I thought about my conundrum. I was conflicted. Did I tell Joanne and risk her wrath at my accusation, thereby jeopardizing Meaghan’s standing at school? Or did I say nothing? Nobody knew what was up unless you counted me, Meaghan, and Alex, and to be honest, I wasn’t even positive what his role was. Did he buy the paper or had he kept it from years past? Was it possible he just wanted her to use it for practice? How was I going to approach this?

I strolled past Dottie, the worst receptionist known to receptioning, without letting her know where I was going. Even a quick conversational interlude with Dottie could take a wrong turn with just one misused word, and we would be heading down a road neither of us wanted to travel. We preferred, instead, to respectfully ignore each other. I get under her skin, for some reason, and she really bugs the crap out of me, so after all these years of my teaching at St. Thomas and working alongside her, we decided that pretending that the other didn’t exist was the best policy. Today I couldn’t tell if she assiduously avoided me, or if she was so engrossed in her latest tome,
Love’s Fertile Splendor
, that she really didn’t notice me. I tiptoed past her desk and made my way outside, using the back staircase that I had a great view of from my office.

My conversation with Meaghan weighed heavy on me. Although I’d never go so far as to say that Meaghan and Erin were like my own children, they were as close as you could get. Crawford and I skimmed and skittered around the child conversation a lot; I was no spring chicken—but had not reached middle age—and he had his hands full with raising two teenagers. If I looked deep into my heart, though, a place I rarely went, I had to admit that I did think about it. What did it say about me that I had been much surer of my desire to be a mother when I was married to my first husband, a man I really didn’t love, than I was with the love of my life, Crawford? Maybe a baby would have provided a distraction to Ray, while I wanted Crawford all to myself. I didn’t know the real answer and, as was my custom, I didn’t want to give it much thought. Scratching off layer after layer of emotion wasn’t something I enjoyed. I preferred, as it were, to let nature take its course.

The first gravesite I visited wasn’t terribly old; Sister Alphonse had died less than a year ago. She once told me that she had prayed for my happiness and that soon after, Crawford had appeared. Granted, he was investigating a murder and I was a person of interest, but I guess Alphonse hadn’t been specific about what kind of man she wanted me to find. Or when. Nevertheless, Alphonse’s power of prayer, obviously finely honed after over eighty years in the convent, made my future husband appear and bring me more happiness than I ever could have imagined. I pulled a sugar packet from my pocket—Alphonse’s sweet tooth was something that I would remember for the rest of my life—and placed it on top of her grave marker, something I did every time I visited. There were ten packets altogether on the cool stone, a few less than there should have been, but with the bird population in the vicinity of the cemetery, that wasn’t surprising. I talked to Alphonse more since she had died than when she had been alive, and while she didn’t talk back, she let her spirit be known in ways that would mystify others but were obvious to me. A fluttering leaf, a sudden gust of wind, a sliver of light that fixated on a particular word on another grave marker—“peace,” “love,” “charity,” words that let me know where she wanted my heart to go.

Today, I asked her what I should do about Meaghan’s situation, and I waited. I stood staring at her grave marker for a long time, wondering what she would do in a similar instance, but Alphonse had been a bit of an enigma so I wasn’t entirely sure. After a few minutes, I reached down and drew my fingers across her name, etched in the stone.

“Nothing to say today?” I asked. When it was clear that Alphonse didn’t have an answer for me, I started back toward the building, a little clearer of mind, but not much. I still wasn’t sure what to do, and that troubled me. Usually, I went with my heart and did the first thing that came into my head, not always a winning combination, but one that eventually worked out in the long run.

Just as I was leaving the cemetery, picking my way across the gravel at the entrance, I stumbled backward, landing at the base of a great and majestic gravestone. Obviously, Sister Irene Mary Stanislaus had come from money, because her family had erected a great and soaring angel in her honor, a marker that towered above the rest of the sisters’ stones. I stood and dusted myself off, my skirt marked with a little slash of mud across the hem; I cursed lightly under my breath and looked at Sister Irene Mary’s epitaph:

Great is truth and mighty above all things.

I guess I had my answer.

Twenty-Two

As I made my way back to my office, I decided that I wasn’t going to seek out Joanne Larkin today but later in the week. I had to wrap my brain around this situation and figure out the best way to approach it. I have never been officially diagnosed, but I suspect I have a terminal case of foot-in-mouth disease, one that gets worse when I have to deal with a sensitive situation or topic. Rather than blurt out the first thing that would inevitably come into my head, I was going to jot down a script, one designed to counter any objections Joanne might have to my accusation and that would keep Meaghan in school and in good standing both academically and athletically. Meaghan would probably handle getting expelled better than she would handle getting bounced from the basketball team, but neither scenario was a good one, and they went hand in hand.

Members of the cross-country team went by in a blur of purple, our predominant school color, and a blast of chilly air kissed my face. I thought about Meaghan and her bad taste in men, something that up until recently we had in common. Both of us had great fathers yet had exhibited incredibly poor judgment when it came to the opposite sex. I hoped that she would see the light, as I had, and move on from Mr. Super Senior, someone who I hoped graduated at the end of the year, joined the Peace Corps, and headed to a far-off land where cell service and texting were still a decade away from being a reality. It didn’t seem like my fervent hope of them breaking up was in the cards, though, so I had to think about Plan B, which was finding a way to make him look unsuitable to her without pushing her farther into his warm embrace, kind of like the polar opposite of playing Cupid.

I had too much on my mind, the least of which was school, and I had to get my focus back when it came to teaching. I was carrying my usual load, but with all of the family drama taking center stage, I was behind on a variety of tasks, including the grading of some creative writing exercises that I had given my class the week before. It was funny how that worked: Students waited until the last possible minute to hand in assignments, yet didn’t give an inch when it came to when I got things back to them. It had become obvious to me over the years that most of my students thought I was some kind of professorial eunuch, laboring solely for their pleasure at the temple of St. Thomas University. The fact that I had a husband, a dog, some stepchildren, and a social life of sorts never entered their minds, so focused were they on their own pursuits of education, sex, and booze. Most of the time it made me laugh, but this week, after break-ins and dog poisonings and cheating scandals, I was ready to tell each and every one who asked where their test was or why their paper wasn’t graded to “stick it.”

After a calming visit to the cemetery, I had managed to think myself right into a black mood, a mood that would surely persist until I got some perspective on my work and hunkered down. As I rounded the corner to the stairs that would take me back to my office, Mary Lou Bannerman appeared, a paper bag in her hand.

“Hi!” she called in that ever-cheerful way that she had. I didn’t know what she took to stay in this state of perpetual bliss, but I wanted some. “Did you have lunch?” she asked.

I thought about the peanut butter sandwich on wheat bread that I had packed that morning and that resided at the bottom of my messenger bag, probably as flat as a pancake by now and more than a little odiferous. “No,” I said.

She thrust the bag toward me. “Fresh mozzarella with sundried tomato and pesto.”

My mouth watered at the thought. “You don’t have a glass of a witty yet serious Chianti in there, too, do you?”

She smiled wider. “No, but that surely could be arranged.”

I took the bag. “It’s like you can read my mind,” I said. “I was just thinking that I was going to go back to my office and eat lunch before my next class. I was also thinking that the lunch I packed was completely unappetizing.” I opened the bag and saw that in addition to the sandwich, there was a bag of gourmet chips, the kind that are made from a variety of root vegetables but are still loaded with calories and sodium, just the way I like my chips.

She turned and looked toward my office, waving a hand in that direction. “Well, bon appétit,” she said. “I’m off to the library. I’ll see you tomorrow in class.”

“Yes, that,” I said. “I was hoping to get your assignments back, but it’s not looking good.”

She waved a hand dismissively. “No worries. Whenever.”

“If only all of my students were like you. Sandwiches and patience. My life would be perfect,” I said, starting down the stairs toward the door. Looking into the hallway, I spied the back of someone leaving my office, pulling the door shut behind him or her, which was odd, because the note that I’d left on my door asked students to either e-mail me or put a note in my mail slot if they wanted an appointment outside office hours. The sun glinted off the double-paned leaded glass, so I couldn’t make out if it was a man or a woman. By the time I got there, the only people on the floor were Dottie and a number of my colleagues all either leaving or going back to their own offices.

Dottie was actually working when I got to her desk, a spreadsheet open on her computer. “Hi, Dottie,” I said, checking the mail slot behind her for a note from a student.

She raised a penciled-in eyebrow, no thicker than a toothpick, at my greeting. Today’s getup was a flowered tunic paired with purple leggings, eye shadow to match, natch.

When it was clear that was her greeting, I asked her if she had seen anyone go in or out of my office, or if anyone had left me a message. She continued working on the spreadsheet, giving me a curt shake of her head to indicate that she hadn’t seen anyone nor had anyone left me a message. At least that’s what I deduced.