Love Lessons (29 page)

He knew his dad hadn’t meant it that way, but Dick’s phrasing made Kelly realize if things became bad enough, he’d have to leave Hope. The idea made him feel cold and small.

It wasn’t Hope itself, of course, that he’d miss.

Dick reached over and patted Kelly’s leg. “No more worrying about it, all right? All there is to do right now is watch our pennies. Christmas will be a bit light on gifts this year, and your mother’s been doing some amazing jujitsu with rice and beans for most of our meals, but other than that, nothing has changed.”

“I don’t need anything for Christmas. Take my stuff back and save the money.”

Dick glanced at Kelly over the top of his glasses. “I’ll let you try and sell that one to your mother yourself.” He turned back to the road. “New conversation. Tell me how your finals and such went, and school. You’ve been quiet this last month—must have kept you busy, we figured.”

Oh, Kelly had been busy. His cheeks stained as he recalled how. “My finals were okay, nothing that bad.” He bit his lip, then added, “I think you’ve figured it out, given the way you interviewed him at Opie’s, but Walter and I are dating.”

Beaming, Dick reached over and lightly cuffed Kelly’s shoulder. “There you go, didn’t I say you had to be patient? I know how much you liked him, and he seems like a good young man. Congratulations, son.”

“Thanks.” Kelly’s face was still flushed, though now it was with pride and pleasure at having pleased his father. “We were hoping to get together over break. We hadn’t decided if we were going to his place or mine or both—he’s insisting on giving me a ride back to school.”

“We’d love to have him at the house. We’ll talk to your mother about when would be best.”

“If it’s okay, longer would be better.” Kelly hesitated before divulging his next thoughts. “His family life is rough. Parents are divorced, and his mom has a really hard time. He worries about her, but I don’t think it’s good for him to be there too long, because there’s not much he can do to help, and it only tears him up. I’d been kind of thinking if he didn’t stay with us from New Year’s on, I’d go back with him from whenever we left until school went back on. I think he needs the distraction.”

“I’m sure we can work something out, though I’m sorry to hear about his family.”

“It’s awful. He’s started telling me about what goes on there, and it makes me so sad.” He shook his head, remembering some of it. “I never realized how lucky I was, having you and Mom as parents.”

Dick ruffled Kelly’s head, and when he spoke, his voice was gruff. “We’re lucky to have such amazing kids, is what.”

Kelly leaned into the touch, wishing they weren’t in the car so he could hug him properly. He vowed to do so later. “We’re going to be okay, Dad. No matter what happens with Mom, we’re going to make this work, and we’re going to be okay, school and everything.”

Dick grinned into the setting sun ahead of them. “Now you’re talking like a Davidson.”

Walter tucked his hands in his pockets and wound his scarf tighter against his face in deference to the cold as he walked back across campus, humming softly to himself. He planned to leave in the morning after his last test, and for the first time in a long time he was almost eager to go. Maybe, if he laid the right seeds, he could finesse Tibby and his mom so their family would be functional enough to have Kelly over for an extended stay. His sister had a horse show that weekend, he knew—maybe he’d go, because she’d like that. Maybe for Christmas he’d take his mom on a date, something fun and exotic that she couldn’t make into a sob story about how nobody loved her.

Maybe he could fucking pick up the moon and put it in a gift box. Because he felt so damn good, he thought maybe he could manage it.

Spying Williams’s light on, Walter ducked into Ritche to wish his advisor a merry Christmas and give him one last pep talk before the tenure news on Friday. He heard voices as he approached, and when he came around the corner, he saw Dr. Holtz, the English department head, sitting in Walter’s usual seat. It was odd, because Holtz wasn’t usually on Williams’s staff hang-out list. When Holtz saw Walter, he stopped talking.

“Hey, sorry to interrupt,” Walter said, leaning into Williams’s office. “Just wanted to wish you—” He got a good look at Williams’s haggard face and cut himself off. “What happened?”

The two professors exchanged heavy glances, and Walter tried not to freak out. Eventually Williams gave Holtz a nod. “Give us a minute?”

Holtz stood. He didn’t leave, though, until he’d put a heavy hand on Williams’s shoulder. “I’ll make some of those calls while I’m out.”

Walter didn’t even bother hiding his anxiety, and he damn well didn’t sit down when Williams offered him the chair with a haggard gesture.

“What the fuck,” Walter whispered, “is going on?” When Williams only continued to look heavy and bleak, like somebody’d lined up his kids and shot them one by one, Walter began to spin out. “
What
? It’s not tenure, I know that, because you said it’s Friday, and I know those assholes don’t work any faster than they have to.”

“It’s not tenure. I won’t be getting tenure, and I won’t be denied it either.” Williams kept staring down at his desk, haunted and defeated. “They’ve cut my position. After the end of the next term, the communications department will merge with Language and Culture, and they’re cutting the faculty there down by two. One of them is me.”

Walter stared, dumbfounded, then shook his head. “They can’t. That’s crazy. That doesn’t even make any fucking
sense
. What about communication majors? What, are they cutting my major out too?”

“No. It doesn’t affect the majors, only the faculty.” Williams looked up at Walter with a desperation he knew he’d never forget, not for the rest of his life. “I’ve lost my job, Walter. There’s no appeal. It’s simply gone. No matter how you slice it, I only have one semester left here at Hope.”

No,
Walter wanted to shout, to cry, to scream, to pound the walls until they fell down. He didn’t do any of it, though, only collapsed into the chair Holtz had vacated, legless, as the rock he hadn’t even known he’d been clinging to rushed out of his grasp and into open sea.

Chapter Twenty-One

After he left Williams’s office, Walter wandered all over campus, ending up, naturally, at the campanile. The swans were nowhere in sight, however, which felt like a terrible omen.

He still couldn’t quite get his head around the fact that Williams was gone. Would be gone. Thoughts ricocheted inside him, denials, rages, plans, but nothing stuck. He didn’t know what to think, how to act, what to do.

The one light in the darkness was that Holtz didn’t seem to think the matter was settled. He wasn’t AAUP, but he had his hand well inside the Board of Regents, and as a thirty-year veteran professor, he was a favorite of scores of alumni. Holtz didn’t think Hope grads would like the idea of losing an entire department, especially communications, and he didn’t think Hope would stand their ground on such a controversial decision under the scrutiny of a scandal.

“It looks especially bad when they’re building new dorms and pushing the international student program so much. There’s no guarantee we can change their mind, but we can make a hard push in the next few months and see what we can get,” Holtz had said. “They always announce such things over a long break, hoping furor will die down in the shift. We’ll see to it, Jay, that it doesn’t.”

Holtz was Walter’s candle right now, and he clung to his vow all the way back across campus toward Porter. Halfway over the green, though, he changed direction and headed to Sandman instead, hoping against hope that Manchester hadn’t gone home already.

She hadn’t, because she had a big final in Communications Law the next morning. For half a second, Walter considered not telling her until after her test.

Then he realized what he’d think of someone who withheld intel on Williams’s trouble to him, and he told her anyway.

Rose cried.

It was weird how much that helped Walter—all of her reactions bled him a little, really, first her tears, then her rage, then her mad plans on how they would rally the troops to stop the insanity. He rode along on the tide, mostly relieved to be with someone else who felt outraged and betrayed, but when she pulled out a binder labeled
Ways to Help Williams
, he had to call time out.

“You mean you’ve been compiling this all year?” He flipped through the pages of potentially influential alumni, donors, and page after page of documents on academic tenure. She also had no less than six drafts of articles on why Williams deserved to keep his position and
ten
dummy letters to the editor. “Holy shit, Manchester. You’re a fucking force.”

“Except I never saw this coming.” She took back the binder, looking ready to cry again. “I don’t know how much of this will translate to the cutting of a position.” Grimacing, she shook her head. “I’m going to have to redo three-quarters of this over break.”

“Well send me some of it, and I’ll help. I’ll use this list you have here to start a Facebook group tonight—a lot of the grads will be on there. We can have the administration sweating before they go to their holiday party.”

“No—I mean, the Facebook group is a good idea, but we want to go carefully. Better to launch after the holidays when people are bored and lonely, not busy. This will give them something to do. And us time to plan.” She wiped at her eyes again. “I can’t
believe
they did this. I’m never going to sleep tonight.”

“You need to study for your final. Comm Law isn’t a walk in the park. Let me get started on this.”

“Don’t you have a final?”

“Digital Media. I just need to show up at nine and breathe.” He held his hand out for the binder. “Rose, you know I’m good for this. If there’s a way for us to save Williams, we’re going to fucking do it.”

She gave him the folder and kissed him hard on the cheek. “Oh my God, if you weren’t gay, I’d fuck you so hard right now. If you weren’t dating Kelly, I might at least try to blow you.”

Walter couldn’t help a grin. “No worries, my dick’s been well sucked today.” He glanced around the room. “God, it’s amazing how much more space a real double has.”

“Sandman’s bigger than Porter too. You and Kelly should’ve tried to move over break.”

“Air conditioner. Only Porter and the Manors have physical plant approval for them, and then only the singles. Which I think is bullshit, but, whatever. Besides, I like an excuse to make him sit in my lap.” He used the binder to give her a parting salute. “I’ll keep you posted on my progress.”

“Why don’t you stay here and work?” Rose nodded to her computer. “I’ll put on a pot of coffee, and for breaks you can reward me with signs of your progress. You can even crash on my roommate’s bed if you want. She left yesterday.”

Walter was about to tell her no, but then he thought about heading back to Porter, where the RA was likely ignoring at least three parties and the empty room would remind him that Kelly was already gone. Smiling sadly, he nodded. “I’ll go get my stuff and come back then.” He’d planned to leave after his final—nothing would give him greater pleasure than being done with his damn dorm earlier than previously scheduled.

He set down the binder, and Rose caught his wrist, squeezing it briefly, her eyes filling with tears again. “Thank you for coming to tell me. It means a lot.”

Walter winked and waved as he left the room, but he also had to wipe his eyes on the way down Sandman’s back stairs.

Walter didn’t end up telling Kelly about Williams until he was driving back to Northbrook, partly by accident and partly by design. He was too busy organizing Rose’s notes, altering them to fit the new situation, lining up a potential information loop. By the time he saw Kelly’s text announcing his arrival in Windom, it was after midnight. Maybe Kelly was up, maybe he wasn’t—at that point Walter didn’t think he could stand to rehash it all without at least a few hours of sleep, so he sent a benign,
glad you’re safe, call you tomorrow on my way home
, and declared it good. As soon as he got into his car, though, he set up his hands-free speakers and dialed Kelly’s number.

Kelly could tell something was wrong right off the bat.

“I’ll tell you,” Walter promised, “but first I want to hear how things are for you.”

“Well,” Kelly said, “they’re only okay. My dad dropped some news on the way back.”

Listening to Kelly tell about his mother’s job crisis hit too close to Williams’s troubles, and he quietly hated the soulless bureaucracies that ignored the fact that real people with families held the jobs they so casually tossed out the window. He realized Williams was likely home with his wife this morning, doing the same thing Kelly’s family was doing: trying to figure out how to live on one salary, trying to decide where and how to build their hopes.

When it came time for Walter to share his bad news, it got to him more than he’d intended to let it. He wasn’t quite as bad as Rose had been, but there wasn’t any hiding how much it upset him.

“I’ve never seen Williams looking so low. It made me ache, Kel.”

“I can’t believe they’re collapsing the department. That’s crazy.”

“No shit. They just hacked a big chunk off the value of my degree and anyone else graduating from communications at Hope. Not that it had a lot of value to lose.”