The Lesson (23 page)

After school let out for the day, M.K. wiped down the chalkboard. She heard the door open and turned around to see Eugene standing there. He was so tall he was scraping the top of the door, and growing still.

He scowled at her. “I’m quitting school. I already turned fifteen. I don’t need it.”

M.K. turned back to the chalkboard and calmly finished wiping the last section. She knew this was a critical moment. “You can quit school, Eugene. But you’re going to have to keep learning all your life.” She put the rag in a drawer. “You can’t spend your life quitting things just because they get hard.”

He narrowed his eyes. “It wasn’t hard with Teacher Alice. I was getting along just fine until you showed up. It’s because of your teaching. You couldn’t teach a dog to bark. You couldn’t teach a fish to swim. Or a bird to sing.”

M.K. snapped her head up. She marched up to him and pointed a finger at his chest, which took notable courage because he towered over her. “I am trying to help you. You’re a smart boy, Eugene, but your mind works a little differently than other students. That doesn’t mean you can’t get faster with reading and writing and arithmetic. You can. It’s just going to take you a lot longer and you’re going to have to practice a lot more to keep up.”

He backed up a few steps. “Maybe I don’t care.”

M.K. stiffened. “Maybe you don’t. I can’t make you care. I can only offer you a chance.” She fixed her eyes on him. “But I think you do care. I think you care very much.”

Eugene held her gaze, narrowed his eyes, and called her an unrepeatable name, then whirled around and slammed the door behind him.

Out of habit, Jenny stopped by the mailbox on her way home from school and opened it. She wasn’t sure what might be inside, but it was a bright spot of the day. Usually, all that the rusty old mailbox contained was junk mail. Today, there was a thin, gray envelope, addressed to her. Jenny stared at the letter for a long minute. Her heart leapt into her mouth
and she felt a little strange, kind of dizzy and a little bit sick to her stomach. Looking over her shoulder, she hurried up to the house, dropped her lunch box, sat on the porch steps, and tore open the letter.

Hey there, Jennygirl! I was so happy to get a letter from you. Doing good here, though I sure am missing our monthly visits. Sorry to hear about Old Deborah. She was a nice old lady but she’s been old for as long as I can remember. Write to me soon now honey and tell me about school. And what is Chris doing these days? Has he still gone whole hog over to them kooky Amish? I couldn’t imagine why you’re in Stoney Ridge until I figured out that my daddy’s old house must still be empty. That’s where you are, isn’t it? Don’t you worry. I won’t tell. Makes me feel real happy to know where my babies are, safe and sound. Don’t never forget that I love you. And don’t never forget that I will always be your mama.

XOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOX OXOXOXOXOXO

P.S. Listen, honey, if you can send me some money, it would really help a lot. Cash is king here in the pokey—I need it for cigarettes and stamps and that sort of stuff.

How had her mother figured out where they were living? She had taken such care not to mention anything in her letters and not to supply a return address. She glanced at the envelope.
Stupid me!
The Stoney Ridge postmark would have given it away.

Chris would be furious.

Should she write her mother back?

She looked up at the sky and was surprised to see how thick the gray clouds had become. It would rain soon. She slipped the letter back into the envelope and put it into her apron pocket. Later. She would worry about writing back to her mother later. For now, it was time to start dinner.

You could hear a rumble in the late afternoon sky. Cayenne, the favorite of all the horses, was in her stall. M.K. reached over and touched her nose, and she nickered at her. She could see the horse’s breath in the cold air. There was silence, the only sound was Cayenne’s steady breathing. Her father had told M.K. once that the barn was the most peaceful place he knew. No voices, only the sound of the animals, their breath and bodies so warm.

M.K. had never felt so thoroughly exhausted in all her life. Physically and mentally. Teaching must be the hardest job in the entire world. And she was never done! Even on the weekends, she found herself thinking up a new way to help Jenny Yoder not shut down when faced with an arithmetic problem or wondering how to keep a mind like Danny Riehl’s challenged. Or how to just keep Eugene Miller attending school.

It was too much. It was all too much.

She let her mind drift off to her plan of escape: she would finish the school term, take her passport, and travel to a land without children.

Raindrops started to splatter the metal roof of the barn. A crack of thunder split the sky. The storm would soon pass by. She stroked Cayenne’s nose. She should get up to the house before the downpour started.

The barn door slid open and she turned to find Chris Yoder coming in, leading the draft horses, Rosemary and Lavender, by their bridles. He didn’t notice M.K. as he led the horses to their stalls and attended to their needs: filling buckets with water and mangers with hay. She saw him rub one of the mares’ forehead. The horse nudged closer to him, and though M.K. couldn’t hear what he said, his lips moved as though he were singing to the animal. He bent and ran a hand over each of the mare’s legs.

Such gentleness.

As he dipped the bridles into water to clean off the bits, he caught sight of M.K. and startled. “I didn’t see you there.” He looked around the barn. “I thought I might wait out the rain before heading home, but what’s the use of weather if you’re not out in it anyway? I’ll leave—”

“No, wait. Don’t go on my account. It should pass soon.” Just as she finished that sentence, a loud BOOM blasted overhead and made her jump. She shivered. “When I was little, Uncle Hank would say that thunder meant the angels were moving furniture in heaven.”

“Then that would have been the armoire,” Chris said. He hooked the bridles on the wall pegs and picked up a broom. He started sweeping down the center aisle of the barn.

It had become so dark in the barn that M.K. lit a lantern and hung it on the wall. She watched Chris for a while. “You don’t have to work all the time.”

“Yes, I do.” He swept the loose straw into a stall. “You work pretty hard yourself. I’ve seen the glow of lampshine in the schoolhouse early in the morning on my way to work.”

Someone had noticed? For some reason, the thought pleased her. “I know why I’m working so hard. I’m trying to prove than I can teach school.”

He grinned. “You’re making a little progress, from what I hear.”

That pleased her too, and she felt her cheeks get warm. “So what about you? What are you trying to prove?”

His grin faded.

She had gone too far. When would she ever learn? Just as Chris started to relax, she scared him back into his shell, like a turtle. “I’m sorry. It’s none of my business. My curiosity is one of my worst faults.”

The rain was really coming down now. It sounded like a work crew was hammering nails on the roof. Chris put the broom away and leaned his hips against a hay bale, facing M.K. He crossed his arms against his chest and one booted ankle over the other. “I’m trying to prove that I am my own man.”

“Was there ever any doubt of that? You seem like a person who knows who he is and where he’s going.”

He went very still, and for a long minute he frowned at her. She worried that she had said the wrong thing again. “I’m sorry. What do I know?” A cat wove between her feet. She bent over and scooped up Buzz, the long-haired cat who spent most of his day snoozing. Nuzzling the cat’s warm fur, she said, “It’s just that sometimes I . . . I don’t know who I am or what I’m meant to be doing. Fern says I have a terrible restlessness inside of me. She’s right. I want to travel and see the world and swim in the Mediterranean Sea—but I love my family and I love my church and I love my bees—and I don’t want to disappoint my father or Fern or my sisters. Or Uncle Hank.” She ran her hand down Buzz’s furry back and he responded with a low purr. “Though, Uncle Hank, of all people, would understand.” She set Buzz on the ground and looked at Chris. “But I just can’t figure out which way to go
sometimes.” She was babbling. She had to wrap this monologue up. “Do you ever feel that way? Do you understand what I mean?”
Please, please understand.

Chris’s face grew tight. He shook his head. “No. I don’t.”

Oh. This wasn’t going very well, and the rain wasn’t letting up at all. If anything, the thunder and lightning were coming steadily. Even the horses seemed uncomfortable, shuffling their feet restlessly. It was a very dramatic stage for M.K. to bare her soul—to practically a stranger—and she had just made an utter fool of herself.

Chris rose to his feet and crossed the space between them and put his hands on her shoulders. M.K. had never seen eyes so blue, the purest cobalt, like windows to the soul. For a split second, the way he was looking at her, the nearness, she was certain he was going to kiss her. She had never let a boy kiss her before, had never
wanted
to be kissed before. When she had observed Sadie and Gid kissing—which she had done on plenty of occasions—she thought kissing seemed ridiculous, involving odd noises and a lot of awkward nose bumping.

Ruthie had kissed a couple of boys—but only the ones she had fallen in love with. She had described kissing that made her stomach flip-flop and her palms sweat and her head start to spin. M.K. told her she might be confusing kissing with coming down with the flu.

But standing so close to Chris right now, kissing took on a different light. Chris Yoder wasn’t a boy. He was a young man. He looked away, then looked back, and gave her shoulders a gentle shake. Something flickered behind his eyes. “I don’t feel sorry for you. Not at all. You don’t realize what you have here. You have something that most people would give their eyeteeth for in a heartbeat. A family, a place of belonging. A purpose—you’re needed in that schoolhouse.”

He was practically nose-to-nose to her. Her heart was thumping so loudly she was sure he could hear it. He brushed his fingers over her cheek. She had never felt anything like it: a touch more quiet than a breath.

“You might be the prettiest girl in Stoney Ridge, but if you don’t have the smarts to appreciate that—all that—then you don’t deserve the life you’ve been given.” He reached behind her and plucked her dad’s black slicker, hanging on a wall peg. As he slipped it over his head, he said, “Jenny will be pacing the front room like a circus lion if I don’t get back soon. She hates storms. Tell your dad I’ll bring this back in the morning.” He slid the barn door open, just enough to slip through, then he disappeared.

Through the opening, M.K. watched Chris run down the driveway in the pelting rain. How dare he! How dare he speak to her like she was a child. Why, he was using the very same tone she had used to scold Eugene Miller barely an hour ago. Chris Yoder had a regular way of dousing any momentary warmth she might have felt for him.

Insults. That’s all she was getting today. Eugene told her she couldn’t teach a dog to bark and Chris told her she didn’t have much smarts. Boys! So rude.

Then a small smile crept up on her face. Chris had said she was pretty. The prettiest girl in Stoney Ridge.

No one had ever called her pretty. They had called her nosy and sneaky and overly imaginative. Not pretty.