She took another step back. “Come by the house if you need hair help. Don’t bother knocking. Okay?”
I nodded, watching as she made her way to her car. She stowed the bag in the back seat and then gave me a wave. Because I couldn’t help myself, not for a single minute where this woman was involved, I called, “Let me know if you need me to marry you.”
She tipped her head to the side. “I’m not ready to think about that yet.”
“Then let me see Lollie’s will while I’m waiting.”
“No need,” she said. “It is what it is. No sense fighting.”
She opened the driver’s door and climbed into the seat. She paused as if she meant to say something but waved again. I lifted my hand in response, watching as she drove away.
This time, when I heard that reminder, it saidthere goes your wife.
chapterseven
Shay
Students will be able to serve as a human shield.
“Hmm.Do these letters look right to you? Are they all standing properly?” I asked. Gennie frowned at the small whiteboard in her lap. “Any of them backward?”
Understanding hit her. “Oh. TheDs. And theGs.”
“You know how to make aG,” I told her. “Gfor Gennie.”
She rubbed a sock over the board, erasing the misshapen letters. “Gfor game.”
I nodded slowly. We were talking about old shipwrecks up and down the Atlantic, and a few in nearby Newport Harbor. “Also that, yes.”
She set to rewriting her sentence. “Do you like games? Like, sports and stuff?”
“Yeah. Sure.” I bobbed my head. “Let’s think about punctuation and capitalization in this sentence. Where would we do that?”
We didn’t have much longer until Gennie and Noah were scheduled to meet with the school to determine whether they’d promote her to first grade. I didn’t want to waste a minute of that time on side conversations.
I’d learned in the past few weeks that Gennie was really bright—andreallystruggled to stay focused. It was like she had a hundred thoughts buzzing around her head at once and it was all too easy for her to lose track of the one she needed.
She wiped the words away again and started over. She was also a perfectionist. If the work wasn’t correct, everything was thrown out. If she didn’t think she could do it without error, she wouldn’t do it at all. Whiteboards and dry-erase markers helped cut down on the risk of being wrong but didn’t eliminate it entirely.
“Like this?” she asked.
I read the words. “That’s a strong statement. ‘Ships wrecked because of rocks they did not see.’ Nice attention to capitalization and punctuation.”
“There’s a football game tonight,” she said, erasing the words in one dramatic swoop. “You said you like sports so you should come to the game with us.”
“Hmm.” I paged through the book we’d read. “Let’s think about the wordswreckandrock.” I wrote them on her board. “What similarities do you hear in those words?”
“They both haveck,” she replied quickly. “So, you’ll come to the game? Noah says I can get a pretzel as big as my head and there’s a marching band too and—”
“This is really interesting,” I said. “I want to hear more about it after you look through the story and spy the other words with a-ckblend. Find those words and then we’ll talk about giant pretzels.”
I really didn’t want to hear about giant pretzels.
Not that Gennie’s stories weren’t amazing—they were, even more than most kid stories were amazing. But we were running out of time here.
“Done.” Gennie snapped the book shut. “It’s the first football game. They start playing football even before school starts. Noah says everyone goes so you should go too.”
“I’ll have to think about it,” I said. “Can you think of any other words that have the-ckblend?”
