“You knoweverything.”
“It’s really not an interesting story.”
“Charlotte.”
“Wow, you’re really interested in small-town gossip.”
I take a gulp of my own coffee, which is way too hot, and scald everything from my tongue to the back of my throat. I rasp out a cough, my eyes watering.
Charlotte smirks over her own delicate sip.
“If there’s reason to be concerned about my tenant—” I start.
“No one’s buying that. And I saw how he looked at you when you pulled up with June.”
“I’m not dating.”
“And he doesn’t date students’ parents. Anymore.”
“That’s completely irrelevant.”
“You brought it up.”
“So we’re in enemy territory, even though we’re at home,” I say, desperately trying to get this train back on a track where I can find out everything I want to know without actually asking.
And that I don’t want to know.
But do.
But am happy to pretend I don’t.
“Flint lost his job there. It was billed as a voluntary resignation, but Opal said it wasn’t. Not really. Since the divorce happened so quietly—the husband was always out of town to begin with—everyone thought he was thereasonthey got divorced. Then parents of other kids that he’d been working with after school started questioning his intentions and why he cared so much abouttheirkids and what he was teaching them, and if he was playing favorites, and basically a million other things that really boiled down to it turning into a crowd with pitchforks who forgot why they had them in the first place but were determined to burn it all down, and the rest is history.”
I stare out at the field as our kids trot back out.
Junie’s played exactly two games this season, so I did get to see her play once.
I won’t today. But she’s still out there managing water bottles and towels and balls without complaint.
And she’s doing more than that too. All season, she’s been the team’s biggest cheerleader from her spot on the sidelines. Today, though, she took it one step further and actually bumped Flint out of the way at halftime, grabbed his whiteboard and markers, and apparently gave orders on a play.
The team scored two minutes into the second half.
I sip my coffee again, slower this time, and keep my eyes trained on the action on the field while I ask my next question, which Ishould notask and technically already have an answer to, but Charlotte knows things.
If there’s more than what I’ve been told, she’ll tell me. “Why’s it so important to him to watch out for the kids falling between the cracks?”
“Hewasone of those kids.”
I wince, even knowing that part was coming. Junie could’ve been one of those kids. I still go to bed half the nights of the week worried that she hates me, even when I know she’s been happier here where what my mom did hasn’t impacted her social life.
I’m seeing her less and less because she’s hanging out more and more with her classmates.
And for the record, yes, I know all their parents and what she and her friends do while she’s gone.
“Was he?” I ask like this is new information. I want to understand more, even though I know I shouldn’t.
“There’s a lot I don’t know,” Charlotte murmurs as voices swell around us. The other team is charging down the field toward our goaltender, and that makes all of us nervous. “The most I’ve ever gotten out of Opal is that his father was toxic, his mother bent over backward to try to get his dad to love her, and by the time Flint was, like, twelve, his father was never home, his mom was in a pretty bad state of depression, and he was having to do things like shop for groceries and sneak money to buy himself clothes. He ran away when he was sixteen. Opal foundhim and brought him here to finish out high school. He had remarkably good grades through all of it, so the town put together a scholarship fund for him.”
