“Hi,” I answered. “Can I get you something?”
“No, thanks.”
I glanced over his shoulder at my boss’s table and I set him up with a glass of tonic water, which would have appeared to be a real drink from her position. When she was trying to interpret all the various numbers she’d scratched into her notebooks, shealways came to the same conclusion: the business was circling the drain. That made her testy about the customers and their lack of large tabs.
“This glass is for show. I’m not going to add a twist because the citrus is really old here,” I explained. “What did you need?”
“What?”
“I thought you must have needed something. You texted me,” I reminded him. “Or did you want to talk about your last game, maybe to get a fan’s perspective? There weren’t that many other people in the stands that you could discuss it with.”
“The Junior Woodsmen don’t attract much of a crowd,” he concurred. “Especially when the forecast high was twenty degrees.”
“It was chilly. But you played well in spite of that,” I told him. “You threw the ball a lot, and they mostly caught it. Except when they dropped it.”
“Uh…yeah. I had a few misses, too.”
“But you weren’t only relying on your legs,” I pointed out. “I’ve heard that quarterbacks who were successful in college due to their athleticism instead of their arms usually wash out in the pros.” That was what my cooperating teacher had told me the previous semester. “I don’t mean that was why you washed out. I would guess that your problems were due to your drunkenness at the workplace, when you were caught by your boss, Mr. Whitaker.”
Everett picked up the glass of tonic water and drank some before he answered. “I wanted to talk about something different. You’re a teacher, right? You were at the stadium on some kind of class tour.”
“It was Mrs. Pauker’s first-grade field trip and I was her student teacher at Mitigomin Elementary School. I wasn’t a first-grade student in the class, but I’m not the real teacher yet,” I explained. “I’m training and going to school for that. A college, not an elementary school.”
He seemed to understand. “Ok. Never mind,” he said briefly, and I thought that he was going to leave.
“Wait!” I reached across the bar and grabbed his arm, but he looked down at my hand so I let go. “Do you have a problem with a school? Like, are there parents blocking your driveway at pickup, or are the bells annoying you? Because I know a lot of people in the district. I’d like to help.”
“Yeah. Ok, yeah,” he agreed. “I have some questions.”
He had very specific questions about the teachers’ advanced degrees, about standardized testing, about college acceptance rates for seniors, and a whole lot of other stuff, too. He wasn’t looking for public information, the stuff that the district proclaimed on its website. He was interested in details that only an insider would be able to tell him, and I was somewhat of an insider now. When we discussed the elementary school where I was currently placed, for example, I could say that the principal, Suzanne, wasn’t great because she seemed to be afraid of making people angry so she avoided decisions and ignored problems. Alot of the teachers were unhappy and that made a difference to the students there and to their parents, too.
But he wanted to know even more, and luckily, I had a source for that. “I can talk to my school’s admin assistant,” I suggested. “She knows everything about everything.”
“Ok. You could you text and let me know what she says,”
It was a golden opportunity and I knew what my sister would have done. I tried to smile like Willow did, with my chin a little tucked so that I was looking up into his eyes. “Or we could meet again,” I suggested, my heart almost pounding out of my chest.
“I don’t go out to bars anymore,” Everett told me. “I quit drinking.”
“What a good idea,” I congratulated him. “After losing your job over it…”
“My demotion wasn’t due to what happened that day.” He sounded angry, but I wasn’t sure if it was at me or about his lost football opportunity. “I had a shitty preseason and I wasn’t getting any snaps in practice. It was a matter of time before I got sent down and my agent was there to talk to them about it. You can text and let me know what you find out—”
“But we wouldn’t have to go to a bar,” I interrupted. “We could have coffee, liquor-free. Do you still drink that?”
He looked at me and then got a funny smile. “Yeah. Sure, coffee’s still good.”
“Why do you want to know all this stuff about schools?” He’d asked how often they practiced drills for natural disasters ateach location, for example, and if earthquake preparedness was a thing here in northern Michigan. Why was that important?
“I may be signing up a student,” he said, and now he sounded a little reluctant.
“Oh. Oh, this is so much worse!”
“What is?”
“When you said that your wife had left you after having affairs with a plethora of other men, I didn’t realize that you guys had kids together.” I shook my head. “I felt really sorry for you but this makes it even more terrible.”
“You felt sorry for me?”
