Right now, my phone was actually ringing, and I went into the back room to answer this call from my former cooperating teacher—not the lech, but the nice woman who’d taught me so much when I’d worked with her in her first-grade class a year ago. “Hi, Sarah,” I said.
She was just as nice as I remembered from when I’d been in her classroom. “Hi, Zoey! How are you doing?” We chatted for a minute, but she was also just as busy as I remembered. She had kids of her own to care for, prep to do for her job, and a house to maintain. There wasn’t much time left for chatting, so she got to the point pretty quickly.
“I heard from Everett Ford. He sent an email to my school address to apologize for the field trip last year,” she said.
“He did?”
“It was brief but nice. No, you may not have ice cream tonight…Zoey, hold on.” She came back to the call after a moment andhad an important topic to discuss with me. It turned out that her life was about to get even busier.
Jannie was sitting in the booth with Len, the 7 and 7 guy (sitting on his lap, squeezed in there) and she wouldn’t have understood my excitement about what Sarah had said. So I called Everett next, because I thought he might.
First, I asked him about his email to her. “You said you were sorry?”
“Yeah,” he answered. “I was thinking about people who needed to apologize and I figured…anyway, I wrote to her and to my former agent. And to Luke Whitaker, too. He’s one of the owners of the team and he was the guy who came into the storage closet and knocked you over. I’m sorry about that, Zoey. I’m sorry about the puke and I’m sorry that I was an asshole.”
“I know,” I said. “I knew it that night when you came to the bar and you were so sad but—listen, there’s something else.” I explained the other thing that Sarah had talked about.
“Really? She wants you to take over for her?” he asked me. “How does that work?”
“She’ll have her baby in January and then she’ll be out until next fall, like a year from now. She said that she’s not even sure that she’ll want to come back but at the very least, she needs a long-term sub. And she wants me to do it, because she thought I did a good job when I was with her.” I heard the pride in my voice.
“Don’t they have regular people to hire?”
“Regular?” I repeated.
“When someone goes down on a football team, there’s a backup, and then they have the development league to call up more guys. Or they could try to sign someone from another team,” he explained.
“Sure, she could choose someone else. I better go,” I told him. “I have this job to do.”
“Zoey—”
I hung up and I turned down the volume on my phone. I didn’t need any more calls, and I had customers to serve. It was something I was sure I knew how to do well.
It was dark with the moon hidden behind clouds as I drove home after my shift, and it was dark in Everett’s house, too. I let myself in through the garage and walked into the quiet kitchen, and I started to put down my keys and bag. Then I jumped and threw them, because the light of a phone suddenly glowed at the island. He sat at one of the stools there.
“You scared me!” I gasped as I picked up my belongings from the floor. “What are you doing? It’s late.”
“I was waiting for you because you never answered me. You didn’t answer my texts or my calls. I left voicemails. I emailed you.”
“You can see my location,” I reminded him, because he’d wanted to start sharing that and I’d agreed. I could see his, too, and I’d wondered if I’d watch him go out to a club when he was away at the next game.
“Yeah, I watched you driving here. The roads are so empty.”
“Well, now I’m back,” I said, and I started to walk toward the stairs.
He got off the stool and followed me. “Wait a minute. Why are you pissed off at me?”
I did stop but then I wasn’t sure how to explain what I was feeling. “I’m not. I’m disappointed.”
“In me?”
“In myself, I guess. I was thinking that you’d be excited about me getting this opportunity, but you thought that Sarah Paulker should find someone better. I’d been feeling happy because she trusts me enough to take over her class.”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” he said. “I didn’t mean that you’re a shitty teacher.”
“Ok.Good night.”
But when I took another step, he reached for my arm. “Zoey. I don’t think that you’d do a bad job. I was…” He looked frustrated. “I’m worried about you in those schools. You told me all that crap about lice in the classrooms and then there’s some old man harassing you? There has to be a better job out there.”
