"I heard it," Cole said, and went back to his food like the conversation had concluded. Ben was grinning at me from the end of the table. Luke had already opened his phone, and I would bet the stuffed bear Oliver had named Gerald after our favorite goat, that he was adding heartburn triggers to the shared document he swore he didn't have.
I looked around the table at all of them, their silly noises and the napkin diagrams and the confiscated pepper and my hand resting on a bump that was still mostly theoretical, and it occurred to me that if I could go back and show this exact dinner to the woman crying on Tessa's bathroom floor a week ago, she would have never believed me. She would have assumed it was a scam. She would have asked what the catch was.
"MOM." Oliver had surfaced from his napkin. "We forgot to tell you the news."
"We have news?"
"School news. It's big." He laid his hands flat on the table the way he did when he was about to deliver a briefing. "Mr. Beauford doesn't work at our school anymore. We have a new principal."
"You don't say."
"Mrs. Marjorie Smith is the principal now. Interim principal," he corrected himself. "She has different bell bottoms for every day of the week and she can't hear anything, except she heard Madison say a bad word from across the whole cafeteria, so I have a hypothesis about her hearing that I'm still testing. Also, her office doesn't smell like cologne."
"She told Tommy Herrera that if he ran in the hallway one more time she would come to his birthday party," Noah reported, eyes huge. "And he stopped running. She seems really good at her job."
"The bar was on the floor," Tessa murmured into her water.
"Nobody knows what Mr. Beauford did," Beth announced to the table, thrilled. "But it was BAD. Tommy Herrera says he stole a car. Madison says he stole a TEACHER'S car."
"AND," Noah said, leaning in with the gravity of a nightly news anchor, "Tommy's mom saw him carrying his boxes out, and he had a black eye."
"TWO black eyes," Emma corrected. "Who do you think gave him those?"
There was silence across the table until Cole swallowed audibly.
"Audible swallowing can indicate dry mouth, emotional tension, heightened awareness, or emotional restraint," Oliver said, without looking up from his diagram.
Cole picked up his water and drank all of it. Every other adult at that table became extremely interested in finishing their food at the exact same moment.
"Maybe he walked into a door," Vaughn offered.
"Twice," Ben agreed.
"Also Miss Karla got fired," Emma offered quietly, from behind her book. "She cried in the front office. Beth saw."
"I saw," Beth confirmed. Then she pivoted to me with zero warning, because Beth's conversations have no seatbelts. "When are you coming back to be our teacher? Mr. Donaldson is fine but he’s not as fun as you."
"Next year, sweet girl. This year I've got a different project." I put my hand back on the theoretical bump. "Marjorie, your new principal, asked me to come back and I told her I'd take the year renovating the house for the new baby on the way. But nobody escapes me completely. I'm still running the play, which means all of you are still mine on Friday."
"And as for Mr. Beauford," I added, in my best teacher voice, the one that could iron a wrinkle out of any conversation, "sometimes grown-ups make choices, and choices have consequences, and the school is going to be just fine. Better than fine." Vaughn raised his glass. "To new management," he said. "And to the doorknob that ran into Beauford's face. Twice."
The guys laughed and clinked their bottles, and I made a point of starting to put all the kids’ leftovers into the little cardboard to-go containers, because there are questions a pregnant woman does not need answers to.
“I can’t wait to be a big brother," Oliver suddenly announced to the table. "I've already decided the baby can share my room if the house renovation runs behind schedule. Babies don't take up much square footage. I measured my floor."
"I CALL BABYSITTING," Beth said as her hand shot straight up.
"You can't call babysitting," Emma said, scandalized, lowering her book for the first time all dinner. "I already know how to swaddle. I practiced on my rabbit."
"Can the baby be on our paintball team?" Noah asked. "Miss Morgan's team wins every time and the baby is basically already on it."
"The baby will not be playing paintball," I said, "for several years, at minimum," which all four of them correctly heard as eventually, yes, and celebrated in cheers.
Cole caught my eye across the table and held it. He didn't say anything. He didn't have to. Luke's hand found my knee under the table, and Ben winked at me from the end of it, and I sat there in the middle of all that attention and the kids excitement about the new baby on the way feeling more loved than I ever had. Down the table, the babysitting negotiation had escalated into a bidding war, and Beth was now offering to throw in free hair braiding.
"Before you start World War III," Vaughn said to all the kids, "if you all volunteer to help out with our little one on the way we’ll take you all out for ice cream right now."
The kids all cried out “YAYYY!!” in unison and stampeded for the door with Tessa and Vaughn herding them, and I hung back to grab the leftover boxes, which is how I ended up alone by the hostess stand when a voice I knew better than I wanted to said my name.
