Suddenly (13 page)

Angie caught her breath. “Do
you
want him to board?”

“No, but that’s not the point. The point is that you’re still orchestrating things, which is what he’s rebelling against. He needs freedom from that. So do I.”

“A household can’t function without organization.”

“Organization is one thing, manipulation another. You’ve just informed Doug that I’ll be driving him to school twice a week and picking him up three times a week, but you never even asked me if that was all right.”

She was speechless, feeling overwhelmingly wronged. Finally she pointed a shaky finger at the floor. “Right here, last night, you told me that I emasculated you, that I never let you do things for our son because I was afraid you wouldn’t do them right. Now I’m giving you a chance. I don’t understand why you’re upset.”

“Because it’s
your plan
. You came up with it all on your own. You didn’t ask me what I thought, or if I had any better suggestion.”

“Do you?”

“That’s not the
point
.” He ran a hand through his hair, made a guttural sound, and rose from the table. “It’s a losing battle. I can’t get through.” He headed for the door.

“Where are you going?” A picture of Nora Eaton flashed through her mind.

“Out.”

“Ben—” But the screen door slammed shut, and he was off toward his car.

Angie sank down on her chair and looked blankly at the uneaten servings of cake. When the numbness of his abrupt departure began to wear off, her insides were trembling.

She had been so sure she was doing all the right things. She had certainly
wanted
to do them. She didn’t understand where she had gone wrong.

But there was no denying how deep the resentment ran against her. She might have attributed last night’s flare-up to moodiness, had tonight’s not followed it. Not only did the resentment run deep, but it struck her that it must have been building for years. And all the while she had been oblivious of it.

She wondered where had she been all that time, what she had been thinking. “You don’t listen, do you?” Ben had asked, echoing all he had said last night. To one who took pride in having a firm grip on her life, his words came as a blow—and that, on top of the cutting fact of his infidelity. They hadn’t even
touched
on that tonight. But perhaps rightly so. It was a symptom. Just as her schedules, and revised schedules, were placebos.

The problem was that for all her knowledge, for all her training and skill and competence, she didn’t have the faintest idea where to turn.

N
OAH PERRINE CAME FROM A FAMILY OF
academics. His father, his mother, and two older sisters were all teachers. It was understood that he would do the same. And he wanted that. Having grown up on the campus of the small southwestern college of which his father was a dean, he liked the sense of community that campus living offered. The seeming insularity of it didn’t bother him at all. He believed that electronic communication made the world a smaller place, such that he could be cosmopolitan and provincial at the same time.

For the sake of tasting the cosmopolitan, he completed a doctoral program in New York, then took a position as the head of the Science Department at a prep school outside Tucson, but it soon became clear that his talents were wasted if limited to teaching. He had a way with adults. He had organizational skills and a feel for business that few others at the school had. Almost by default, he became involved in upper management and, in time, was named director of development. It was a position that allowed him to combine teaching with alumni relations and fund raising, both of which were critical to the institution’s survival. The fund raising involved travel, and although he wasn’t wild about that, he was paying his dues. His goal was to be named Head, if not of that school, then of another.

Unfortunately there was no appropriate headship available at the time when he had a sudden, dire need to leave Tucson. So he moved to northern Virginia to head the nonprofit Foundation for Environmental Awareness. There he was able to combine his knowledge of ecological issues and his teaching skill with his flair for fund raising, and over the course of twelve years, he thrived. If there were times when he missed the warmth of small-campus life, he consoled himself with the knowledge that he had a meaningful job working for a cause in which he believed.

When he turned forty, though, he began to feel detached. He was as apt to wake up in Minneapolis, Boulder, or Boise as in Alexandria. People moved in and out of his life. He craved the centeredness of the life he knew as a boy.

A return to academia was inevitable, etched in his marrow like a spare gene, but he took his time, wanting just the right school, just the right setting.

Mount Court Academy wasn’t it. Nearly insolvent, it had a dismal reputation punctuated by impotent leadership and a student body out of control. Academics had declined; disciplinary problems abounded. The school was a disaster that had already happened, waiting only for aftershocks, before imploding.

But the timing was right. Noah needed the change. The fact that the appointment was for a year gave him a built-in escape clause. And there was something to be said for the challenge.

He started in June and spent the summer cleaning up the administrative mess that his predecessor had left. By September he had worked out scheduling snafus with the registrar, weeded through a maze of alumni records with the development office, and, with the academic dean, critically examined every course being offered. While the basic curriculum was upgraded, electives were sorted through, tossed out, or restructured with an eye toward demanding a meaty academic load from every student.

More than a grumble came from a less than enthusiastic faculty that suddenly had to rewrite lesson plans, but those sounds were nothing compared to the reaction of the students when they returned after Labor Day.

Now, less than two weeks into the school year, Noah wondered if he was up to the job. To say that he wasn’t a popular man on campus was putting it mildly. He didn’t have a friend. The faculty treated him like an outsider; the students treated him like the enemy. The strength of his convictions didn’t waver—he knew that he was doing right by the school—but that fact did nothing to make his work easier. He was lonely.

That was why, he supposed, Paige Pfeiffer caught his eye. She was a doctor, an intelligent woman who would support the changes he was trying to make, or so he had assumed—and it wasn’t that he had assumed wrong, just that she was coming at things from a woman’s point of view. She saw the emotional side of the issue, while it was his job to see the structural side. He was the rule maker, the disciplinarian, while she could be softer and more permissive, which was all fine and good.
She
wasn’t the one who had to answer to an army of demanding parents and an even tougher brigade of trustees.

Still, he watched for her. She intrigued him somehow. He decided that it was her long, lean, runner’s legs. They were sexy as hell.

The inappropriateness of the thought brought home to him the sad state he was in. He needed a friend in Tucker. More than that, he needed encouragement, a sign that what he was trying to do just might work.

Determinedly he showered, put on a clean pair of slacks and a fresh shirt, and went to the dining hall, but rather than taking his customary place in the faculty alcove and sitting through another meal with another teacher who would get in little digs about the extra class he had to teach that term, he plunked himself down in the middle of a group of freshman boys.

Those who weren’t eyeing him warily exchanged nervous glances with each other.

“How’re you guys doing?” he asked in a friendly way.

One brave soul found the courage to say, “Okay.”

“Classes going well?”

Several shrugged. Others found sudden interest in their food.

“What do you think of the building project?” he asked to get them going.

They looked at each other.

One said, “It’s okay.”

Another said, “We’re not old enough to do it.”

A third said, “It may not look so good when it’s done. Homemade stuff stinks.”

“There’s nothing ‘homemade’ about the house we’re building,” Noah chided. “The plans were drawn up by a legitimate architect, and the construction is being supervised by a legitimate builder.”

Another boy said, “My brother’s helping. It’ll be a disaster.”

“Uh-uh,” Noah argued. “I can’t afford a disaster. Everyone who’s helping will learn to do it right.”

“Yeah,” said another with smug looks at his friends on either side, “so they’ll be able to graduate and build houses.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” Noah said.

“My dad isn’t paying big money for me to learn to build houses.”

“No, but that would be a great little side benefit to the formal education you’re getting. Let me tell you, there’s satisfaction to be had in building a house.”

“You’ve done it?”

“More than once.”

“Your
own
house?”

“No. They’ve always been houses for other people who wouldn’t be able to afford it without a little help from their friends.”

One of the boys groaned. “Here comes the pitch.”

“What pitch?” Noah asked him.

“You’re going to tell us that the community service requirement is the best thing to hit campus since the salad bar, but I hate salad.”

“That doesn’t mean you have to hate community service.”

“In Tucker? Are you kidding? The town is the pits. There’s nothing here.”

“There’s a grocery store, a library, and a post office. There’s a hardware store, a lumberyard, and a bookstore. There’s a crafts collaborative. There’s the Tavern. And the inn. There’s an ice-cream shop, and there’s Reels. And the hospital.”

“Tucker General,” someone snickered.

“From what I hear,” Noah said, “Tucker General’s saved many a Mount Court kid from disaster, so don’t knock it.”

There were several more snickers with no words attached. Then someone mumbled, “I wouldn’t want to have a heart attack there,” and the others laughed.

“Why not?” Noah asked. “The doctors at Tucker trained at the same hospitals that you know and trust. They just choose to live in Vermont. If I were a betting man, I’d wager that Tucker offers more personal care than the big city hospitals do.”

“That’s because the nurses are hicks. They don’t know any better.”

Noah was disappointed by the boy’s cynicism, but not surprised. Spoiled was never far from arrogant and arrogant never far from jaded. These fifteen-year-olds were all three. “John, is it?” he asked the boy who had spoken last and found satisfaction in his surprise. “I tell you what. You do your thirty hours at the hospital and then tell me you still believe that, and I’ll treat you and three of your buddies to sundaes at Scoops.”

“Thirty hours?” John asked, looking appalled.

“That’s the requirement.”

“Where are we supposed to find that kind of time?”

“Saturday mornings, six weeks’ worth, five hours each,” Noah said. “Or Saturday afternoons, or Sunday afternoons, if you can’t get out of bed early enough. The hospital is always in need of help on weekends. Or if you don’t want to work at the hospital, you can tutor math at the elementary school, or read to the elderly at the nursing home, or work at the recycling booth at the town dump. The point is,” he concluded, “that you all are a privileged lot. You have advantages that others don’t have. You owe it to society to give something back.”

“We pay taxes.”

“Your parents pay taxes,” Noah corrected. “You’re the ones taking so much without giving back.”

“We’re too young to give back.”

“You’re never too young.” He rose from his seat. Much more and he’d have indigestion, and he hadn’t yet started to eat. “Who knows?” he added, tray in hand. “The concept of charitable giving might just sink in. You might find that you like it. You might leave Mount Court a nicer person.” On the verge of saying something sharper, he took his leave. He ended up back in the faculty alcove and ate his dinner feeling somehow defeated. So, when he was done and back out in the early evening air, he tried again.

This time it was Paige Pfeiffer’s group—Julie Engel, Alicia Donnelly, and Tia Faraday, plus Annie Miller and several juniors, plus two sophomores, Meredith Hill and Sara. They were sitting on the lawn, finishing assorted concoctions of the frozen yogurt that had been served for dessert. He slid his hands into his pockets and sauntered up.

“How’s the yogurt?”

The girls eyed him with varying degrees of caution. Julie shrugged. Annie tipped her head. Tia said, “It’s okay.” They continued to eat, some licking cones, some spooning yogurt from dishes.

“An improvement over last year’s food?” he asked.

They consulted each other with glances. Finally Alicia said, “This is.”

The implication was clear. Noah waited for someone to elaborate on it. When no one did, he elaborated himself. “But you didn’t like the tofu we had for lunch, is that it?”

Annie made a face. Tia grunted. Julie said, “It was vile.”

“Tofu takes on the flavor of the foods it’s cooked with,” Noah explained. “Our cook hasn’t gotten the idea yet. But he will. I thought his pizza was great.” It had been covered with extra cheese and an assortment of vegetables and, more important, had been prepared without the extra dollop of oil that school cooks mistakenly assumed added flavor.

No one commented.

Noah pushed on. “He’s doing okay with the salad bar. And the sandwich bar.” They had been Noah’s ideas, too, the theory being that there would be less waste if food was prepared simply and presented in such a way that students could take what they wanted and leave the rest. They much preferred bagels for breakfast than burned corn muffins that the cook had spent an hour preparing. Noah had had the dubious honor of tasting the latter during his visit to the school the spring before.

Alicia stretched out her legs. Tia whispered something to Julie. The juniors took extra crunchies from a dish and sprinkled them on their cones. Meredith and Sara reached for napkins from a wad that sat on the grass.

“How’s your dad feeling, Lindsey?”

The girl, one of the juniors, looked up in surprise. “How did you know he was sick?”

“I talked with him on the day he and your mom dropped you here. He said he was having surgery.”

“He did. He’s better.”

Noah nodded his satisfaction. He looked up in time to catch a wayward Frisbee that had sailed out of control from the game in progress farther down the lawn. Good catch, Noah, he told himself when none of the girls said a word. He sent the Frisbee off again.

“This time last year,” he told the silent group, “I was in the hills of northern Virginia. I thought fall was beautiful there, but it’s even more so here. Another few weeks and the color will be spectacular.”

The girls looked at each other. Julie said, “That makes it even harder to concentrate on classwork.”

“And on official school business,” Noah said, “but it has to be done. Besides,” he added on a note of humor, “concentrating when it’s the hardest is what builds character.”

No one laughed. No one even smiled. Noah felt a tangible resentment directed his way.

Alicia pushed herself up from the grass. “I’m taking this back to the dining hall.” She was immediately handed other dishes and spoons, which she stacked, and left.

Julie rose, said pointedly, “I have to get ready for study hall,” and started off. She was quickly joined by her friends.

The sophomores were the last to leave. Noah would have liked to talk with them, but when his eye caught Sara’s, the abject fear he saw there kept him still.

He worried about her. She had come from San Francisco and a mother who was unable to cope with a teenage daughter, which had to be one blow for the child. Another had to be leaving all her friends behind, and a third, starting over in the middle of high school.

She was a sweet girl. Beneath the stoicism that kept her feelings hidden, she was sensitive. He was sure of it, and because of that, he had doubts that this was the right school for her. He liked Meredith, and others of the sophomores seemed nice enough, but he wasn’t wild about the seniors in the cross-country gang. Paige Pfeiffer seemed fond enough of them—she could afford to be fond of them, since her time with them was limited—but they struck him as tough. He didn’t know whether he could get through to them in a year. The underclassmen were something else. He had a chance with people like Sara, assuming they weren’t turned off by the seniors. He vowed to do everything he could to prevent that, but it wouldn’t be easy.