Chapter 21 Junior K

The gray truck liked the corner of Netmaker Lane, so on Monday I drove the twins to school the long way: up Chandler Hill, around the water tower, back down through the Heights. Eleven extra minutes. Nowhere near that corner.

It hadn't been there that morning. I'd checked from the bathroom window at six, and again at seven, and again while I was buckling Pippa in. The corner had been empty except for Dora's recycling bin and a gull eating something it shouldn't.

I went the long way anyway.

"Why are we going up a hill?" Pippa demanded from the back.

"Scenic route."

"What's scenic?"

"It means there's a view."

She inspected a row of garages and a closed laundromat. "This is a bad view."

Bramport Harbor Day School stood on a slope above the inner harbor in a Victorian building that had once been a sea captain's house, gray-shingled, with a widow's walk on top and a newer brick wing behind.

The junior kindergarten was in the old part. Its windows had been made from sea glass somebody's grandmother had collected, green and white and frosted blue, so the light in the classroom came through in pieces and lay on the floor in colored patches.

There were fourteen steps up to the front door. Felix counted them out loud for Pippa as we climbed, one hand in mine, his voice just above a whisper. "Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen." At the top he let go of my hand and put it back on his stethoscope.

Pippa stopped in the doorway, Admiral under one arm, and addressed the hall at large.

"We're from Zurich," she announced. "Actually we're from here now."

A woman crouching by the cubbies looked up and laughed.

---

Zoe Frost was thirty-four and had freckles and a cardigan with pockets full of crayons, and she knelt on the floor so she was shorter than both of them, which I knew at once was the right answer.

She shook Admiral's fin and told him he was the first shark ever to be enrolled in junior K and asked if he needed a cubby too. Pippa said he could share hers, because he was small and didn't have a lot of stuff.

Then Zoe turned to Felix.

She didn't ask him to say hello. She'd read the forms, and she'd read the line I'd written under *Anything we should know?* which said *Felix whispers. He'll talk to his sister. He'll talk to you when he's ready. Please don't make him.* She just held out a sheet of stickers.

"I saved you a special cubby," she said. "This one's for the class doctor. You get to choose the sticker for it."

Felix went over the sheet sticker by sticker, twice. Then he chose a small round sticker of a red heart with a stethoscope wrapped around it, and stuck it on the cubby with his name on it, pressing the corners down one by one with his thumb.

"Perfect," said Zoe.

I stood at the edge of the colored light and watched my children hang up their coats in a room in Bramport, and my throat closed so suddenly I had to look at the bulletin board.

---

There was coffee for the new families in the hall outside the classroom, in an urn on a trestle table with a plate of muffins and a sign in marker that said WELCOME, NEW FRIENDS. Six or seven parents stood around it with paper cups, mostly mothers, mostly in quilted jackets that cost more than a used car.

One of them had already found me.

She was tall and sleek, with a blowout that had survived the walk from the parking lot, a cream jacket, and a cup of coffee she wasn't drinking. I'd seen her come in with a boy of about four in a blazer with a crest on it.

Her eyes went from my face to my plain navy coat to my flat shoes. I watched her place me. It took about three seconds: the 2021 gossip, the headline, the photo of me leaving St. Ansel with my head down that ran that spring.

I reached past her for a cup.

She turned her shoulder. Not much. Just enough that I was facing her back, and the circle of mothers closed by one place.

"Some of us," she said to the woman next to her, not quite quietly enough, "actually look into who our children sit next to."

I filled my cup from the urn. I put in milk. I stirred it with a wooden stick and dropped the stick in the trash.

"So do I," I said, to her back. "It's how I knew to wash my hands."

Then I walked back into the classroom with my coffee before anyone could decide what that meant.

---

The trouble started at nine-forty.

I'd stayed for circle time because the school allowed it on the first day, sitting on a child's chair at the back with my knees up near my chin. Zoe had them on the rug in a ring, and she went around asking each child to say their name and one thing they liked.

Pippa said hers and that she liked sharks and that Admiral liked sharks too, obviously, because he was one.

When it was Felix's turn, Zoe smiled and said, "And this is Felix, who likes hearts. Felix brought his stethoscope," and went straight on to the next child without waiting. Felix let his shoulders down and studied his knees.

Then the sleek woman's son leaned across the rug.

He was a solid boy with his mother's chin and a voice that carried. "Baby doctor," he said, loudly, pointing. "Baby doctor, baby doctor."

A couple of children giggled. Felix didn't look up.

"Arlo," said Zoe pleasantly. "We use kind words on the rug."

Arlo reached out, fast, and grabbed the stethoscope from around Felix's neck. He yanked. The tubing caught under Felix's chin and pulled his head forward, and then it came free, and Arlo was holding it up in his fist, the bell swinging.

"My mom says your mom poisons old men," he announced to the whole rug.

The classroom went silent.

I was already on my feet. I'd knocked the child's chair over behind me and didn't hear it go.

Pippa was faster.

She was up off the rug and across it in two steps, her face an inch from Arlo's, her mouth open, and I saw her teeth. I saw her decide. Every muscle in her small body was arguing for biting him. She'd bitten a boy in Zurich at three and a half for kicking a pigeon.

In the end she snatched the stethoscope out of his hand, so hard he sat down on the rug in surprise.

"*That's his,*" she shrieked. "*And you're a liar, and your mom is a liar, and you're both liars.*"

Zoe was there. I don't know how she got there so quickly. She had one hand on Pippa's shoulder and the other flat on the rug in front of Arlo, and her voice didn't go up at all.

"Arlo. We don't take things. Pippa. We don't shout in faces. Thank you for giving it back to Felix."

She held Pippa's eye, eyebrows up, until Pippa, still panting, turned around and hung the stethoscope back around her brother's neck and straightened the bell on his chest.

Felix hadn't moved. He was sitting cross-legged on the rug with his face gone white and his hands in his lap. When the bell settled against his sweater he cupped his hands over it.

"Arlo, come and sit by me," Zoe said, "and we'll talk about what we heard at home and whether it's kind to bring it to school." Over the children's heads, her face said *I've got this* so clearly that I picked up my chair and sat back down on it.

I made it to my car in the parking lot before I cried. I sat behind the wheel with my forehead on it for four minutes, which I timed, and then I wiped my face and drove to St. Ansel and did rounds.

---

It was raining at pickup, a thin gray drizzle off the harbor that soaked through everything slowly. The line of parents stood under the porch roof and along the path with umbrellas. I stood at the bottom of the fourteen steps with mine.

Rhys had asked on Saturday, in the aquarium parking lot, after the truck had pulled out and gone, whether he could come to pickup on their first day. He'd asked it standing well back from me, hands in his pockets, and I'd said yes before I could think of a reason not to.

His car pulled up at three exactly. He got out without an umbrella and came up the path through the drizzle and stood beside me under mine, not touching, a foot of wet air between our shoulders.

"How was it?"

"Ask them."

The door at the top of the steps opened and the junior K came out in a line holding a rope, Zoe at the front. Pippa saw me and dropped the rope at once. Then she saw Rhys, and her face did something complicated, and she came down the steps at a run with Admiral flapping.

Halfway down the path the sleek woman stepped into the gap.

She'd seen him. Of course she had. She came down off the porch with her umbrella and her cream jacket and her son by the hand, and her face had gone bright and warm and interested, nothing like the one she'd shown me at the urn.

"Mr. Calloway!" she said. "Rhys Calloway? Simone Dunmore. We met at the harbor gala in the fall, you won't remember. Are you considering us? For next year? I'd be so glad to show you around. My husband's on the board."

Rhys gave her one glance. Then he bent down and caught Pippa as she reached him and lifted her onto his hip in one movement. Pippa let him. She hooked an arm around his neck and glared at Simone.

Felix had come down the steps behind his sister, walking. He stopped beside Rhys. Rhys held out his free hand, down at his side, not reaching, just there.

Felix looked at it. Then he took it.

"They're my children," Rhys said to Simone Dunmore.

She opened her mouth. Nothing came out.

"Dr. Fairley chose the school," Rhys said, loud enough for the porch. "I came to see if it deserved them."

Simone's face went the color of the wet curb. Beside her, Arlo was staring up at Pippa on Rhys's hip with his mouth open. Somewhere along the porch, somebody's phone was up, held at chest height, pointed our way, the little red dot on the screen glowing through the drizzle.

Rhys didn't look at it. He turned and carried his daughter down the path to my car, with his son's hand in his, and I followed them under my umbrella and didn't look at anyone either.

At the car he set Pippa down on the wet sidewalk and opened the back door for her. She stayed where she was, holding the door frame and looking up at him with rain on her eyelashes.

"Arlo said a lie," she informed him. "At circle."

"What kind of lie?"

"He said Mama poisons old men. His mom told him." She used the voice she'd have used to report Arlo eating glue. "I didn't bite him. I wanted to. I was very good."

Rhys didn't move. The rain was coming down on his bare head and running into his collar. I watched his face, and he didn't let anything onto it at all.

"You were very good," he said at last.

"Mama doesn't poison anybody," Pippa said. "She fixes hearts. She fixed a fish lady's."

"I heard about the fish lady."

"So you know," said Pippa.

He was quiet for a second too long, and she noticed. She always noticed.

"I'm learning," Rhys said.

Pippa considered him. Then she climbed into her booster and held out her arms for Admiral, and Rhys gave him to her, and buckled her in himself, wrong, and I fixed it after he'd gone.

By six the next morning, the photo was in Elliot Crane's column, *The Harbor List*, on the *Bramport Courier* site, under a headline with a word in it I had spent five years outrunning.