The What If Guy Page 3

  I put a couple of boxes of cereal back on the shelf. “Um, no. It’s just Elliott and me.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” Holly’s gaze softened. “Divorced?”

  I put my arm around Elliott and squeezed. “No. It’s always been just us.”

  Holly blinked at me, then turned to Elliott. “What’s your name?”

  He smiled and pushed his glasses up on his nose. “Elliott.”

  “It’s very nice to meet you. I’ll bet you’re almost the same age as my oldest, Tabitha. You’re what? Ten?”

  I cringed. This sort of thing always happened to El. Small for his age, he looked more like a fourth- or fifth-grader instead of the sixth-grader he was.

  “I’m twelve,” he said.

  “Middle school. Very cool.” Her gaze returned to me. “Is he your only one?”

  I nodded and tickled the chubby baby’s chin, invoking a damp smile. “Yes. And you? You have two?”

  “Lord, no. I’ve got five. The rest are outside in the minivan, watching cartoons. Thank God for the DVD player.”

  Holy Moses, five kids?

  “Wow, Holly, congratulations. Who is this little one?” I discreetly wiped the baby’s drool off my hand.

  “This is my youngest, Ty,” Holly announced proudly. “And Thomas, Trevor, Tanner, and Tabitha are in the van. Tabitha’s your age, Elliott. She’s in sixth grade.”

  What’s up with the T names? The dusty minivan parked outside appeared to be rocking back and forth.

  “That’s quite a family. And you’re still with Cody?”

  She nodded, beaming. “Thirteen years and still going strong. We took over his dad’s farm a couple years ago.”

  I pictured the small pea farm Cody had grown up on. “That’s great.”

  “Mom,” a childlike voice called.

  I peeked around Holly’s cart to see a pretty little girl with long hair the color of spun gold staring at her mother with her hands on her hips. Tabitha looked just like Holly, twenty years before. I glanced at Elliott, who’d taken notice as well, his cheeks pink.

  “I’ll be there in a minute,” Holly said over her shoulder.

  “Trevor pulled on my iPod cord, and now it’s broken, and Thomas is crying because he was going to borrow it for the field trip tomorrow, and I told them both to stop yelling, and so Tanner gave me a wet willy, and his breath smells like garbage.” Tabitha spouted the minivan play-by-play without taking a breath.

  I stifled a giggle.

  Holly closed her eyes and shook her head. “Listen, it was nice to see you. I have to be going now.” She pushed her empty cart back to the corral, picked up the baby, then offered me an apologetic shrug.

  “It was good to see you, too.” I bit my lip.

  I wanted to say more. To apologize for being a giant jerk. To ask her to be my friend again, because moving back home made me feel like crying. But I said nothing. I just watched as she walked toward the door with the baby screaming on her hip.

  “Bye,” I called.

  She glanced back at me and hesitated for a second, her hand hovering above the door handle. “Bye. Nice to meet you, Elliott.”

  Elliott’s hand went up in a robotic wave, his eyes still locked on Tabitha, who followed her mother out, complaining the whole time. I nudged my son. “Got a crush?”

  Casting me a dirty look, he snatched a candy bar off of a nearby rack. “No. Stop it. Can I get this?”

  I sucked in a breath, mentally tallying our grocery bill. “We’re on a tight budget.”

  “Then why did you put eight boxes of cereal in the cart?” He raised an eyebrow. “That lady made you nervous.”

  Holly pulled her minivan into the street and drove away with a seatbelt hanging out of one of the sliding doors. “She used to be my friend. A long time ago.”

  “What happened?”

  I looked at my son. It’s never fun to admit to your child that you behaved badly. “I was a horrible friend.”

  Elliott’s eyes grew wide. “What did you do?”

  “Just get your candy bar and stop asking questions.”

  I had some serious fences to mend.

  §

  “How can there be just one hallway?”

  Elliott looked stricken, but I tried to appear at ease.

  Monday morning, we stood in the main entryway of Palouse Plains Grade and Middle School—yes, they’re combined. The school had three hallways total—two utilized for grade school and only one designated for sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. A row of beige lockers lined one side of the hall. Many lockers hung open, and several backpacks had been left unattended.

  Elliott examined the open bags and abandoned books and binders. “Why are their bags on the floor? Doesn’t their stuff get jacked?”

  “School out here is different,” I said.

  The school in Seattle I’d worked so hard to send him to was very different from this single corridor that passed for a middle school. His other school featured classes in figure drawing, stringed instruments, and poetry, among the standard courses. Palouse Plains offered only the basics, with a handful of contact sports thrown in for extracurricular activities.

  I led Elliott to the office, where a woman with a fuzzy beehive hairdo watched us expectantly. She looked just like Miss Price, the head secretary when I’d attended school here, years before. She grinned, her crooked teeth reminding me of a jack-o-lantern. It was nearly Halloween, and the paper streamer with black cats and candy corn hanging above her head didn’t help.

  “Hello, Autumn.”

  Holy crap, it is Miss Price. I studied her curiously. She’d been pretty old when I’d been a student here, so she had to be in her eighties by now, if not her early hundreds. What was this woman doing to keep herself alive? Hyperbaric chambers at night?

  “Miss Price,” I blurted.

  “You remember me?”

  “Of course I do.”

  Miss Price wrung her gnarled hands. “That’s sweet, dear.”

  We looked at each other for an uncomfortable moment. Her gaze bounced between mine and Elliott’s with unabashed curiosity.

  “So…I’m back in town.”

  “I heard.”

  Of course you did. “I need to enroll my son in school.”

  “He’ll be a Lancer, too. How wonderful.” She referred to Palouse Plains the same way that someone who graduated with honors from Harvard would proudly claim their school.

  “Right.” I glanced over the registration forms. “I have his transcripts here.” I handed them to her, then nudged my son. “El, Miss Price was the secretary when I went here.”

  Elliott’s eyes went wide. “Whoa.”

  I gave him a stern look. “This is my son, Elliott.”

  “Elliott…?” She waited for a last name, her pen poised.

  “Cole,” I said, confirming there was no father in the picture. That would make for some good gossip once I’d walked away.

  “Of course, dear.”

  She handed a schedule to Elliott, giving him another jack-o-lantern smile. “You’ve already missed first period.”

  “Who does he have for homeroom?” I asked.

  “Mrs. Holbrook.”

  “Mrs. Holbrook is still around? Ugh.”

  A flash of panic shot across Elliott’s face.

  “Don’t worry, it’ll be great,” I said. “What class comes after that?”

  Elliott looked at the paper. “Pre-algebra.”

  “That’s with Mr. Smith,” Miss Price said. “You remember him, don’t you? He’s the one who sings and dances. He did a nice rappy thing for your generation, if I recall.”

  “Rappy?” Elliott snorted.

  I squeezed his shoulder, warning him to reign in the sarcasm. “He’s still here, too? Are all of my former teachers still around?”

  She lifted one of her wrinkled fingers to her chin. “Goodness no. Mr. Lincoln passed away ten years ago.”

  “Did he get shot in a theater?” Elliott asked, without blinking.<
br />
  Miss Price pursed her lips. “He had a coronary. Took him out, right in the parking lot.”

  “Oh, lord,” I gasped.

  Miss Price spouted off a few more names, my heart dropping with the mention of each one. After a moment, she patted my hand. “Anyway, all of us are awfully glad you’re back.”

  “Are things the same as they were when I was here?” I asked.

  Miss Price blinked a few times. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean…”

  I looked at Elliott and pointed to the nearby trophy case. “Go check out the trophies, hon. They’re pretty cool.”

  He scuffled over to the glass case, muttering, “I’m not two, you know.”

  I turned to Miss Price, who stared at me like a dimly lit bulb. “Okay. I’m going to be honest. When I went here, I didn’t fit in.”

  “Oh, you were a good girl.”

  “I was a good girl, but I didn’t fit in. I was a geek. I painted and drew instead of trying out for cheerleading. The teachers didn’t know what to do with me. Nobody knew where I fit in, so they either ignored me or poked fun at me. It was miserable.”

  Guilt weighed on my shoulders as I talked to Miss Price, but I pressed forward. Elliott had experienced so much change over the past two days, it broke my heart to have to enroll him in a tiny school that didn’t offer the classes he was used to.

  “Elliott’s creative, artistic, musical. He won’t blend in here. He doesn’t play sports. I don’t think he knows how to shoot a basket. Is he going to feel left out like I did? Are there any programs that will interest him?”

  Miss Price stared at me for a full ten seconds before offering me a reassuring nod. “Things have changed. Three years ago, we started a nice, after school arts and crafts program. We got a new social studies teacher this year who has started all sorts of clubs. Activities that don’t involve sports. Like exploratory music and art history.”

  Art history? At Palouse Plains?

  Miss Price blushed, her face turning the same purplish shade as her Halloween sweater. “The new teacher—he’s quite nice to look at, too. Don’t mean to embarrass you, dear.”

  I motioned for Elliott to come back. “Why would that embarrass me?”

  “Well, he’s single.” She giggled. “And you’re single.”

  My cheeks heated. “Don’t worry about me. I’m not interested in being set up with the new teacher.”

  She patted her teased hairdo, and clicked her tongue. “Rumor has it, he’s going through a divorce. He apparently left the big city to escape the pain of it all. I can’t even imagine. But you see there? He’s from a big city, you’re from a big city.”

  I mustered a serious look. “No fixing me up. I don’t want to date anyone here.”

  Miss Price handed Elliott a bright pink, cardboard square with “Hall Pass” printed on it. “Here’s your hall pass.”

  For one hall?

  “Go to Mr. T’s social studies class,” Miss Price said. “He’ll show you where to go after that.”

  Elliott smirked. “Mr. T?”

  “That’s what the kids call him. You know, like the muscular man on that TV show? I pity the fool, and all that gold jewelry?”

  I swallowed back laughter. “Right.”

  “Autumn, you know the way around. Why don’t you take Elliott to room five?” She smiled crookedly at us, and gestured down the hall.

  I picked up my purse and hitched it on my shoulder. “Five. Got it.”

  While Elliott opened his locker and dropped off his belongings, I looked at my reflection in the trophy case. Thank goodness I was a few hundred miles away from any place important, because I looked like hell. Day three of the dry weather in Fairfield, and my hair had enough static electricity in it to jump start a school bus.

  Since most of my nice clothes, not to mention all of our knickknacks and furniture, were being stored in a friend’s attic back in Seattle, I’d rushed around the house in a flurry that morning, looking for something to wear. When I’d decided to move back to Fairfield, I’d realized that my compact car was only going to hold the bare necessities, plus Elliott’s giant cello case, and since my hometown wasn’t exactly the hub of fashion, I’d decided on bringing mostly casual clothes. This morning, I’d slid into a pair of jeans and the first shirt on the top of my suitcase, which was a tee with Fake it ’til ya make it printed on the front.

  I knocked on the door of room five. Elliott briefly slipped his hand into mine and whispered, “Love you, Mom.”

  I squeezed his hand. “Love you, too, buddy.”

  “Come on in,” a male voice called.

  The classroom looked and felt exactly the same way it had when I was a kid, including the judgmental stares from the students. With his back to the class, the teacher scribbled a makeshift map on the whiteboard at the front of the room. All of the students’ eyes shifted to Elliott. Some looked at him with interest, but others already glared with disapproval. I wished that El hadn’t been wearing his yellow and black checkered vest and a bow tie when I’d thundered down the stairs to find him waiting at the front door, tapping his foot. What had been stylish in his funky Seattle school was a blinking neon sign declaring I’m an oddball at a small country school like this.

  “Um, hi?” Elliott’s voice cracked. “I’m Elliott Cole, and I’m, uh, new.”

  Pride swelled in my chest, and I beamed at my son. I leaned down and whispered in his ear. “You’re awesome, El. I love you.”

  He gave me a stiff nod. “Thanks.”

  “Welcome, Elliott, it’s good to have you.” The teacher spoke in a low, gravelly voice.

  I straightened and smiled at the teacher. “Thanks…”

  All the oxygen left my lungs, and I stood paralyzed. The class became silent. Elliott’s teacher and I stared at each other, dumbfounded—mouths open, hands half-extended, eyes round and wide like headlights set on bright. My insides vibrated like the engine of an idling grain truck. All in response to the teacher, who gawked at me with what appeared to be the same mixture of shock and disbelief.

  Elliott’s teacher was Henry Tobler.

  “What are you doing here?” I whispered.

  I regretted my words the moment they came out. I should have said something eloquent or profound. Something that would have made seeing each other for the first time in over a decade less awkward. As if that were remotely possible.

  Henry’s eyes, that rainy-day shade of gray, narrowed, and a line formed between his eyebrows. “I work here.”

  I couldn’t help staring. Henry looked like a teacher, but no teacher I’d ever had at Palouse Plains. He wore a grayish-blue, button-down shirt, untucked, and a worn, olive-colored sport coat. His wavy, brown hair was cut shorter than I remembered. Even at ten o’clock in the morning, he sported a sexy five o’clock shadow that made my stomach twist. I remembered those whiskers well.

  He still resembled the young man I’d made eyes at across the lecture hall during college, so long ago—his face chiseled and rugged-looking. Back then, a perpetual smile had teased at one side of his mouth. Now, I saw no hint of that smile. But his eyes still revealed his emotions, no matter how hard he tried to hide them. I wished he’d outgrown that, because his eyes screamed I’m not happy to see you.

  “Y-you’re a teacher now?” I stammered.

  “I’ve always been a teacher.”

  “Right, but…”

  I opened and closed my mouth two or three times like a deranged fish. Henry looked so good. He wore the years well, whereas I looked like I’d been working underneath cars with very little time left for grooming for the past thirteen years. Yeah. I looked that bad.

  I slapped at a strand of hair that had fallen across my forehead. I couldn’t believe that I was facing my long-lost love for the first time in years in Fairfield, of all places.

  “You were… Your degree was… Art history.”

  A hint of pain flashed in Henry’s eyes. “I changed my major.”

  Elliott
shifted his weight between feet. “I take it you guys know each other?”

  I started. I’d forgotten about Elliott. I put my arm around him and tried to smile. “Yup. El, this is Henry…er, Mr. Tolber.”

  Elliott looked around self-consciously. “Geez, Mom, chill. I already know this is Mr. Tobler.”

  “Of course you do. Sorry. I just… He’s um….”

  Henry stood frozen in place, staring at me as if I were a ghost.

  I trembled, struggling to regain composure. “He’s an old friend.”

  Elliott squinted at me for a few beats, then turned to Henry. “I’m sorry. She’s… uh, wired this morning. Where do you want me to sit?”

  Henry’s mouth remained set in a line. “There’s an open seat by the window. Go ahead and grab a textbook off of my desk.”

  “Okay. Mom, you can go.” Elliott bumped my toe with his.

  I waved at him and backed toward the door. “All right. Have a good day… And you,” I said to Henry, “have a good, um, class.”

  “Yes.” Henry nodded stiffly.

  I misjudged and backed into a bookshelf, ramming my butt into a sharp corner. A shockwave of pain shot through my right cheek, and several encyclopedias tumbled onto the floor.

  The kids laughed. Elliott sat at his desk, then covered his face with his hands.

  “I’m so sorry.” I bent to pick up the books, hot tears of embarrassment pricking my eyes.

  Henry stepped closer and reached for one of the encyclopedias. “Here, just let me—”

  “No, I’ve got—”

  I stood, bringing an armload of the thick books up as I did. Whack. The books collided with Henry’ nose. Bright-red blood instantly flooded all over the “G” encyclopedia and the sleeve of my shirt.

  “Argh.” He grabbed for the box of tissues on his desk, leaving a trail of blood droplets on the floor.

  The kids gasped, and Elliott slowly laid his head on his desk. One girl in the back of the room grabbed her stomach. “I’m gonna puke, Mr. T.”

  I dropped the encyclopedias onto the desk of a very pale-looking boy, and he shrank from the bloody mess.

  “Oh, shit,” I muttered.

  The students giggled.

  “She said shit,” a kid in the back of the room whispered to his friends.