Onward! — Work-in-Progress Wednesday

In case you didn’t hear the good news, Princess of Dorsa is finally live on Amazon!  You can get it here.

But an author’s job is never done — there are always more stories to write.  I’ve already started on my next novel.  It’s untitled at the moment, but I’m thinking of calling it East of the 125.  “125” refers to a made up interstate in a made up city.  Opinions??

This book… I’d intended to make it a light contemporary romance.  Classic girl meets girl, girl falls for girl, girl gets in a fight with girl, girl makes up with girl; along the way, girl has hot sex with girl.  😉

Buuuuuut….. well, you know me.  Nothing I write ends up being “light.”  It’s going to be a story about divorce and race and class in suburbia.  The bit I’m posting below is very, VERY beta.  This is a brand spankin’ new project.

Anyway, without further adieu…

—

1

 

And you may ask yourself

What is that beautiful house?

And you may ask yourself

Where does that highway go to?

And you may ask yourself

Am I right? Am I wrong?

And you may say yourself, “My God! What have I done?”

– Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime”

 

Children’s birthday parties in the suburbs are more or less all the same.  Sure, the details can vary — there’s a bouncy castle or there isn’t; there’s a pool in a backyard or a pizza party at a community pool; there’s a magician or sometimes a clown; there’s bowling and whack-a-mole or there’s video games and Disney movies — but the feeling?

The feeling is always identical.

Excited children, adrenalized by cheap plastic toys, party favors, and sheet cake, run around gleefully, filled with the anticipation that something amazing is just about to happen.  Parents, along with the occasional grandparent and older sibling, mill about aimlessly, leapfrogging from one island of small talk to the next, hoping against hope that they will run into an adult they recognize, or, better yet, an adult they actually like.

Many of the children’s birthday party attendees over the age of eight do not know each other’s names.  Everyone is simply, “Logan’s Mom” or “Aiden’s Dad.”  An adult’s name will be occasionally learned — “Kasey.  That’s right, it’s Kasey.” — only to be forgotten again, misplaced like a set of keys, replaced at a later date once more with “Logan’s Mom.”

Logan’s Mom, known to her closer friends as Kasey, was sipping wine poolside at just such a children’s birthday party on a Saturday afternoon not long after her own daughter turned eight when she finally admitted to herself just how much she hated the suburbs.

Wine wasn’t typically a staple at suburban children’s birthday parties, but in this case the hostess — Avery’s Mom, also known as Kerry — was a close friend of hers and had offered after all the other parents meandered away from them, through the sliding glass doors, out of the kitchen, to keep an eye on their kids.

Kerry had opened the kitchen pantry nearly the moment the last dad’s khaki-colored backside had disappeared and the sliding glass door had closed.  She disappeared inside the pantry, reappearing a moment later with the merlot in her hand.

She shook the half-empty bottle in Kasey’s face.  “I know you want some,” Kerry said.

Kasey shrugged, disinterested in the wine as she was disinterested in the birthday party and wondering if she should go outside, too, keep an eye on her Logan and Aiden.

“Sure,” she told Kerry.

“I’ve got these blue juice glasses,” Kerry said, pulling two water glasses from an open cabinet.  “No one will know it’s wine.  We can pretend it’s soda.”

Kasey managed a smile.  The hiding was one of the parts she hated about living in the suburbs — everyone was always hiding and pretending, pretending and hiding.  And if she wasn’t hiding, she felt like she should be.  What was it about a place like this that could do that to people?

Suburbia made Kasey feel furniture left in direct sunlight too long.  Somehow she was getting bleached out, brittle.  She felt like her color faded by the day.

This isn’t me, she thought to herself as she took the wine glass that Kerry handed her.  Kerry was babbling excitedly about something — gossiping, Kasey assumed, because there was little outside talking about the misfortunes and foibles of the other Creekside Elementary School moms that brought this kind of glint to Kerry’s eye.

This isn’t me, Kasey thought as Kerry opened the sliding glass door and ushered Kasey outside.

She still wasn’t listening to Kerry as she followed her towards a glass-topped table with a large umbrella mounted in its center.  There were a few other moms she recognized there, and one of them looked up from the conversation that was going on as Kasey and Kerry approached, offering a wan smile before turning back to the discussion.

“Liam didn’t much care for Miss Juarez when he had her last year,” a mom with shoulder-length auburn hair was saying.  “He thought she was too strict.  But when I volunteered in his classroom,” the mom continued, pressing one splayed hand to the collar of her pastel-green tank top, “I thought that woman let the children run roughshod over her.  She had hardly any control over that class.”

“Oh, I know, I know!” another mom agreed.  This one, whose hair was a dyed blonde instead of a dyed auburn, also wore a pastel tank top on this summer’s day, which wasn’t quite warm enough to be called “hot” yet but certainly would be before the party’s end.  Kasey wondered idly if they’d bought their tank tops from the same store, since the cuts looked the same.  “I thought the exact same thing when I volunteered at their Christmas party last year.  Especially — what was the name of that one little boy?” she asked the auburn-haired woman.

“The autistic one?”

The blonde woman sucked in a tiny breath and dipped her head conspiratorially.  “Is that what was wrong with him?”

Cookie cutter houses, she recited to herself.  Cookie cutter cars.  Cookie cutter PTA moms in cookie cutter tank tops.

This silent listing of the things around her that looked alike — too much alike for her tastes — was one of Kasey’s pastimes.

Because she was not a cookie cutter mom.  And it was not mere wishful thinking to believe so.  Kasey didn’t look much like the other moms.  She had sleeve tattoos down her left arm, shoulder to wrist, and the otherwise respectable dark hair that fell halfway down her back had streaks of pink and bright blue running through it.  Most of the moms would suck in an excited little breath and tell her how much they loved her hair when they saw it for the first time.

The sleeve tattoos got fewer compliments.

She’d stopped listening, she realized.  She’d let herself zone out at the mention of “the autistic one,” because the comment had inexplicably pissed her off.  The only way to not stand bolt upright from the table and yell at all of them was to let herself zone out.

“You can’t complain about all of them silently judging you,” Kerry had chided her once.  “Aren’t you sitting there and silently judging them, too?  I can tell you that very few of them think of you as being anything more than a ‘free spirit.’  But you?  You look down your nose at all of them.”

Kerry was good about calling bullshit.  That was one of the things Kasey liked about her.

It was true.  Kasey was a free spirit — fiercely independent, destined to forge her own path.  It was her mother’s doing.  Mom had been a loud-mouthed, self-proclaimed feminist in her heyday, the kind who’d burned her bra in the sixties and got into yoga long before lululemon started selling hundred-dollar spandex pants to housewives who couldn’t do so much as downward-facing dog.

“Mommy!”

The single word snapped her out of her half-meditative state at the glass top table.  The voice belonged to Aiden, her kindergartener, and he sounded upset.

Kasey swiveled around, eyes sweeping the patio around Kerry’s pool, the bright inflated vinyl animals floating on the water’s surface, the dozen or so children who ran around it playing and laughing.  Finally she found her little boy, but so had someone else.  Tony, her ex-husband, had made his way to Aiden first.  He was bent over their crying child, saying something that was no doubt comforting into Aiden’s ear.

Kasey sighed inwardly as she stood up and threaded through pockets of children and adults to make her way to Aiden.

Aiden threw his arms into the air the moment Kasey arrived, the signal that he wanted to be picked up.  It seemed a minor victory — he hadn’t asked his daddy to pick him up; he’d waited for Mommy to arrive.  Kasey scooped him up, the gesture as automatic as Aiden’s arms in the air.  He pressed his face into the space between Kasey’s neck and shoulder and cried.

“What happened?” Kasey asked Tony.

Tony gave a nonchalant shrug.  “Logan,” he said.  “Sounds like he was trying to play with her and some of the older girls and Logan pushed him.”

“She did,” a wet-nosed Aiden said into Kasey’s neck.  “She pushed me and I fell and I scraped my hands.”  He pushed back from his mother and put a palm in her face, too close for her to actually see it properly.  “See?  It’s scraped all to high hell.”

Kasey suppressed a laugh and gave the palm a kiss.  Tony’s lips pursed slightly.  “All to high hell” was one of Kasey’s phrases, not his.  Before the divorce, he would have laughed along with Kasey; in the months since they split, he had lost his sense of humor.

“Don’t say ‘hell’ in public,” Kasey told Aiden.  “It isn’t polite.”

Instead of answering, Aiden buried his face against her neck again, nuzzling like a puppy.  The sensation his face, the light tickle of his long eyelashes, the damp of his tears and snot — it all did something to Kasey’s heart.  Like a tuning fork, her heart hummed with a love so enormous for this little boy in her arms that she thought her whole body might splinter and shatter with the pressure of it.

Holding him like that, Kasey remembered all at once why she lived in this neighborhood, in her cookie cutter home with her cookie cutter neighbors:  It was for them, for Logan and Aiden.  It was for the schools whose halls were clean and shiny, for the laptops every child learned to use by the end of first grade, for the parks with new playground equipment, for the proximity to places like Petey Pizza and other kid-friendly venues.  She might hate the suburbs, but it was good for her kids, and that was what mattered.

“Logan!” Tony called, putting on his authoritative dad-voice to get their daughter’s attention.  She looked over from the circle of girls she played with.  “Come here, please.”

She trotted over, pushing her unruly dark hair behind her ears and glancing from one parent to the other.  The expression on her face said that she knew she was in trouble, and she was already preparing her defense in her head.

She looked so much like Tony, Kasey thought.  Both her children did.  Tony was Mexican, and although their skin was more of an olive complexion than his perpetual tan, they both had his coal-colored eyes and moon-round face.

It still irked Kasey that her children could be half-Mexican but have such yuppie-white names as “Logan” and “Aiden.”  She’d wanted to name Logan “Ana Rosa” for Tony’s favorite abuela, and she’d fought for Aiden to be “Tony Junior” or “TJ” for his father.

But Tony was the one who vetoed both names.  “TJ” sounded too much like the nickname locals used for Tijuana, he said; “Ana Rosa” reminded him of a hotel housekeeper.  With their dark features and a last name like Chavez, he said, he wanted them to at least have names on their future resumes that didn’t immediately signal their heritage, names that would get them jobs on their own merits and not thanks to Affirmative Action.

Aiden squirmed in Kasey’s arms, turning to get a good look at his big sister.

“Aiden says you pushed him down when he was trying to play with you,” Tony said calmly when Logan arrived.

“He was being mean!” Logan protested.

Ah, here came the defense she prepared.

“Logan — ” Tony started.

“I told him we were playing a game for big kids and he stole one of the pieces and ran off with it!” Logan said, eyes flitting from her father’s to her mother’s, hoping to win one of them over.  “Then I said ‘Give it back!’ and he said ‘No’ and he stuck out his tongue at us.”

“Logan,” Kasey said, “what do we say about disagreements?”

Her face fell and she didn’t answer.

“Your mother asked you a question,” Tony said.  He didn’t raise his voice; he didn’t change his tone to stern and demanding.  He was a good dad, Kasey remembered — and the thought sent a fresh wave of guilt through her.  She’d divorced a good man — a good provider and a good father — and now her children only saw them half the time.  And for what?

What if she was simply having a midlife crisis as he claimed, and once the dust settled, she’d kick herself for letting him go?

“It’s okay to disagree,” Logan mumbled, her gaze trained on the ground, “but we use our words, not our bodies.”

“Should you have pushed Aiden down?” Tony asked.

“No,” Logan admitted.

“Big sisters take care of little brothers,” Tony continued.  “Aiden doesn’t know as many people here as you do, and it sounds like he only wanted to play.”

“But he was being annoying!” Logan said, her temper flaring again.

Her eyes are her father’s, Kasey thought.  Her temper is all mine.

“I was not!” Aiden said, squirming in Kasey’s grip to get a better look at his sister.  “I tried to be nice and you wouldn’t let me play!”

Matching Tony’s reasonable tone, Kasey asked him, “Is stealing a game piece and sticking out your tongue the best way to handle things when you’re upset?”

Aiden hesitated.  Then he shook his head no.

“What could you have done instead?” Kasey prompted.

“I could have said…” but he trailed off.

Kasey brushed at his thick, unruly hair with her fingers.  It didn’t matter how much she combed it, it always stuck up in all the same places.

“Maybe you could have said, ‘Can I please play, Logan?’” Kasey suggested.  “‘I don’t have many other people to play with here.’”

Tony looked down at their daughter.  “Would you have let him play if he asked that way?”

“Yes,” Logan said sullenly.  It wasn’t true, of course, but she knew it was the answer that was expected of her.

Kasey set Aiden down.  “Logan,” she said.  She pointed at a child-sized plastic chair next to the sliding glass doors.  “Go sit over there.  You’re in timeout for five minutes for pushing your brother.”

Logan’s eyes filled with indignation.  “But I — ”

“If you argue with your mother, it will be longer,” Tony said seriously.

Logan heaved a dramatic sigh and spun away from her parents, marching towards the plastic chair.

“And you’re in timeout for two minutes,” Kasey told Aiden.  “You don’t steal game pieces and you don’t stick out your tongue at people.”

Aiden looked like he was about to argue, but Tony cocked his head and lifted both eyebrows.

“Alright,” Aiden said.  “Where do I sit?”

“Thank you for not arguing,” Kasey said pleasantly.  She scanned for a suitable place for timeout, someplace where Aiden and Logan wouldn’t be able to see each other.  “Over there,” she said, pointing at the fence at the far side of the pool.

Aiden nodded and jogged away.  Kasey pulled her phone from her pocket and set the timer for two minutes, considered for a moment, and set it for three.  In three more minutes, Aiden would completely forget his anger with his sister.  For Logan… six or seven minutes should suffice.

Kasey could feel eyes on her as she slipped the phone back into her pocket.  She looked up to see Tony watching her.

His expression was unreadable.  He might have been angry.  But his face might’ve been saying something else, too — grief, maybe.  Regret.  Sadness.

He attempted a smile.  “Hi.”

“Hey.”  Her voice was tired, and the single exhausted syllable contained an entire history within it.  Years of struggling — with him, with herself.  With her parents and his between the time they announced they were separating and the time the divorce was finalized.  Years of sorrow.  Years of punching her pillow and yelling in the closet with the door shut tightly behind her, lest the children hear.

Plus at least six solid months of crying herself to sleep after he moved out, waking up with a stuffy nose and headache for her efforts.

Tony kept smiling.  He held up a hand, palm facing her.  “Good parenting.”

She gave the upraised hand a high-five.  “Good parenting,” she agreed.

He stood there staring at her, like he was waiting for something.  Or like he might say something else.  But Kasey didn’t say anything, and Tony didn’t say anything, and so after a moment, his smile faded.  Tony nodded and walked away.  She watched him go.

“You alright?” a voice said in Kasey’s ear.

Kasey turned to find Kerry at her elbow.  The other woman wore a concerned expression.

“Yeah.  It’s fine.”

“Do you need more wine?”

Did she?  She didn’t much care for wine, or the ritual of suburban moms drinking it as a cure-all for their daily stresses, but she found herself nodding despite herself.

“Definitely,” Kasey said.

 

2

 

The last few weeks of summer drifted by uneventfully, lazy as a leaf floating on the surface of Kasey’s swimming pool.

Truth be told, there were a lot of leaves on the surface of the pool by the end of August.  Not to mention a film of green against the in-ground pool’s white concrete walls.

Kasey stood at her kitchen sink, washing last night’s dishes before her kids woke up, staring at the pool and once again remembering that she needed to find someone to get it cleaned.

Tony had been the one to insist on a swimming pool when they bought the place seven years ago, which meant that he’d also always been the one to keep it maintained.  He’d been like a little kid begging for a puppy when they bought this house with the big backyard and the swimming pool — “I’ll take care of it,” he’d said.  “You won’t have to do a thing.  Please?”

For some people, the hood ornaments on their cars were the signs that they had finally “made it;” for others, it was being able to shop at certain stores without paying attention to the price tags.  For Tony, it was a swimming pool in the backyard.

Kasey put a pot that had held organic macaroni and cheese in it the night before upside-down in the dish rack.  She tipped detergent into the next one.

Kasey had fought him on the pool again, of course.  When they were looking at new houses all those years ago, she had a one year-old daughter whom she carried around to every real estate appointment in a cloth sling against her chest.  The idea of a swimming pool in the backyard brought up memories of a million six o’clock news stories

Two year old drowns in swimming pool; neighbors tried but failed to revive her

that Kasey wanted nothing to do with.

“We’ll make it safe,” Tony had insisted in his maddeningly soothing, reasonable voice.  “We’ll put a fence around it.  We’ll teach the kids to respect it, to be careful.  They’re smart kids,” he said, and he flashed a white grin.  “They’ll learn.”

Kasey and Tony had only one kid at this point, just baby Logan, but they liked to lay in bed at night, fingers laced together, his other hand tracing an aimless pattern on her bare breast, and they would talk of the son they would have one day, the one Kasey wanted to call TJ and Tony wanted to call Nick or Jake or Robbie.

On the day of Tony’s “We’ll make it safe” speech, Kasey had stood there in irritated silence between her husband and the real estate agent, bouncing a fussy Logan up and down as a way of distracting herself.

“Birthday parties,” Tony added quietly, spreading one hand in front of it and moving it in a wide arc to indicate the pool, the patio, the barbecue pit that was already built into it.  “New Year’s celebrations — we can invite your brother up, and your mom and dad.  And look there.”  He pointed up, first at one tree at the far end of the pool, then to a similar one not far from it.  “We can hang a piñata between those trees.  Logan and Nick can have all their friends over, then go swimming afterward.”  When Kasey still didn’t say anything, Tony pressed one more point.  “Once they turn into teenagers, you’ll want them hanging out here and not at their friends’ houses.  Won’t you?”

She’d acquiesced, but that was almost nine years ago, in the days when they still slept with their fingers intertwined at night and the idea that they would ever get divorced had been laughable.  Now here she was, the one who kept the house, which meant she’d also kept the swimming pool.

And that pool was dirty.

Filthy.

Bad enough that she’d stopped letting the kids swim in it weeks ago, when the water had turned just a tiny bit green

“It’s not green, Mama,” Logan had insisted.

“Well, it looks green to me,” Kasey retorted.

“But — ”

“Logan, I swear to you on all that is holy, if one more word comes out of your mouth, I’m taking away screen time until Christmas.”

The girl’s mouth snapped shut.

and it started to smell more like decaying leaves than chlorine.

Kasey finished the last of the dishes and reached for a towel, thoroughly drying her hands before sitting down in front of her phone at the kitchen table.  She opened the phone’s browser and typed in “eastside pool cleaning service” and ended up tapping on an ad for a review site that promised dozens of local pool cleaning services.

Her mind half on the pool cleaning project, half on the fact that the kids would start school next week and she needed to either make a big box store run or else order school supplies online soon, she scrolled through the site’s pool cleaners, trying not to stress about the money it would cost to get the pool cleaned or the fact that she was going to have to head back to work soon.

When she’d been married, she’d had the luxury of being a stay-at-home-mom ever since Aiden was born.  Now that she was divorced, she and Tony had agreed she would go back to teaching high school once the new school year started.  She’d gotten a position as a social studies teacher at a high school she could walk to, the high school the kids would go to one day, but although she loved teaching, she wasn’t looking forward to going back.

An ad caught her eye.  The company logo was an African American version of Rosie the Riveter, and in the blue word bubble that normally said “We can do it!”, it said “We do it all!”

Kasey tapped the photo.  It took her to the company’s review site page.

Mama’s Little Helpers

said the top of the page, with the Rosie the Riveter image positioned to the left.  The tagline read:

Woman owned, woman operated.  Serving Westside and Eastside Since 2002.  Call today for a free estimate.

And beneath that was the list of services:

– Minor home repairs / improvements

– House painting

– Landscaping / gardening / lawns

– Pool maintenance

– Junk removal

She scanned the reviews, which were all four and five stars.

“Drea and Alice were the best!” one of them read.  “Prompt and reliable and did exactly what they said they were going to do.  I’m never using anyone else on my house!”

It was enough to convince Kasey.  She pressed the number on the page, drumming her fingers while the phone rang three times.  It was still fairly early on a Saturday, and she anticipated she’d have to leave a message and wait until Monday to arrange anything.  But just as she mentally prepared her voicemail, someone picked up on the other end.

“Mama’s Little Helpers, Drea speaking,” a voice said.  It was a smooth voice, relaxed and easy, low but still clearly feminine.

“Uh, hi,” Kasey said, caught off-guard by someone actually picking up.  She cleared her throat and blushed, despite the fact that she was by herself.  “Your listing said you, uh, do pool maintenance?”

“We do,” Drea said.  She waited expectantly.

“Could you — I have a — you serve everything in Eastside?” Kasey said.  Her blush deepened as she stumbled over her questions, not sure which one to go with first.  Almost apologetically, she added, “My house is almost as far east as you can get while staying inside city limits.”

“Yeah, that’s fine,” Drea said, sounding as cool as Kasey sounded flustered.  “We serve the whole city and then some.”

“Great,” Kasey said.  “I was wondering if you could send someone by to clean my pool this week?”

“Sure,” Drea said easily.  “What day works for you?”

With a quick, practiced efficiency, Drea confirmed with Kasey the day, time, location, and price.  The whole conversation took less than five minutes, and when Kasey got off the phone, she felt a satisfying sense of relief.

See? she said to herself.  It’s not that hard.  You can do this without him.

Divorce was a strange beast.  A person could know that she was strong and perfectly capable on her own, but even so, after twelve years of sharing life’s many seemingly insignificant details with another, operating independently felt awkward and unstable, like learning to walk again after an amputation.  Even small things, like arranging for a pool cleaning, emptied one out.

The strangeness of divorce might have explained why, moments after her sense of relief, Kasey became aware of an enormous, cavernous hollowness inside her chest.  It might have explained why she rested her forearm on the kitchen table, then her head on her forearm, and wept quietly.  Only when she heard Aiden stirring upstairs — it had to be Aiden, because he was the early bird — did Kasey sit up and hastily wipe the tears from her face, forcing a smile that became genuine as soon as she saw the bleary face of her little boy.

“Hey, baby,” she said.  “Do you want some breakfast?”

#

Kasey pulled into the unfamiliar high school parking lot a few minutes before the sun was fully up on Monday morning, searching for the faculty spaces.  She’d been here only once before, for the job interview, but then she had parked in a visitor’s space, all of which were located in front of the school’s main office.  Today — and maybe it was just because she had a case of the first-day-of-school jitters — the parking lot seemed a treacherous jungle of different colored curbs, spaces whose numbers were painted over or half-worn off, and signs with contradictory arrows pointing at and identifying unfamiliar buildings.

She eventually gave up and pulled into a random space in front of the building that she thought was the one housing the humanities classrooms.  It didn’t matter too much if she was in the right parking lot or not; school wouldn’t be back in session for students until Wednesday, so she could afford a parking faux pas.  For today, it was close enough to her classroom to start moving supplies in.  She could figure out the parking specifics tomorrow.

Kasey didn’t have keys yet, but she lucked out and caught a door swinging closed as another teacher exited.  A moment later, she’d propped it open with a chunk of broken curb and had her first boxful of books, papers, office supplies, and bulletin board posters in her arms.

She was just about to swing the propped door open with her foot and walk in when a slender, officious-looking man coming the opposite direction kicked away her chunk of curb and gave her a stern glare.  He had on glasses that were much too big for his face, their bottom rims only an inch or so above a mustache that was much too small for his face.

“Did you prop the door?” he asked, in a tone that suggested he already knew the answer.

“Yeah,” Kasey acknowledged, adjusting her grip on the box so that she could reach for the door’s edge.

He didn’t move from the door frame to let her pass.

“We can’t prop the doors open,” said the man.  “It’s a security issue.”

“Sorry,” said Kasey, trying to be pleasant despite his obvious attitude problem.  “I’m new here.  I’ve got a lot of stuff to move into my classroom.”

Still he didn’t move out of her way.

“They didn’t have similar rules at your old high school?” he asked, and the way he said it, for a moment Kasey thought he might have actually mistaken her for a student instead of a faculty member.

“They… it was never a problem for me,” she said, even though she vaguely remembered that there was a similar rule at the last school she’d been at.  Kasey gestured with her chin towards the open hallway behind him.  “Do you mind if I…?  The box is getting kind of heavy.”

Almost reluctantly, the man stepped out of her way.  “You could probably borrow a hand truck from one of the custodians,” he said.  “Or ask them for some help.”

She took a step past him, biting back what she really wanted to say, which was, “Or you could offer to help, since you don’t have anything better to do than play policeman on the door.”

Instead, she only smiled and said, “Good idea.”  She glanced left and right down the hallway.  Even though she didn’t particularly want to ask this man for help, she supposed it was better than wandering up and down the halls with the boxful of supplies in her arms.  “Do you know where three eighteen is?” she asked.  “Am I in the right part of the building.”

“Ah, so you’re the new history teacher,” he said, his expression becoming considerably less irritated.  His mouth made an odd little twist and Kasey guessed he was trying to smile.  He held out a hand to shake.  “I’m Richard Burdenski.  I teach AP European, AP US, government, and I’m the department chair.”

Fantastic.  This man wasn’t simply a colleague; he was her department chair.

Awkwardly, Kasey shifted the box to one hip and shook his outstretched hand.  “Pleased to meet you.  I’m — ”

But Richard Burdenski held up a finger.  “Kasey Chavez.”

“James,” she corrected.  “Kasey James.  ‘Chavez’ was my married name; I haven’t finished the paperwork yet to change it but I’m going back to James.”

The man’s momentary good cheer faded.  He frowned.  “Everything says Chavez.  That’s how it’s listed for your students — the school sent out class schedules last week.”

“It’s okay,” Kasey said, taking pains to keep her tone light instead of grinding her teeth.  “I’ll explain it to them on the first day.”  She shifted the box in her arms.  “So three-eighteen…?”

“Oh,” Burdenski said.  “Right.  I’ll take you there.”

“You don’t have to,” Kasey said quickly.  “If you just point me in the right direction…”

“It’s no bother,” he said.  “I have to go that way myself anyway; I’m in three twenty-two, two doors down from you.”

Two doors down.  Kasey already found herself wishing she could take one more year off from teaching.  One more year to be there all the time for her children, one more year to work on her certification to teach yoga.  One more year to stay away from school politics and men like Burdenski.

They chatted about inconsequential things as they walked — the fact that August had been much more mild this year than it had the year before, the fact that it still hadn’t rained, the fact that Kasey’s ninth and tenth grade students were generally more difficult to teach than his eleventh and twelfth grade students would be.  Kasey was one of the rare teachers who actually enjoyed teaching freshmen, but she decided not to contradict him.  He didn’t seem like the kind of man who much cared for being contradicted.

But at least Burdenski had a key that would open her room.  So there was that, at least.

She was relieved when she finally had a chance to set her box down on her new desk.  Her initial plan had been to bring all the boxes from her car before she started unpacking them, but given that she couldn’t prop the door open and hadn’t found a custodian from whom she could borrow a hand truck, she decided she’d arrange the classroom and unpack what she had before going back for more.

She stood with her hands on her hips, surveying her new room, imagining where things would go, when a knock came on the door frame.  Fearing that she would turn around and see the Napoleon-sized man with the big glasses and small mustache, Kasey took a breath and composed a polite smile on her face.

“Hell-o-o?”

But it was a female voice.  Not Napoleon at all.

Kasey turned to see a heavyset African American woman taking up most of the doorway.  She wore a ruffled dark blue dress, heels, and freshly fixed hair.  She was smiling broadly, and when Kasey looked her way, she lifted a hand and waved like an eager child.

“Hi!” said the woman.

“Hi,” Kasey returned, and despite everything, she found herself smiling back.

The woman crossed the room in two easy strides, heels clicking against the tile.  Once she was close, Kasey realized that she was even taller than she’d looked from the door.  Kasey was a respectable five-foot six, and this woman was at least three or four inches taller than her.

The woman extended a hand and Kasey shook it automatically.  “Brenda, Brenda Howell,” she said.  “Like a wolf — aroooo!  That’s what I tell the kids.”

Kasey chuckled.  “Kasey James.”  She tried to think of something clever to add, the way Brenda had, but she couldn’t.

Brenda touched her chest.  “World history and AP world history.  And I’m working to get African history offered as an elective next term.”  She gave a disdainful click of her tongue.  “Girl, you know when they say ‘world history,’ they mainly mean the Greeks and the Romans and the Europeans, with one week set aside for Africa, one week for early North and South America, and two weeks for all the rest of the world.”  She threw her hands up.  “Ancient Egypt alone deserves an entire semester!  They gave us the first three hundred sixty-five day calendar, not to mention eyeliner.  Anyway,” Brenda said, taking a deep breath as if to settle herself down, “I didn’t mean to scare the new girl.  I’m just a very passionate history nerd.”

“There’s definitely nothing wrong with being a history nerd,” Kasey said.  She decided that she liked Brenda with at least the same amount of enthusiasm that she disliked Burdenski.

“Islam,” Brenda said by way of response, raising one finger and giving a definitive nod.  “It informs more of world history than most of us in the West understand.  The history of Islam is another subject that deserves at least an entire semester.”

“Too many people see the Greek and Roman empires as the axis on which history rotates,” Kasey said in agreement.  “Meanwhile, the Persian empire and the Islamic empire that rose from its ashes were at least as important — and practically saved civilization while Europe went through the Dark Ages.”

Brenda cocked her head, eyeing Kasey speculatively.  “You,” she said, shaking her raised finger.  “I like you.  You can stay.”  Both women laughed.  When the laughter died off, Brenda asked, “So what are you doing for lunch today?”