She looked surprised and, he thought, suspicious. But she took the bait. “Lots of exciting things.”
He polished off his wine and signaled for a refill. “Start at the beginning. Tell us everything.”
Dick glared at him from the head of the table.
“I’m focusing most of my time these days on Bright Future,” she said. “They’re doing such important work.” Maureen leaned forward, eagerly. “I just helped coordinate a huge mailing about peanut allergy awareness. We’ll save dozens of lives this year.”
“My friend Calvin might die from a peanut allergy,” Toby said. “He’s my best friend.” The entire table went quiet. Toby looked around trying to figure out what to do next.
“Oh no,” Maureen said, looking genuinely upset. She grabbed Toby’s hand and held it. “I’m so sorry, Toby. How awful.” She shook her head and clucked her tongue. “These allergies are getting worse all the time. Terrifying.”
Toby broke the substantial silence that followed with another bomb. “Mom called last night,” he said.
The news was enough to jolt Nicole out of her funk. She tried to catch Sean’s eye across the marzipan Pilgrims and Indians.
“She called you?” Maureen looked almost hurt. She leaned toward Toby. “What did she say?”
“She’s in Momtalk now. She says Happy Thanksgiving to everybody.”
“Did she say what she’s doing? When she’s—”
“She sounded good,” Sean said. “Much, much better.”
“She wants me to visit her for Christmas break.”
Maureen’s eyebrows shot up defensively, then her mouth spread into a grandmotherly smile. “Of course she does. She loves you. We all do.”
“Dad won’t let me.” He avoided eye contact with Sean.
Maureen’s face softened when she looked at Toby. “Well, your dad knows best. And I think he’s right, it’s probably not a great idea.” Ordinarily, having Maureen take his side was helpful. Why did it make him squirm today?
“It is a good idea,” Toby whined.
“I know you miss her,” Maureen said. “But Mommy’s still tired. She needs to rest.”
Toby protruded his lower lip into an impressive pout.
“And besides, what would we do on Christmas without you?”
“It won’t be Christmas without Mommy. I always see her on Christmas.”
“Well if she wants to see you, she can just come here.” Maureen didn’t try to hide the edge in her voice, then set her mouth in the same way Ellie did.
Toby looked at Sean, confused. He sensed something was going on, but had no idea what it was. “I want to visit Mommy.”
Maureen shook her head. “Not after … not after the way she left you all.” Under her breath, she added, “That is not what a good mother does.”
Toby’s face fell and he looked like he might cry. Sean opened his mouth to tell Maureen to stop, but Nicole gave her one cutting look, which did the trick.
“She was a good mother,” Sean said, wondering where this deep-seated reflex to defend his wife came from. “Is a good mother.” The words caught in his throat as he said them. The last thing Toby needed to hear on Thanksgiving, from his grandmother, was that his mother was a fuckup. His rescue of Ellie’s reputation, he realized, had much less to do with Ellie than it did with Toby. “In fact,” he went on, taking a deep breath before jumping into the abyss, “I’ve decided to let Toby go to Montauk.” His heart pounded as he said it.
Toby stared at him, his mouth gaping slightly. “Really?”
Now it was Maureen’s turn to be indignant. “You can’t do that!”
“I can,” he said, as Maureen’s face flushed with agitation. “If Ellie continues to sound as good as she did last night, I’m going to let him go for the whole two weeks.”
“Yes!” Toby jumped out of his seat and threw his arms around Sean. “Thank you Dad! Thank you!”
He hugged Toby hard. Allowing him to visit his mother was more difficult than anyone at the table could have known, but it was the right thing for so many reasons. He was sure of it.
CHAPTER NINE
TOBY WAS HAPPY AND CAREFREE THE REST OF THE WEEKEND, AND Monday morning he literally skipped to school. But by the time he got home that afternoon, he was anxious and grumpy. “I can’t do it,” he whined over his math homework.
Sean didn’t look up from the bills that covered the kitchen table. “Yes you can.” He added up the rent and the tutoring bills but didn’t have enough to cover both. Noah would probably be fine with half of what he was owed as long as he got the other half in a couple of weeks. The cable bill was also going to have to wait. He looked up when he heard Toby whimpering. “What’s the matter?”
“I’m stupid,” he said, pulling his hair. “I can’t do word problems.”
“Come on Toby, calm down and read it again.” He was going to need some extra cash this month for Christmas presents. And framing supplies for the Burdot pieces. He could pay the minimum on the credit card for a few months. But there was no way he could put Toby in the after school art class he wanted to take next semester.
Toby rolled his forehead back and forth on the coffee table, a death groan emanating from deep inside him.
“Cut it out and do your work.” He hadn’t meant to yell at Toby, but the drama was over the top.
“I told you I’m stupid,” he yelled back. “I can’t do it!” Toby hurled himself face down on the couch.
Sean pushed away the bills, took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. Yelling was only making it worse. It always did. “Come on, Tobe. I’m sure we can figure it out.” Actually, he wasn’t sure about that at all. Helping with math always ended badly.
“Sit up,” he said, as he lowered himself to the ground next to Toby. Toby grudgingly sat up, his face red and streaky. Sean held up the worksheet. “Jane has pennies, nickels, and dimes in her purse.” He started to glaze over. He hated word problems. Maybe reading it with more expression would make it less deadly. “She has eight coins altogether,” he said, stressing the eight. “Including more dimes than nickels, more nickels than pennies, and fewer pennies than nickels. What are the two different amounts of money she could have?” Sean’s stomach contracted with that sick feeling he used to get in math class when he didn’t know or care.
“Um, huh. Okay.” He had no idea where to start. This had to be high school math. Or at least middle school.
“So how do you do it?” There was a challenge in Toby’s voice.
Sean stalled, hoping something would come to him. “I have no idea,” he said, finally. While there were many wrong answers he could have given, this was probably the most wrong. He tried to rally. “Let’s try to work it out.”
He picked up Toby’s pencil. “Uh, okay, Jane has how many coins? Eight? Okay. So … if she has the most dimes, which it says, then, um, huh. Should we just start trying out combinations and see what happens?”
Toby’s forehead was back on the table. “I hate math.” He raised his head. His eyes were full of anger. “I hate myself.”
“Come on.” He tried to sound encouraging. “At least we can try.”
Maybe Toby’s bullshit meter was more developed than Sean had given him credit for. “No!” Toby shouted. He picked up the math packet and tore it in half. Sean ducked as Toby hurled the pieces in his direction.
“What the hell are you doing?” Sean yelled before he could stop himself. He’d let Toby get a rise out of him, which was bad. And he’d said hell, which was also bad. Once you said hell in front of a kid this age, you couldn’t take it back, and it would, without fail, be trotted out later, usually in front of company.
But Toby wasn’t even focusing on the slip. “I’m the dumbest kid in my class,” he screamed. “I can’t do it.” He ran into his room and slammed the door hard behind him.
His inclination was to run after Toby. But Toby needed time to cool down, and Sean needed time to form a plan.
He wondered how Ellie woul
d handle the early-onset teenage outburst, but this was virgin territory. He dialed Noah, who picked up on the first ring.
“Hey man, how’s Toby?” Noah asked. “Everything all right?”
Sean described the math problem and the response it had elicited.
“Yeah, it’s too hard for most kids this age,” Noah said, which was a huge relief. “And no, I’m not surprised they assigned it.”
“But I don’t get it. Why would they—”
“Do you want to know how to do it?”
Noah walked Sean through the problem and explained how to help Toby figure it out on his own. As he hung up the phone, he knew West Side Tae Kwon Do would have to wait another month. He would pay Noah’s tutoring bill in full.
Sean took his time pouring orange juice into a SpongeBob cup then knocked on Toby’s door. No answer. He opened it a crack. Toby’s head was buried under the pillow. “Can I come in?”
Sean put the cup on the night table and sat on the edge of the bed. “Hey,” he said. “You all right?”
Toby took the pillow off his head. “Everyone can do word problems except me.”
“I bet that’s not true, Tobe. That was a hard problem,” he said. “I talked to Noah and I think we can handle it now.”
Toby looked skeptical.
“And I can talk to Jess about it. Ask why she’s assigning such hard math. Okay?”
Toby nodded and eyed the SpongeBob cup suspiciously. “Pulp?”
Sean shook his head. Thank God he’d bought the right juice this time.
By the time Toby had downed the juice, the storm was a mere memory. They worked through the problem, which took about thirty seconds, Sean read him a chapter from Prince Caspian and tucked him in before eight o’clock. Then he emailed Jess. Now that there was a head teacher, he figured he might as well use her.
He set up a meeting for two‐thirty the next day while Toby would be in science.
Being back at Bradley the next afternoon gave him a bad case of déjà vu. As he climbed the stairs, he remembered the soft thud of his foot making contact with Calvin’s torso. The memory set off a wave of nausea that forced him to sit for a minute. He thought about the tubes running into Calvin’s arm and nose and about the machines that beeped when his heart beat. Was Calvin better? Was he worse? Shineman had told parents not to call, to give the Drakes some space, some privacy. But she’d also said she’d send an email with an update, which she hadn’t. The silence was ominous and ate at him the longer it went on.
Someone trotted down the stairs toward him, then stopped abruptly. “Hey!” Walt Renard said, jolting Sean from the depressing reverie. “What’s going on?”
“Just taking a moment.”
“Mind if I join you? I just came from a maddening meeting. I need to decompress a little or I might blow.” When he’d plopped himself a few steps above where Sean was sitting, he looked around. “There a reason for the moment?”
“It’s where I found Calvin.”
“Shit,” he said, staring at the spot where Calvin had been. “Allergies,” he said, wistfully, and trailed off. “Unbelievable.”
“I still don’t get how Calvin could have been so allergic—so suddenly.”
“My upstairs neighbor’s daughter is so allergic to strawberries,” Walt said, “that a knife that had been used for strawberry jam a month before—and washed many times since—sent her into a life-threatening episode. The family is at the ER at least three times a year.”
“It’s so unfair,” Sean said.
“It’s terrifying,” Walt said. Kids squealed on the other side of the fire doors. “You going to be okay?”
“Me? Yeah, I’ll be fine.” He stood and checked his phone. “I’m late though.”
Walt started down the stairs. “I’m counting on you for basketball one of these days. Don’t disappoint me.”
“You got it,” Sean called down after him.
When he got to Toby’s classroom, the wild-haired computer teacher who did all of The Bradley School’s tech stuff was giving Jess a Smart Board tutorial. Sean couldn’t remember the guy’s name, but Toby had him every year for computer class. “Have a seat,” Jess said when she saw Sean. He’d been hoping for a slightly warmer greeting. “We’re just finishing up.”
He sat as instructed. The computer geek was perched too close to Jess, nodding eagerly when she pushed the right button.
“Great!” he said. “You must have had a Smart Board where you taught before.”
“I had a blackboard.”
“Oh,” the guy said. Adoring was the only word to describe the way he was looking at her. “How about if I come by sometime and show you some tricky stuff you can do on here? Advanced stuff.”
“Sure,” Jess said, tentatively. “Okay.”
“I mean, like I pull all-nighters sometimes,” the guy went on eagerly. “So anytime really works for me.”
Jess was looking at him as if he were slightly crazy. Which he may have been.
Sean cleared his throat. “Do you think you’ll be much longer?”
“I think we’re done,” Jess said to the computer teacher, with a smile that softened the blow somewhat.
“Oh. Okay,” he said, the disappointment tugging at his face. “I’ll check back tomorrow.”
“Looks like you have an admirer,” Sean said, when he was out of earshot.
“I’m hoping he’s just excited about the technology.” She pulled up a chair. “Are you here about the extra credit?”
That would explain everything. If it was extra credit Toby wouldn’t have had to do the problem. “I hadn’t realized it was extra credit,” he said. “No wonder it was so hard.”
“What was so hard?”
“The math problem. Jane and the pennies.”
“Oh. No, that wasn’t extra credit.” Jess waved her hands in the air as if to delete everything they’d said so far. “Let’s start again. Tell me what’s on your mind.”
Sean described Toby’s meltdown. Jess nodded seriously. “I was worried about that.”
“You were worried about Toby?”
“So why’d you assign it?”
“Last year my third grade ran a bake sale during lunch period. That’s how I taught them about money. But Bradley wanted me to teach conceptually.”
“But if the kids are going to freak out because they can’t do it, what’s the point?”
She opened a file and spread out the homework packets. “Fifteen out of the eighteen kids got the problem right.”
“Or their parents did.”
Her sigh was barely audible. “I’ll work it through with Toby,” she said. “It’s hard at first, but he’ll get it, don’t worry.”
He sat, trying not to worry. “That wasn’t actually why I came in,” he started. “I mean, it’s not the only reason I wanted to talk to you.”
Now that he was here, he wondered where to begin. Jess knew something was going on—she’d heard Toby’s Thanksgiving essay. He wanted her to know the whole thing. “In September his mother left.” It sounded terrible when he said it. She probably thought he was a shitty husband, a shitty guy. “She was having some … she was depressed, I guess. Toby and his mom were close, so, well, it’s been a big adjustment. He’s having a hard year.”
“I’m really sorry,” she said. “That’s got to be hard for everyone. It would explain why he’d be having self-esteem issues, though. It could be why he was so down on himself not being able to do that math homework.” She put her hand to her chest. “I’m glad you told me. I’ll think of some ways to help him in the classroom. If you have any ideas, let me know.”
“Thanks,” he said, oozing gratitude. “I appreciate it.” To her left he saw a sign that read: The Show: Music, Dance, Art. “Sounds interesting,” he said.
Jess pointed to it with Vanna-White hands. “That is the extra credit.”
“An extra credit show?” Toby had brought
home puzzles and problems over the years, but this was new.
“Almost every parent has called or come in asking for extra credit for their child,” she said. “I don’t get it, honestly. My fiancé thinks it’s because I gave back some gifts.” He looked at her ring finger. The diamond was so small he wondered why the guy had even bothered. Sean had been living on a freelancer’s salary, but he’d managed to get Ellie a nice ring. A ring you could see without a magnifying glass.
“That’s off the record,” she said.
“That parents were trying to bribe you?”
“Your words, not mine.”
“So what did you give back?”
She waved away the question. “Nothing, it’s not important.” When she blushed her whole face—and the scoop of chest not covered by her top—turned red.
“Tell me.”
She looked toward the door, to see if anyone was around. “Promise you won’t say anything?”
“Promise.”
“Season tickets to the Knicks, a Prada purse,” she said, then took a black velvet box out of her desk drawer. “And these.” She pushed it toward him. “I’m giving them back today.” He snapped open the box. Inside was a pair of diamond earrings. Each one was ten times bigger than her ring. “Holy shit,” he said. “I mean, they’re nice. Really … nice.”
He’d heard some of the parents did stuff like this.
“I don’t get it,” Jess said. “Who gives a third‐grade teacher diamonds from Tiffany’s?”
“Now I feel bad I didn’t bring you anything.”
She laughed. Her whole face lit up when she did. “I’ll let it go this time.” She put the diamonds back in the drawer. “Forget I showed you those.”
“Showed me what?”
Jess smiled again. “Good.”
Just then, Bev Shineman let herself into the classroom.
“Hope you don’t mind my crashing,” she said. He couldn’t remember minding anything more.
“Oh.” It was pretty clear Jess was as surprised as he was.