time with him long enough to figure it out. “Wait—before you go—can I ask you something?” he blurted out.
“Sure.” She looked at him quizzically.
Miles put his hands in his pockets, feeling those little butterflies, feeling seventeen again. He swallowed.
“So...,” he began. His mind was racing, those little wheels spinning for everything they were worth.
“Yes?”
Sarah knew instinctively what was coming.
Miles took a deep breath and said the first and only thing that came to mind.
“How’s the fan working out?”
She stared at him, a perplexed expression on her face. “The fan?” she repeated.
Miles felt as if he’d just swallowed a ton of lead. The fan? What the hell was he thinking? The fan? That was all he could come up with?
It was as if his brain had suddenly taken a vacation, but for the life of him, he couldn’t stop....
“Yeah. You know ... the fan that I got you for your class.”
“It’s fine,” she said uncertainly.
“Because I can get you a new one if you don’t like it.”
She reached out to touch his arm, a look of concern on her face. “Are you feeling okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” he said seriously. “I just wanted to make sure you’re happy with it.”
“You picked a good one, okay?”
“Good,” he said, hoping and praying that a bolt of lightning would suddenly shoot from the heavens and kill him on the spot.
The fan?
After she pulled out of the parking lot, Miles stood without moving, wishing that he could turn back the clock and undo everything that had just happened. He wanted to find the nearest rock to crawl under, a nice dark spot where he could hide from the world forever. Thank God no one was around to hear it!
Except for Sarah.
For the rest of the day, the end of their conversation kept repeating in his head, like a song he’d heard on early morning radio.
How’s the fan working out? ... Because I can get you a new one ... I just want to make sure you’re happy with it. . . .
It was painful, physically painful, to recall it. And no matter what else he did that afternoon, the memory would lurk there under the surface, waiting to emerge and humiliate him. And on the following day, it was the same thing. He woke up with the feeling that something was wrong... something... and boom! There was the memory again, taunting him. He winced and felt the lead in his gut. And then he pulled the pillow over his head.
Chapter 8
So how do you like it so far?” Brenda asked.
It was Monday, and Brenda and Sarah were sitting at the picnic table outside, the same one that Miles and Sarah had visited a month earlier. Brenda had picked up lunch from the Pollock Street Deli, which in Brenda’s opinion, made the best sandwiches in town. “It’ll give us a chance to visit,” she’d said with a wink, before running out to the deli.
Though this wasn’t the first time they’d had the chance to “visit,” as Brenda put it, their conversations had usually been relatively short and impersonal: where supplies were stored, whom she needed to talk to to get a couple of new desks, things like that. Of course, Brenda had also been the one whom Sarah had first asked about Jonah and Miles, and because she knew Brenda was close to them, she also understood that this lunch was Brenda’s attempt to find out what, if anything, was going on.
“You mean working at the school? It’s different from the classes I had in Baltimore, but I like it.”
“You worked in the inner city, right?”
“I worked in downtown Baltimore for four years.”
“How was that?”
Sarah unwrapped her sandwich. “Not as bad as you probably think. Kids are kids, no matter where they’re from, especially when they’re young. The neighborhood might have been rough, but you kind of get used to it and you learn to be careful. I never had any trouble at all. And the people I worked with were great. It’s easy to look at test scores and think the teachers don’t care, but that’s not the way it is. There were a lot of people I really looked up to.”
“How did you decide to work there? Was your ex-husband a teacher, too?”
“No,” she said simply.
Brenda saw the pain in Sarah’s eyes for a moment, but almost as quickly as she noticed it, it was gone.
Sarah opened her can of Diet Pepsi. “He’s an investment banker. Or was ... I don’t know what he does