room of Sweet Briar Public Library. Not seeing her assistant, she looked back at the little boy. “When?”
“Just now . . . when I went to the potty.” Placing his hands on his hips, Jackson turned to face the little girl who’d questioned his integrity, his voice taking on an injured quality. “She didn’t tell me what to draw. She didn’t even talk to me.”
“Then how did she help you?”
He looked back at Tori, his eyes wide. “You said to close our eyes and try to think how someone looks when they’re happy or sad or worried . . .”
“Or mad, don’t forget mad,” Bobby reminded.
“Yep, mad, too. And well, I closed my eyes and I did what you said and that’s why the eyebrows are upside down like that.” Jackson pointed at the squiggly caterpillar-like marks on the top half of his drawing. “But when I went to the bathroom, Mrs. Morgan helped me think of the lines and the finger.”
The little girl in the back stamped her foot, dislodging a golden blonde tendril from her perfectly coiffed little head in the process. “No fair! I’m going to tell my mother!”
Jackson’s hands found his hips once again. “She didn’t tell me, Penelope. She showed me . . . like this.” Scrunching up his face, he stuck the index finger of his right hand in front of his mouth.
“Did you ask her to demonstrate?” Tori asked as she looked from Jackson to his teacher and back again, her mind warring with itself over the urge to laugh at the child’s demonstration.
“No. She didn’t even see me. She was just standing there behind the desk like this.” Again he made his worried face and again she tried not to laugh, only this time she wasn’t any more successful than his teacher.
Forcing her attention onto the task at hand, she painstakingly went through the rest of the pile giving each kindergartener a chance to point out the expressions they opted to use to illustrate their chosen emotion. When they were done, she handed the pictures out to their rightful owners. “Bobby, how did you know what a mad face looked like?”
“I just do.” Bobby shrugged. “Everybody gets mad.”
She looked at Jackson. “And you knew how to draw worry because of Mrs. Morgan’s face?”
The little boy nodded.
Shaking off the questions that followed in her thoughts, Tori stood and gestured toward the various shelves in the center of the children’s room, her time with Mrs. Tierney’s class drawing to a close. “As you get older, some of the stories you read won’t have pictures. But that’s okay. Because if you use your imagination and your own personal experiences—as you just did with your drawings—you can still picture the characters and the places in your mind based on what’s being said in the story. And you want to know something?”
Fourteen heads nodded as fourteen sets of eyes fairly glued themselves to her face, waiting.
“Sometimes books are even more fun without pictures. Because then you can imagine a character the way you want to imagine them.”
“Wow!”
“That’s cool!”
“I still like pictures best.”
You win some, you lose some . . .
Mrs. Tierney clapped her hands softly, bringing instant calm to the room. “Class? What do we say to Miss Sinclair for spending time with us this morning?”
“Thank you, Miss Sinclair,” chorused fourteen voices as Sweet Briar Elementary School’s morning kindergarten class lined up at the door, the promise of snack time under the hundred-year-old moss trees more than enough to keep them quiet.
One by one the students filed out of the room like baby ducks waddling after their mamma. And, true to form, the last of the bunch strayed from the pack. “Miss Sinclair?”
She looked down, a smile tugging her lips upward at the sight of her friend’s son. “Yes, Jackson?”
“Will you make sure she’s okay?”
“Who?”
“Mrs. Morgan.”
Smoothing back a strand of soft brown hair from the little boy’s forehead, she nodded. “Of course I will. But I’m sure she’s okay. She was probably just trying to answer someone’s question. We get a lot of those at the library.”
Jackson shook his head, displacing the same strand of hair once again. “She was all by herself. There wasn’t anybody else in the li-berry ’cept Sally’s mom.”
Melissa.
She squatted down to the child’s eye level and gave him a quick hug. “I’ll check on her, okay? But I don’t want you to worry. I’m sure Mrs. Morgan is fine.”
For a moment he looked as if he was about to protest but, in