The Last King of Texas - By Rick Riordan Page 0,69
taking Jem to kindergarten the morning after we'd all been up until two, attending the possibly fatal shooting of a mutual friend, was better than anything else I might've spent the morning doing.
By nine Jem and I were driving through Monte Vista in a car that was even more absurd than our situation - George Berton's precious baby, his 70 Barracuda.
That too had been Erainya's idea. After my accident last night, she'd pointed out, I needed a car, a temporary loaner, and Erainya just happened to know where George kept his spare keys. She didn't offer her own car to me. Go figure. I'd never driven the 'Cuda before - never done more than glimpse it while Berton performed his holy rituals under the hood with a chamois cloth and a lug wrench and an oil can.
The car had nothing in common with the VW except color, age, and ragtop. The dash was polished oak. The stick shift and bucket seats were covered in black leather. A gilded Virgen de Guadalupe statuette hung from the rearview mirror. The disc brakes responded to the lightest tap and the monstrous 440 motor purred like a tigress under the shaker hood. I couldn't drive the thing without hearing War's "Low Rider" in my head.
We pulled over at the corner of East Craig and McCullough, outside the private school that swallowed up most of the block. The campus was a series of renovated mansions on a hill, shaded with live oaks, the thick green lawns immaculate. The kindergarten building was a plantation-style carriage house on the corner, directly above us.
Jem and I watched kids on the playground - scampering over the jungle gym, swinging, playing on the monkey bars. The kids all looked happy. The teachers in the yard all looked happy. I felt like I should look happy too but I knew I damn well might start screaming any minute.
"You might like it here," I told Jem. "Nice play structure."
Jem nodded.
He was dressed in khaki pants and a little green polo shirt that made his dark skin glow. His hair was newly cut into a bowl of black. He pressed the creases in the top of his lunch bag over and over. He hadn't said much on the way over - a short treatise on breakfast-cereal toys, a few questions about the Barracuda.
Those questions stopped as soon as George's name came up.
"You ready?" I asked him.
Jem nodded again, with no enthusiasm.
We walked up to the white-columned porch of the carriage-house kindergarten building and did a lot of handshaking with a pale blond woman in a willowy dress. Mrs. Something-or-Other. Her name started with T and had about seven syllables and I felt very inadequate when I heard the kindergartners rattling it off effortlessly. She wore a lot of perfume. Jem was mostly interested in her necklace - one of those primary-teacher specials with little ceramic animals and multicolored alphabet letters designed to capture the attention of twenty kindergartners at a time. Even I had an overwhelming urge to fondle it.
"We're so pleased to have you here today," Mrs. T. told us.
She called over a sandy-haired kid named Travis and introduced him to Jem. Thirty seconds later Jem and Travis were in line to play wall ball.
"See you at one-thirty?" Mrs. T. asked me.
"I'm supposed to leave him?"
She smiled patiently, like she was used to hearing that question. "Well, it's better for him, to interact with the children, you know - "
"I knew that."
She smiled some more, then excused herself to go greet another pair of visitors - an ample redheaded woman with an equally redheaded, overweight child.
I stepped back against the fence and watched Jem play. It was the first time I'd seen him with a group of his peers. He'd never been in day care, never had anybody at his birthday parties who was under thirty, yet he seemed perfectly at home. Ten kids were now involved in his wall ball game. Jem and Travis were rewriting the rules so more could play.
"It's hard," a woman said.
I looked over. It was the redheaded woman who'd just dropped off her kid. I tried to match her sympathetic smile. "What's hard?"
"Leaving your child - it's hard, isn't it?"
I opened my mouth, tried to form an explanation about my non-relationship to Jem, then just nodded. The mother patted my arm in camaraderie and drifted away.