find. What in blazes did she keep in that thing? When she glanced in my direction I lifted my eyebrows to tell her to move it along.
“It’s not that I don’t appreciate the offer, Shellie. I just don’t have anything interesting to say about it. You’d probably be bored.”
“Don’t sell yourself short, Joe. The kids could really learn something from you.”
“All they’d learn from me is how to pack fish. I’m really not the best person to ask about this stuff.”
She let her eyes hold mine another moment. She was wearing a bunchy sweater of raw gray wool, the kind that looks homemade and in Shellie’s case almost certainly was. (No doubt she’d woven the wool, too.) A bright purple scarf circled her throat; she smelled a little of wood smoke, and beneath that, almost imperceptibly, a wispy hint of lilacs. I knew what she was doing with her eyes—she was a teacher, teaching—and bless her heart, I thought, thank God above for the Shellie Wisters of the world; though I also wanted very badly to shoehorn Kate from her friends and hit the road without having to explain any more than I already had. Shellie was clutching a clipboard across her chest, and as she stood before me, her dark eyes narrowed thoughtfully, letting the silence do what talk could not, I felt the conversation slip from its course and snap into a fresh line like a tacking sail.
“A lot of us think your father was a great man, you know. He helped a lot of people.”
I had to laugh. “Pissed a few off too.”
“True, he did. But what’s the saying? Real courage is doing the right thing when nobody’s looking. Doing the unpopular thing because it’s what you believe, and the heck with everybody. It’s a hard message to teach, especially these days, with that actor in the White House. All of a sudden it’s like Vietnam never happened, like we never learned a thing. It’s worse than disgraceful. It’s a crime. That’s what I’m trying to teach these kids, Joe. To think for themselves. That’s what you could tell them about.”
Somewhere in this Shellie had placed her hand on my sleeve—not quite holding it, but not just touching it, either. The gesture was unknowable, nothing I could break her gaze to consider, a sensation that would remain at the periphery as long as her hand remained in its mysterious contact with my sleeve. Somehow, it made me feel just as I did whenever I read one of her letters in the paper: like I was in the presence of an actual grown-up. The outhouse, the chickens and goats, the clacking loom in her smoky cabin: in the touch of her hand I felt the firm existence of these things, their patient purposefulness and calm utility, the way they expressed a solid life that was far more real, in its way, than the hodgepodge or random impulses that generally pass for adulthood. And here she was, this woman who might have been the second truly charismatic person I had ever met—my father being the first—suggesting I might have something to teach anyone. She had no idea how wrong she was about me, but for a second, just one, I knew what I would have told the class. Most of us spend our entire lives trying to learn what it means to be brave. What we hope is that simply trying will count for something.
“Well, I don’t want to take too much of your time, Joe. I’m sure you have places to be.” She released my sleeve, and just like that, the spell was broken. “Tell Lucy I said hi, won’t you? And thank her again for her help with the bake sale. Those cinnamon buns of hers are always the first to sell out.”
I couldn’t have said how long the two of us had been standing there. Kate was nowhere to be seen. Then the crowds parted and I found her by the bus line, talking to a boy I didn’t recognize, a sandy-haired kid in jeans and a flannel shirt holding a hockey stick he kept flicking on the pavement, the two of them standing together on the path in a nervous, happy way that could only mean one thing. Boys, I thought, and felt the word drop like a bomb to my stomach. Just a day ago she had crawled into my lap to hear a story of her babyhood. She might have actually put her