At Joan’s appearance, he gestured for her to stay, holding up one index finger while continuing his conversation. “Our purchasing agent ordered them in January of last year .... Are you sure? ... When? ... In July! But how could that many textbooks just disappear? ... Mr. Travis, my problem is that next Tuesday I’m going to have five hundred and ninety tenth-grade students coming through these doors, and English is a required course for every one of them.” After a lengthy pause he wrote down a bill-of-lading number. “To the loading dock? How big were the cartons?” He dropped the pencil, rubbed his forehead, and said, “I see. Yes, thank you, I’ll check at my end. If they can’t be located, do you have more in stock? ... Yes, I will, thank you. Goodbye.”
Tom hung up and expelled a breath that puffed out his cheeks. “Missing textbooks. What can I do for you, Joan?”
“I’ve got a new transfer student out here you’ll want to meet. He’s a senior and he wants to play football. Will you handle it?”
“Sure,” he said, rolling back his chair and rising. As much as he loved his job as principal of HHH, Tom hated this last week before school. During these crazy days he became primarily a problem solver, working in the chaos left behind by the summer-school staff, who moved things they weren’t supposed to move, hid equipment that was in their way, and stuffed incoming supplies into the most unlikely of places. Electricians were installing a new overhead lighting system, and some snafu had held up a batch of the fixtures, so there were no lights in the home economics department. A physics teacher he’d hired way back last May had called the day before and said she’d accepted a better offer from another district and wouldn’t be coming to work here after all. And now the textbook people claimed a trucking company had delivered thirty cartons of books onto a loading dock at the district warehouse on July 15, but nobody at this end had ever seen them.
Tom Gardner stuffed it all behind a calm exterior and focused on the facet of his job that he considered most important: the students.
This new one was waiting with his mother on the opposite side of the counter—a tall, dark, good-looking kid with an athlete’s build who wanted to play football.
Joan led the way and made introductions.
“This is Kent Arens. He’ll be a senior with us this year. Kent, our principal, Mr. Gardner.”
Tom shook hands with the boy and felt a hard paw with plenty of muscle behind it.
“And this is Kent’s mother, Monica.”
The two began shaking hands as automatically as any strangers, but midway through the introduction a sixth sense buzzed through Tom.
“Monica?” he said, peering at her more closely. “Monica Arens?”
Disbelief widened her eyes.
“Tom?” she said. “Tom Gardner?”
“Well, for heaven’s sake, this is a surprise.”
“That’s you? Mr. Gardner ... the principal here?” Her gaze shot to the brass name plate beside his office door.
“That’s me. I’ve been here for eighteen years, first as a teacher, then as principal.” He dropped her hand, for it was awkward holding it above the elbow-high counter. “Obviously you live in this school district.”
“I ... yes ... we ...” She had grown flustered and her face began flushing. “I’ve just been transferred here. I’m an engineer for 3M. I never would have ... I mean, I had no idea you lived anywhere near here. I didn’t even know what the principal’s name was until Mrs. Berlatsky said it a minute ago.”
“Well, that’s how it goes,” he said with an easygoing grin. “Paths cross, don’t they?” He hooked his hands on his hips, letting his gaze linger on her affectionately. She remained flustered and offered no smile, only the impression that she was struggling to overcome some gross embarrassment. “And you have a family now ...” He turned his attention back to the boy.
“Just one. Just Kent.”
He was truly a handsome young man, as tall as Tom himself.
“You know my mother?” Kent asked, surprised by the discovery.
“Way back when,” Tom replied. “In nineteen seventy-five.”
“But we haven’t seen each other since,” Monica hastened to add.
“Well, enough about us. We’ve sort of left you out of the conversation here, haven’t we, Kent? Listen, why don’t the two of you come into my office, where there’s less confusion and noise. We can talk in there.”
In his office, with its view of the arboretum and the football field beyond, they sat facing each other across his desk. The late-morning sun angled above the east wing of the school building and spread across the south windowsill, where a gallery of Gardner family photographs faced Tom’s desk.
Tom Gardner tipped back in his swivel chair, loosely steepled his hands, and said to the boy, “So you want to play football, I’m told.”
“Yes, sir.”
The kid looked familiar. “You’ve played before? In your last school?”
“Yes, sir. I lettered in both my sophomore and junior years, and last year I was all-conference.”
“What position did you play?”
“Running back.”
Tom had been a coach himself; he knew what questions to ask to determine if the kid was a team man or a me man.
“What was your team like?”
“Just great. I had some really good blockers who were smart, and they really understood the game. It made it easy to play, because we sort of ... well, you know, we understood what each other was doing.”
Tom liked the kid’s answer. “How about your coach?” Kent answered simply, “I’m going to miss him,” impressing Tom further. Once again, he had the strong impression he knew the boy from somewhere. Not only his facial features but his expressions looked awfully familiar.
“So tell me about your goals,” Tom said, feeling the boy out further.
“Short-term or long-term?”
“Both.”
“Well ...” Kent rested his elbows on the arms of his chair, joined his hands, and cleared his throat, thinking over his answer. “Short term ... I’d like to bench-press three hundred pounds.” He sent Tom a mini-grin, half shy, half proud. “I’m up to two-seventy now.”
Tom said, “Wow,” returning a pleased grin. “And your long-term goals?”
“I want to be an engineer like my mom.” Kent glanced at his mother, throwing the front of his face momentarily into direct sunlight. Something caught Tom’s eye, something he hadn’t paid any attention to before, something that clicked in his brain and sent a sizzle of warning through him; a tiny cowlick right at the center front of Kent Arens’s black crew-cut hair, the smallest wedge, which made it look as if no hair grew at the very tip of his widow’s peak.
Just like his own.
The recognition came and kicked Tom Gardner in the gut while the boy went on speaking.
“I’d like to go to Stanford because they’ve got a great engineering program and a super football team, too. I think I’m good enough to maybe go on a football scholarship ... that is, if I can play again this year so the scouts can see me.”
The boy looked back at Tom, full-face. The similarity was uncanny. Startling!
Tom glanced away to disabuse himself of the preposterous notion. He reached across the desk. “Mind if I take a look at your class schedule?”
Concentrating on the blue paper, he hoped that when he looked back up he’d believe he was mistaken. The boy had chosen a very heavy load: calculus, advanced chemistry, advanced physics, social studies, weight training, and honors English.
Honors English ... taught by Tom’s wife, Claire.
His gaze remained lowered longer than necessary. It can’t be, it can’t be. But raising his eyes once again, he saw features too much like those he encountered in the mirror every morning—a long swarthy face wearing a deep summer tan, brown eyes with dark brows curving much like his own, an aquiline nose, a good, solid chin—faintly dimpled—and that tiny wedge of a cowlick he’d hated his whole life long.
He shifted
his attention to Monica, but she was studying her knees, her mouth drawn tight. He remembered how flustered she’d acted when they were introduced in the outer office, how she’d blushed. Sweet Jesus, if it was true, why wouldn’t she have told him seventeen, eighteen years ago?
“Well, this ...” Tom began, but his voice cracked and he had to clear his throat. “This is an impressive schedule ... tough courses. And football on top of that. Are you sure you can handle it all?”
“I think so. I’ve always taken a heavy class load, and I’ve always been in sports.”
“What kind of grades do you get?”
“I have a three-point-eight average. Mom’s already told my old school to send my records, but I guess they haven’t gotten here yet.”
Queer, zingy rivers were whizzing through Tom’s bloodstream as he rocked forward in his chair and spoke, hoping nothing showed on his face.
“I like what I see, and I like what I hear, Kent. I think I want you to talk to Coach Gorman. The team has been practicing for two weeks already, but this should be the coach’s decision.”
Monica spoke up, meeting Tom’s eyes directly for the first time since entering his office. She had regained her composure but her face remained impassive. If she had truly blushed before, she now exemplified a woman in control.
“He’s college-bound, one way or another,” she stated, “but if he doesn’t get a chance to play his senior year, you know what happens to his chances of getting a scholarship.”
“I understand, and I’ll speak to Coach Gorman myself and ask that he get a tryout. Kent, do you think you could come down to the football field this afternoon at three? The team will be working out then and I can introduce you to the coach.”
Kent glanced at his mother. She said, “I don’t see why not. You can take me back home and use the car.”
“Good,” Tom said.
At that moment Joan Berlatsky interrupted, thrusting her head around the doorway. “Excuse me, Tom. I forgot to tell Kent ... we have a newcomers’ group that meets every week, Thursday morning before school. Nice way to get to know the kids, if you’re interested in joining it.”
“Thanks, I might.”
When Joan disappeared, Tom rose, and the other two followed suit. “Well, Kent ...” He extended his hand across the desk and Kent returned the handshake. At close range, appraising his dark good looks, touching him, Tom’s suspicion seemed even more believable. “Welcome to HHH. If there’s anything I can do to make your transition here easier, just let me know. I’m here for the students anytime. Even if you just need to talk ... well, I’m available for that, too.”
Tom went around the desk and shook Monica’s hand. “Monica, it was nice to see you again.” He searched her eyes for a clue, but she gave away nothing.
She fixed her gaze on something behind his left shoulder and remained coolly distant. “Nice to see you, too.”
“Same goes for you. If you need any help getting him settled in here, just give a call. Mrs. Berlatsky or I will be glad to help however we can.”
“Thank you.”
They parted at his door, and he watched them walk away through the messy outer office, where someone had propped open the hall doors to dilute the strong paint smell. A radio was playing a Rod Stewart song. A copy machine set up a rhythmic shd-shd-shd while yellow papers flapped from it. Secretaries typed at their desks while a trio of teachers checked their mailboxes and chatted—everybody going about their business and not one of them suspecting what a life-altering shock had just befallen the man who led them all. He watched as Monica Arens and her son walked out of the office, crossed the hall, and exited through the set of propped-open outer doors into the sunny August day. He could tell they were talking as they strode down the sidewalk, stepped off the curb, and continued toward a new Lexus of a piercing aquamarine blue. The boy got behind the wheel, the engine started, and the sun glinted off the car’s clean, luminescent paint as it backed up, turned, and disappeared from his view.
Only then did Tom Gardner move.
“I don’t want to be disturbed for a while,” he told Dora Mae, as he entered his office. He closed the door, which was normally left open unless he was with a student. Alone, he flattened his vertebrae against the windowless door and let his head drop back against it. He felt all cinched up inside, as if a tree had fallen across his chest. His stomach quivered and held a knot of impending fear. He closed his eyes, trying to force the fear into submission.
It didn’t work.
Pulling away from the door, opening his eyes, he actually felt dizzy.
He went to the window and stood in the slanting rays of late morning, one hand covering his mouth, the other wrapped across his ribs. Outside, in the arboretum, the sun striped the manicured grass, dappled the pruned trees, and faded the old-fashioned wooden picnic tables; in the distance it sketched a second, fallen chain-link fence at the foot of the one delineating the perimeter of the tennis courts; it whacked out large trapezoids of shadow from the visible half of the spectator stands; it lustered the cornfields behind them.
Tom Gardner’s gaze registered none of it.
Instead, he saw the handsome face of Kent Arens and the stricken, blushing one of Kent’s mother. Then later her closed expression and the air of detachment as she carefully avoided Tom’s eyes.
God in heaven, could the boy be his?
The dates matched.
The third week of June 1975, the week of his marriage to Claire, who had been pregnant with Robby at the time. Staring sightlessly, he regretted that one breach of good sense eighteen years before, that single infidelity on the eve of his wedding, that sin for which he’d done silent penance earlier in his marriage but which had faded gradually as the years of absolute fidelity had built between himself and Claire.
He dropped his hand from the heat of his own blush and felt a wad in his throat that stuck there like a piece of hard candy each time he swallowed. Maybe the boy wasn’t seventeen. Maybe he was sixteen ... or eighteen! After all, not every senior was seventeen!
But most were, and common sense told him Kent Arens was too tall and well developed to be only sixteen. It appeared he shaved every day, and his shoulders and chest muscles were those of a young man. Furthermore, the startling physical resemblance to himself seemed to bear out Tom’s awful suspicion.
He stood over the photographs of his family. He touched the frames. His family: Claire, Chelsea, and Robby.
None of them knew a thing about the night of his bachelor party.
Oh, please, let this kid not be mine.
Abruptly he spun and opened his door. “Dora Mae, did you file Kent Arens’s registration card?”
“Not yet, it’s right here.” She picked it up from her desk and handed it to him. He took it back into his office, dropped to his desk chair, and read every word.
Kent was seventeen, all right: birthdate 3-22-76, exactly nine months after Tom Gardner’s irresponsible act of rebellion against a marriage for which he wasn’t ready.
Parents’ name: Monica J. Arens; no father listed.
He searched his dim memory of that night, but it had been so long before and he’d been drinking—a lot—and she’d been nothing more than this girl who showed up at a party delivering pizza. Had either one of them used any birth control? He had no idea if she had. Had he? Probably not, because at that time Claire was already pregnant, so no birth control was necessary. Before that she’d been on birth control pills, but she had forgotten to take them along on a weekend ski trip to Colorado, and like most randy young whelps, they’d thought themselves invulnerable, and that’s when she’d gotten pregnant.
Irresponsible? Yes, of course, but that entire night of his bachelor party had been irresponsible, from the amount of alcohol he’d consumed, to the porn movies his fraternity brothers had shown, to his indiscriminate sex with some girl he scarcely knew.
All because he was being rushed into a marriage that had—in the long run—turned out to be the best thin
g that ever happened to him.
Sitting in his office holding Kent Arens’s registration card in his hand, Tom sighed and rocked forward in his chair. Could the kid look that much like him and not be his? Given the circumstances, he doubted it. And if he had so easily spotted the resemblance, anybody could: the office staff, Chelsea, Robby ... Claire.
The thought of his wife threw him into a tailspin of panic, and he rocketed from his chair, leaving the card behind, instinct driving him straight to her to protect whatever might possibly be in jeopardy.
“I’ll be up in room two-thirty-two,” he told Dora Mae, striding past her desk.
Like the main office, the long halls leading to the classrooms were a mess, piled with study materials, covered with drop cloths, smelling of paint. From some of the classrooms came the sound of radios, the volume turned low while teachers, dressed in work clothing, put their rooms in order. The audiovisual director came trudging toward Tom, pushing a cart piled with tape recorders, having trouble negotiating the junk-filled hall.
“Hi, Tom,” she said.
“Hi, Denise.”
“I need to talk to you sometime about the new photography class I’ll be teaching. We’ll have to work out a darkroom schedule between us and the school paper staff.”
“See me in my office and we’ll set something up.” Already he resented the intrusion of school business and felt a pang of guilt for letting his personal concerns eclipse the importance of the job he was paid to do. But at that moment nothing mattered as much as his relationship with Claire.
Approaching her room he felt a touch of contained terror, as if his indiscretion of eighteen years ago would somehow show on his face and she might look at him and say, How could you, Tom? Two women at once?
Her room faced south, like his office. A name plate beside her door read MRS. GARDNER. Though there was no school policy on students using teachers’ first names, she held that the respect inherent in their using the more formal term of address carried over into their respect for her in the classroom. And she realized plenty of it from her students.