A Child's Wish

“Any prospects?” He cared, but he wasn’t even all that jealous.

“Maybe.” She grinned. “There’s this administrator at the hospital. I can’t seem to get away from him, yet I always dismissed him because he’s nothing at all like me. Far too impractical. He flies planes in his spare time. Do you have any idea how dangerous that is?”

He smiled back. She was an extraordinary woman. “I have a feeling you’re about to find out.”

She shuddered. “I don’t know.”

“Well, if you need me to check him out for you, you let me know.” He was only half joking. “If you ever need anything, you let me know,” he added, this time not joking at all.

“Thanks.”

And then, as he contemplated getting back to school, another thought occurred to him. “Who’s going to tell Meredith?”

“She’s my friend, so I guess I will,” Susan said, as though she didn’t even consider it an issue. “Unless you want to.”

He dropped her hand, stepped outside. “It’s just that I’ll probably see her before you do and it might be awkward to lie to her.”

Susan gazed at him so thoroughly it made him uncomfortable. “And there’s Kelsey to consider, too,” was all she said. “They do seem to have formed quite a special attachment. Perhaps you should be the one to tell her.”

He nodded. He was the logical choice.

She agreed. Gave him one last quick kiss on the cheek, grabbed her purse and walked him to his car. Mark watched her pull out of her drive behind him, and didn’t miss the tears she wiped from her cheeks.

IT WAS ONLY as Mark arrived back at school that it occurred to him that Meredith might well blame him for the breakup with Susan. Notwithstanding the fact that she’d done the breaking up, he could still be judged as the one at fault for not giving Susan what she needed, for not making her happy. He started to regret not agreeing with Susan when she’d suggested that she be the one to tell Meredith.

Kelsey, on the other hand, would be pleased. For once. Their relationship had been painfully stilted since his daughter’s outburst four nights before. She hadn’t been in to watch him shave once since then. Maybe that would change now it was just the two of them again.

And if he ever did hook up with someone else, he’d do it differently where Kelsey was concerned. His daughter would have to be the one to instigate any relationship she might or might not have with any woman he chose to be his future wife. She’d been correct about one thing on Saturday. He didn’t have the right to choose whom she invited into her inner world.

“There’s a message for you from Angela Liddy, that reporter from KNLD in Tulsa who interviewed Ms. Foster three weeks ago,” Macy said as Mark pushed into the outer office of the principal’s quarters at Lincoln Elementary.

“Thanks. Anything else?”

“Just the new music teacher wanting permission to have the piano tuned.”

“She has it.” He closed his door behind him.

Two minutes later he opened it again.

“Macy, see that Ms. Foster stops in before she leaves for home this afternoon.”

“Will do, sir.”

He nodded, shut his door and thought about a gallon of caramel chocolate fudge ice cream with raspberry swirl. Everything else that came to mind made his neck muscles ache.

“DO YOU WANT the bad news or the worse news?”

What Meredith wanted was to go home. She hadn’t seen Mark since Saturday night and she’d had a particularly trying day. Her students’ parents might have chosen to keep their kids in her class, but the kids were not the same children she’d had before Barnett had started his slur campaign against her.

They argued with her more. Ignored her more. And that afternoon Jeremy had asked her to predict what grade he was going to get on the spelling test she’d been about to administer.

If the class had laughed, she might have been able to shrug the whole thing off, laugh with them, make some pithy comment in return. But though there’d been a few loud guffaws, most of the kids had looked embarrassed, uncomfortable—unsure of her.

And that hurt.

“Meredith?”

She sat down, her narrow denim skirt sliding halfway up her calves. “I’m sorry. I’ll take the worst.”