“Who is your meeting with?” I asked.
“My faculty adviser,” he said.
“Jude Flemming?”
“Jude Flemming,” he said. “I need to ask her for an extension on my dissertation. I get a little nervous asking her for anything.”
“I can understand that.” I poured myself some more coffee. “How late are you getting the dissertation in?” I asked.
“You know, about nine years.”
I stopped midpour.
“There are reasons,” he said.
I nodded. “I’m sure,” I said.
Then he stood up, his tie loose around his neck, and he began grabbing for several things at once: his keys, the mostly empty thermos, a shabby briefcase on the counter. “So you think you could take them?” he said.
I looked at him, confused. “Take who?”
“Sammy and Dex,” he said. “To school. The afternoon part, at least. It’s walking distance from here. And it would really help me out. They have an indoor peewee soccer league afterward that will keep them busy until after I’m back, but can you take them over there?”
“Me?” I said, turning to the twins, who were still busy with their waffles, not so much as looking in my direction. “But they don’t know me, Jesse. Won’t that be weird?”
Jesse turned toward them too. “Okay guys, this is your Aunt Annie.” He patted the top of my head. “Tell her hello.”
They turned to me, giving me a once-over, neither of them saying a word, neither offering a wave.
“Hi guys! ” I smiled at Sammy who was holding on tight to his watering can. “I like your planter,” I said.
Still, nothing.
“Okay, so, whichever of my big guys wants Annie to take them to school today more should tell her his name loudest, right now,” he said. “Winner gets a hundred bucks.”
Both boys raised their hands high. “Me! Me!” they screamed in a rising, vocal unison.
Then Dex waved his arms and screamed out, “I’m Dex! I’m Dex!” And Sammy held up his yellowing watering can and—using its spigot as a microphone—joined him with, “I’m Sammy! I’m Sammy!”
Jesse smiled down at me, his tie somehow magically tied. “There we go,” he said. “One problem solved.”
12
We must have been a sight on the way to school, the wind and snowfall kicking up: Sammy and Dexter on either side of me, wrapped in enormous winter coats entirely covering their little bodies (Sammy’s watering can sticking out from beneath his), me in a light fleece unequal to the wind, all of us holding hands—shouting at the cars passing by, shouting at street signs, shouting at the sky.
Even with the hundred dollars on the table, the boys had seemed nervous and unhappy to see their father go, and, so, in an attempt to cheer them, I suggested playing a game of I Spy as we walked.
I wasn’t sure if it was exactly age appropriate, but Jordan played it with Sasha and that seemed like endorsement enough for the time being. And the boys seemed to enjoy it. In the twenty or so minutes it took us to go from door to door—from the quiet outskirts of town to its slightly less quiet center—they spotted train tracks, an out-of-business ice-cream parlor, a broken bicycle, several snowmen, a closed-down fruit stand (with the sign SEE YA IN MAY!), a giraffe (or, rather, a statue of a giraffe in someone’s yard), and dogs of several sizes (the people walking the dogs, the twins were far less interest
ed in).
When we got closer to school, they also spotted the Williamsburg General Store, where I made the mistake of stopping. Because there, on the newspaper rack in front of the store, were copies of several national newspapers, including the New York Times, complete with a small advertisement for The Unbowed. The ad consisted of a photograph of a creepy playground at night, complete with a blurry image of a couple on the swings, so blurry you could almost miss them. But you couldn’t miss what was on the bottom of the print, in bold black letters. His name: NICK CAMPBELL.
My heart clenched. My heart clenched just seeing his name, right in front of me, where I couldn’t ignore it.
After Dexter “I spyed” the General Store, I was pretty close to adding, Funny because I spy a ghost.
But by the time we turned onto the elementary school’s grounds, I’d pulled it back together, which was a good thing because, despite the school not being impressively large, it was impressively busy: a sizable group of kids finishing their afternoon recess, another group starting a basketball game, another playing boxball, wrapped up tightly in hats and gloves and winter coats. I spotted a teacher by the front door, clipboard in her heavily mittened hands, who pointed us to the kindergarten classroom on the far end of the floor.