“That’s another thing,” Ms. Crum continues. “Tanner has been telling stories, claiming he has a pa. A new pa at home.”
I swing around and look at Tanner. His freckles stand out as his face goes white. He looks down at his shoes.
When I look back at Ms. Crum, she’s adjusting the pencil sharpener, inching it around her desk, lining it up with her stapler. “I expect, I’d prefer if he were telling the truth. Because from my perspective, if you don’t clean up your kids’ act, if you don’t get them to take learning seriously, we’re going to have problems. What they need is discipline. What they need is a father.”
I frown at Ms. Crum. She’s as old as Granny, she’s old-fashioned and she’s fairly awful, and right now, her swamp green eyes have taken on a pitying look.
I want to snap I don’t need a man. But that’d be a lie, because if the good Lord told me that I could have Bobby back, I’d take him up on that offer in a second.
And then, I wonder. Why has Tanner been telling tales? Does he want a dad that bad?
I grip the dirty jeans of my overalls and glance around the office, at the windowless walls, covered in water-stained wallpaper, at the filing cabinets overflowing with years of school records, at the collected records of generations of Hollow Creek’s finest.
“If you don’t fix this situation, I’ll be forced to hold your daughter back. And I’ll be forced to expel your sons. Do we understand each other, Mrs. Sutton?”
I dig my boots into the dank blue carpet, and the dirty drab blue suddenly reminds me of horrible, awful Gavin Williams. I can see him sneering at me, telling me this is exactly what he’d expect of someone like me. How my kids will become just as ugly, drab, and uninspired as I am. If he’d paid me what he owed, I could’ve gotten Shay reading tutors, I could’ve hired math tutors, we could’ve…should’ve…would’ve…
“We understand each other.” I stand and take a final look at the little room, overflowing with paper and files, Ms. Crum squatting like a grand dame in the center of her kingdom.
“Good. I expect changes.”
I hustle out the office door and jerk my head at the kids. “Let’s go.”
They scramble out of their chairs, like they’ve been shot out of a potato gun, and hurry down the hall to the front door. At Granny’s Mustang, they all pile into the back. The brown vinyl seats creak and the springs groan. The car is forty-five years old, and it shows every single one of those years. The brown vinyl is more cracked than whole, and foam squirts out of the seats like toothpaste. The floor in the back is missing in a few places, and you can see the undercarriage, and the road flying past. The car, of course, has an ash tray, and in the tray and the fabric, you can still smell the pipe tobacco that Grandpa Allwright smoked in here for the twenty years preceding his untimely death.
It’s a comforting kind of smell, and it settles me as I climb into the car and shut the groaning front door. Granny Allwright looks over at me and lifts an eyebrow. Apparently, she can tell it’s been a long, long day.
“That bad, huh?”
I nod, then buckle in. Shay reaches over the seat back and rubs her nose against my hair.
“Meow?”
I sigh and run my hand over her cheek. “You’re alright. But maybe, in school, you could pretend to be a little girl?”
In response, she licks her hand like it’s a paw.
We’ll work on it.
Elijah helps Shay buckle in.
Granny looks in her rearview mirror at the kids while she puts on a bright shade of orange-pink lipstick. “What happened? What’d you boys do this time?”
Elijah puts his arm around Shay’s shoulder. “Aww, Gran. That Cody troll shoved Shay down and told her if she was a cat then she’d have to eat bugs like a cat—”
“Cats eat bugs?” Granny frowns at them.
Tanner nods. “Some do.”
“He had a roach, and he shoved it in Shay’s face.”
“Rawrra-meow.” Shay’s kitten meow is extremely affronted.
“Well, I never. Me and the Thorns are going to have a nice little sit-down chat.”
“We took care of it, Gran. We hooked Cody to the flagpole and used the pulley to send him up. It gave him a wedgie that’ll take years to get out.” Tanner bounces in his seat, eager as usual to tell all about his mechanical brilliance.
As his mother, it’s my duty to tell Tanner, “That wasn’t the right way to handle the situation.”