Consequences

“We’ve got a problem all right,” Betty said grimly. “And her name is Gloria Wall.”

“What’s going on?” Willard asked, looking bewildered. He avoided gossip, and was usually the last to know what was happening in his community.

“The school board wants to close our school and throw us all out of work,” Betty told him. “They’re taking it to plebiscite in the spring.”

Willard gaped, looking distressed. “But…I don’t know what you’re talking about. Where would the students go?”

“To Holly Grove,” one of the teachers told him. “On buses.”

“Hey, Willard, maybe you can get a job driving one of the school buses.” Jilly chuckled, then looked around to see if others appreciated the joke. Jim noted that nobody shared her amusement.

“I don’t believe it,” Willard argued with uncharacteristic stubbornness, though he still looked stricken. “It’s just crazy. Why would they do such a thing?”

“I heard it’s Gloria’s personal vendetta,” Betty said. “For some reason, she wants the whole middle school gone. And she’s the one who’s got the board all stirred up.”

“I have a cousin on the school board,” Clyde Tuttle said from the doorway, where he leaned against the wall holding a can of soda. “Sometimes she tells me a bit of what’s going on at their meetings.”

Tuttle was the gym teacher and basketball coach, dressed casually in navy blue sweatpants and a school T-shirt, with a whistle hanging around his neck. Clyde had been a few grades behind Jim when they were in school. An easygoing, good-hearted athlete with a big circle of friends.

Jim grinned at the younger man. “Hey, this is great news,” he told the assembled staff. “Clyde’s got an agent in place. A spy behind enemy lines.”

Despite the tension in the room, this drew another ripple of laughter, and an answering chuckle from the gym teacher.

“Damn right,” Clyde told his colleagues smugly. “And it’s not cheap, either. I have to buy the woman a steak dinner and at least three beers before I can get her to talk.”

“So what’s your cousin telling you, Clyde?” Jilly Phipps asked.

Clyde shrugged and toyed with the whistle on its black nylon cord. “The school board knows the whole idea won’t be an easy sell in this town, even if moving the school means lower taxes for everybody. So the board’s going to war. They’ve got themselves a plan.”

“A plan?” Lucia asked from the front of the room. “What kind of plan?”

“They’re going to start watching this school real close,” Clyde said.

“What for?” somebody asked.

Clyde shrugged and took a long gulp from the soda can. “Looking for any signs of mismanagement, wasted money, discipline problems, anything they can use to stir up public feeling against us.”

Jim was watching Lucia as Clyde spoke, and for a moment he detected a fleeting expression on her face. It was a look of stark fear.

Intrigued, he studied the beautiful blond principal more closely. She looked almost as if she had some kind of guilty secret, and the threat of this kind of close scrutiny terrified her.

But as he watched, Lucia got herself under control. When she spoke, her voice was as cool as ever, her expression remote and watchful.

“Does your cousin have anything else to say about this plan, Clyde?”

“Just that the board’s also been planning a series of surprise visits to the school,” Clyde said. “Different members will be dropping by here without warning, and strolling around to look in on our classrooms while we’re working.”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake!” Betty Rickart said indignantly. “Now, why would they want to do something like that?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Lucia said, her cheeks coloring briefly. “They want to see if they can catch us making mistakes. You all know how gossip travels in this town. If they can convince people we’re not doing a good job, or that some of us can’t handle our students, they’ll have no problem getting enough votes against us when they hold their plebiscite.”

Jim glanced in sympathy at the circle of worried faces around the room. If Gloria Wall succeeded in her attempt to close the school, a lot of these people would be thrown out of work and forced to leave the town where some of them had lived all their lives.

“Well, folks, we have nothing to worry about,” Clyde said heartily from the doorway. “We’re all good teachers, so I reckon none of the board members will find anything wrong when they drop in on our classrooms. Will they?”

“I certainly hope they won’t,” Lucia said from her seat at the front of the room.

As she spoke, she gave Jim a glance of such pointed significance that he was startled again, and a little wary. Her words had been for everybody, but it was almost as if she’d issued a specific warning to him alone, letting him know he was on probation and she expected him to toe the line.

He met her eyes steadily. After a brief moment of tension, she was the first to look away, down at the notes on her desk. For the remainder of the meeting, she didn’t glance at him again.

IN THE EARLY EVENING, Lucia sat upstairs on the cushioned dormer seat in her living room, gazing down at the shady backyard.

June was baby-sitting for her niece, Sally Carlyle, who went bowling on Tuesday evenings. The landlady sat on a bench beside her garden, with a length of blue knitting in her lap, while Sally’s two children played on the grass nearby.

The older boy was almost three, a sturdy red-cheeked cherub who ran around shouting and chasing after a ball with Duke, June’s old spaniel. A fat baby sat on a blanket gnawing the head of a yellow rubber duck and staring at the dog with round, solemn eyes.

While Lucia watched, June leaned over casually and drew the baby onto her lap, cuddled him for a moment and reached inside his plaid overalls to check the diaper. Then she kissed him and placed him back on the blanket where he resumed his contemplation of his brother and the big dog. The much-chewed duck was still gripped in his chubby hand, but for the moment he seemed to have forgotten it.

Lucia touched the waistband of her khaki shorts and felt a warm, melting trickle of love.

“Hello,” she whispered. “Are you really in there? And are you a boy or girl?”

Outside, the setting sun glimmered through the branches of the oak tree as if it had caught and tangled among the leaves. Golden fingers of light caressed June’s hair and the bright curls of the two children.

In a stone birdbath near the lilac hedge, a robin perched at the edge of the bowl. He preened and ruffled his feathers daintily, then bent to dip a wing in the brimming water. The older boy stopped running to gaze at the bird, his thumb jammed thoughtfully in his mouth.

This was all like some kind of waking dream, Lucia thought, watching the two children.

She couldn’t possibly be having a baby. Not now, when the school board was planning to launch its scrutiny of the school, and so many people depended on her for their jobs. And all because of a fleeting encounter with a virtual stranger who meant nothing at all to her.…

Maybe the test had been wrong, and none of it would happen after all.

But in spite of the wishful thinking, Lucia knew that her pregnancy was real. This baby existed. In fact, though infinitely tiny, it was every bit as much a reality as that fat little fellow down on the blanket in his plaid overalls, gnawing on a plastic duck.

And Lucia already loved her baby more passionately than she’d ever loved another person in all her life.

“We’ll get through this,” she whispered to the unseen presence within her. “I still don’t know how it’s all going to work, darling, but somehow we’ll manage.”

Lucia glanced out the window again, stroking her abdomen gently.

“Maybe if everything else is going just perfectly, and they can’t find a single thing wrong at our school except that the principal happens to be pregnant and there’s no father in sight—”

She stopped abruptly, tensing as Jim Whitley came through the back gate with his dog, strolled up the path and paused to say something to June, who set her knitting aside to greet the new tenant.

He wore a short-sleeved cotton shirt and faded denim shorts. Even from this distance, Lucia could see how the thick dusting of hair on his powerful legs glistened warmly in the dying light. His bare arms looked brawny and muscular under the fabric of the shirt.

He’d just moved into the house, but already his presence seemed to dominate everything. Though Lucia hadn’t spoken more than a few words to the man since he’d arrived, she was painfully conscious of Jim Whitley in the rooms just below hers. Even worse, she was dismayed by a warm tingle of excitement when she pictured him listening to her footsteps, the sound of her shower, the creaking of the wooden floorboards as she got into bed.