Promise Me A Rainbow (7 page)

“Cherry, what?” Catherine said, somewhat alarmed by the look on Cherry’s face.

“I forgot to tell you! You’re supposed to call that sucker!”

“What sucker?”

“That sucker coming right there. Here,” she said, thrusting a piece of paper with a phone number under her nose.

Catherine looked down at the paper.

“He came here this morning, Ms. Holben. I said you rode the bus and you didn’t get here till it did. He said he wanted you to call him—as soon as you could. Is that your boyfriend, Ms. Holben?”

“No,” Catherine said as she got off the table. She crossed the grass to head off Joe D’Amaro before he got any closer. She didn’t know what kind of mood he was in, and, if last night was any indication of his usual behavior, she didn’t want the girls to hear him.

He looked the same as he had yesterday—like a construction worker who wasn’t wearing his hard hat. It occurred to her as she walked toward him how little she’d thought of Jonathan today. She had been thinking only of this man’s child.

“Ms. Holben,” he said, holding up his hand as if he thought she might try to ignore him. He took long strides to close the distance between them, but if she was expecting an apology for his parting remark last night, she was mistaken.

“Ms. Holben, I wanted you to call me. I wanted to ask you about . . .” He glanced at the picnic table, then glanced at it again. “ . . . about—are all those girls pregnant?” he suddenly asked, as if what he’d seen had only just registered.

“Yes, they are.”

He frowned slightly. “Oh. What I want to know is what Fritz said to you. What do you do for a living, anyway?” he asked, looking back at the table. This time Beatrice and Maria waved.

“I work with the school program for pregnant students.”

“They’re . . . awfully young, aren’t they?”

“Yes.”

“Just little kids,” he said, more to himself than to her.

“What?”

“Nothing. Kind of sad.” He looked back at her. “About Fritz—when can you talk to me?” It seemed not to have occurred to him that after his rudeness last night she might not want to talk to him.

“I have some time now . . .”

“No, I can’t now. I’m working. I can come by your place tonight. I’m not sure when—six or seven. Maybe later.”

She hesitated, not wanting to commit herself to waiting an entire evening for someone who might not show up, and yet she needed to talk to him about Fritz.

“Look, Ms. Holben. I’ll come by as soon as I can. That’s the best I can tell you. If you’re there, maybe you’ll have time to talk to me. If you’re not, you can call me when you do. It’s important, Ms. Holben. I . . . know you’ve got your own troubles.”

She ignored his allusion to the scene he’d witnessed with Jonathan.

“Fritz is all right, isn’t she?” she asked.

For the first time, he looked into Catherine’s eyes. “I don’t know.”

She stared back at him, seeing more than she thought he’d want her to see—that he was worried, perhaps afraid, and that his minimal courtesy now was likely his way of distancing himself from it.

“I should be home this evening,” she said. “I’m usually home by six.”

Relief flooded his face. “Good. I’ll see you this evening, then.” He turned and started toward the street.

“Mr. D’Amaro?”

He looked around at her.

“The little old lady who lives behind the screen door is Mrs. Donovan. If she asks to see your driver’s license, you’ll save yourself a lot of grief if you show it to her.”

For a moment she thought he was going to smile, but he nodded curtly and walked back toward the street and a battered pickup truck with an upside-down wheelbarrow in the back.

Catherine realized suddenly that Abby was standing at her elbow. Abby was in her fifth month of pregnancy, a pregnancy that to Catherine seemed incredible. Abby was certainly attractive enough to have garnered her share of male attention. Her hair was long and curly and blond, and she had startling but somewhat dreamy blue eyes that belied her high academic standing in the junior class. But she was sometimes as childlike as she was beautiful, leaving Catherine often feeling as if she were explaining the harsher realities of unwed motherhood to a Walt Disney fairy tale character come to life. Abby was seemingly without guile, suspecting no one and nothing, trusting to a fault. Catherine had never had anything that even resembled a meaningful conversation with Abby, and she waited, not willing to let an opportunity slip by.

“Is he your boyfriend, Ms. Holben?” Abby asked, repeating Maria’s earlier opinion.

“No. He’s not my boyfriend.”

“Does he have a . . . pregnant daughter or something?”

“Why do you ask that?”

“I just thought he looked like he did.”

“Upset, you mean?”

“Upset,” she agreed. “When my baby gets here, I’m going to do what Maria did.”

“And what’s that?” Catherine asked. She wasn’t at all certain that Maria was any kind of role model.

“Whenever her father started yelling at her about what she’d done, she’d give him the baby to hold.”

Catherine didn’t think Maria had a father, but she didn’t say so. “Maybe you’d better try to talk to your dad before your baby gets here. Maria’s method might calm down an irate grandfather, but I’m not sure it’s good for the baby.”

The rest of the girls were wandering toward them, and she stood with Abby and waited, firmly putting Fritz and Joe D’Amaro out of her mind.

“All right, we’ve got a few minutes before Mrs. Bauer comes for your math class . . .” She paused for the collective groans, knowing Patricia Bauer could give a few groans of her own. It wasn’t easy teaching mathematics or anything else on as many different levels as this group represented. “I want you to tell me what names you’ve picked for your babies. Beatrice, cut the music and tell me yours.”

Another simplistic approach to a major problem, Catherine thought. She had no delusions that these girls had
chosen
to have their babies. The truth was that most of them had hidden their condition until they had no alternative, and they would continue to deny their pregnancies if she didn’t do something to make them think of their babies as real. She understood their denial; she didn’t fault them for it. She, herself, had used that most basic means of coping in trying to deal with her infertility and with Jonathan, perhaps just as Joe D’Amaro was doing in trying to cope with sad little Fritz.

“Mark or Darlene,” Beatrice said. “You going out with that guy, Ms. Holben?”

“No, Beatrice, I am not going out with him. He is
not
my boyfriend. He’s not going to
be
my boyfriend. I don’t even know the man, all right? What about you, Abby? Have you picked out any names?”

“You ought to go out with him, Ms. Holben,” Beatrice continued, undaunted. “He’s a nice-looking guy. There aren’t too many nice-looking guys your age around here. Times have changed, Ms. Holben. If you like his looks, you should call him up and ask him if he wants to go out.”

“We seen him checking you out, Ms. Holben,” Sasha said. “He’s funny—acting like he’s all business and looking you over so you don’t see him . . .”

“Sasha, I asked Abby a question.”

Abby shook her head and looked at the ground.

“Abby’s going to call her baby
It
,” Maria said. “She’s going to say, ‘Don’t you cry,
It.’
‘Come here, little
It . . .
”

“No, I won’t,” Abby said, her eyes brimming. “I just can’t find a name I want.”

“Maybe you can name him after his daddy—if you know who
that
is.”

“That’s enough, Maria,” Catherine said.

“I got me a name for my little girl,” Sasha said, absently patting Abby on the shoulder.

“Sasha, you don’t know if you got a girl or not,” Maria said. “You can get a boy just as easy, you silly thing. You so dumb, you don’t know nothing.”

“No, I ain’t going to get no boy, either. I’m getting me a girl. My Grandmamma put her ring on a string and held it over my belly and it went back and forth just like it’s supposed to for a baby girl.”

“That was them wrestlers on that T-shirt making it do that,” Cherry said.

“No, it wasn’t! My grandmamma says it’s a girl, and that’s what it is. And her name’s going to be Treasure, because that’s what she is to my grandmamma and me. Treasure Mary Higgins. And me and Treasure ain’t listening to nothing you got to say about no
boys.
Especially you, Maria.”

“Sasha, I’m going to smack you silly!” Maria said, grabbing Sasha by the shirtfront.

“Hold it!” Catherine said. “Maria, I told you that’s enough. You stay after class today so we can talk.”

“I ain’t got nothing to talk about.”

“Well, I do,” Catherine said staring her down. She looked at her watch. “That’s all the time we’ve got. Mrs. Bauer will be waiting for you.”

She got a chorus of groans again.

“I don’t know why I got to do math, anyway,” Sasha said.

“So when Treasure asks you for a dollar to go to the store, you won’t give her two,” Beatrice said.

“Maybe I’ll give her two just because she’s Treasure,” Sasha countered.

“And maybe you’ll end up broke, too.”

The afternoon wore on, tense and uneasy because of Maria’s sullenness. The temperature in the classroom began to rise as the sun came around to the west side, and Catherine fought off the sweaty listlessness that threatened to envelop her, trying to help Pat Bauer with her presence if nothing else. Pat was small and frail-looking and unusually pale today. Her hair needed washing, and her cotton summer dress was wrinkled and too small. There were gaps in the seam line along her midriff where the threads had given way, and her skin showed through. It was if all her energy went into her job now and she had no strength left over for her personal appearance. She was keeping her train of thought on her lecture, but Catherine could feel how much Pat was struggling to do it. It was Catherine’s mind that kept wandering, kept registering the background sounds of subdued voices and closing doors and ringing telephones throughout the building, the very fact that they were none of her business making them irresistible. She hadn’t changed from the time she was Sasha’s age. Her mind preferred anything to the hot, droning monotony of postprandial mathematics.

I call him Joe so he won’t die . . .

“What do you think, Ms. Holben?” Pat said, catching her completely off guard.

“I think . . . I wasn’t listening,” Catherine confessed, making the group burst into laughter. “Further, I think that this class is going to perish right here if it doesn’t get up and go get a drink of water. What do you think, Mrs. Bauer?”

Pat hesitated, then threw up her hands. “Go. Go! And come right back. I mean it! What did you do that for?” she said as the last girl had filed out. “You don’t have to make exceptions for me, Catherine. I can pull my own weight. And when I can’t, you’ll be the first to know.”

“Pat, I did it for
me
. I’m falling asleep here.”

“Thanks a lot, Catherine.”

“That’s not what I meant. It’s hot in here. And they’re all pregnant. They’re supposed to be learning math, not physical endurance. I thought a short break would do us all good—even you.”

“From now on, let me decide who’s going to get up and walk out of
my
class, all right?”

“Fine,” Catherine said. She reached for a clipboard on a nearby table, using it for a makeshift fan and finding it totally useless.