The One I Trust (18 page)

I don’t mean it
that
way.

I mean I liked having someone there when I crawled into bed at night . . . someone holding me while I drifted off to sleep . . . someone curled up beside me in the morning and waking me with a kiss when the alarm went off.
That’s
what I mean when I say I liked sleeping with her.

I also happened to like sleeping with her.

Besides cutting coupons and making dinners, Emily spent a lot of time each day getting ready for the upcoming school year. Many times in the evening, the two of us would work on little projects that she wanted for her classroom. Often I would draw twenty-four inchworms or twenty-four skateboards or twenty-four fish, and then Emily would spend the next day coloring them and cutting them out—getting them ready for some activity that she had planned. We also worked on her bulletin boards, and by the time July ended she felt like she had enough stuff to get her through until at least Easter.

Emily was excited about finally having her very own classroom, but as summer ended, she seemed to grow increasingly nervous. She spent more and more time in her room at school getting things ready and less and less time at home clipping coupons and making dinner. Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night and find that she wasn’t by my side. I’d get up and find her in the living room, worrying over some activity or lesson that she was trying to prepare.

By the time the first teacher workdays rolled around, I could already tell that the days of her meeting me at the door after work and offering to make love before dinner were about to become a thing of the past.

I just didn’t have any idea exactly how bad it was going to get.

ON THE FIRST day that the kids were going to be at school, Emily got up at five-thirty in the morning.

“Why in the world are you getting up so early?” I asked, looking at the clock in bleary-eyed disbelief.

“I want to be there and get ready before anybody gets there.”

“You’ve been getting ready all summer!”

“I have things I need to do,” she said. She sounded annoyed that she was having to take time to explain so I stopped arguing with her and flopped back down.

About forty minutes later she gently shook my shoulder.

“Bye,” she said. “I’m leaving.”

I rubbed my eyes and sat up.

“Bye,” I said. “Good luck.”

“Do I look okay?” she asked worriedly.

“You look great. You’re going to do fine.”

She looked at me doubtfully.

“You will,” I promised, giving her a kiss. “Go have fun.”

She nodded at me resolutely and stood up, walking out of the room. I flopped back down a second time and went back to sleep until my alarm went off thirty minutes later.

At about four-thirty that afternoon, as Ray and I were just leaving the store where we’d spent the day, Emily called.

“Hey,” I said. “How did your first day go?”

“I can’t find my car keys.”

“Did you leave them in your car?”

“No,” she said. “I specifically remember putting them in my bag when I got out of the car.”

It sounded like she was in tears.

“Did you look in your purse?”

“Yes.”

“Did you empty your bag out?”

“Yes.”

“Did you look in your desk drawer?”

“Yes, Reid! I’ve looked everywhere. I’ve been looking everywhere for an hour. They’re
not
here!”

“All right,” I said. “Umm, well, we can be there in about thirty minutes I guess.”

“Okay.” She was definitely crying.

“Relax, Emily. It’ll be all right,” I assured her. “We’ll find them. Okay?”

“Okay,” she sniffed.

I called Emily when we were a few minutes from the school and let her know that we’d be there soon. She was standing next to her car, looking completely disheveled, when we pulled up.

“Thanks, Ray,” I said, waving at him as I got out of the car. I closed the door and he pulled away.

“Hey,” I said, putting my arm around her and giving her a kiss, which she did not return. “It’s okay. We’ll find them.”

I pulled out my keys, unlocked her car, and lifted her school bag to put it in the back.

“What’s this?” I asked, spying a lanyard in her bag and pulling them out.

“My school keys,” she said. Her keycard and ID badge also dangled from the lanyard.

“Come on,” I said, closing the door. “I’ll drive.”

She didn’t argue and I walked her around to the passenger side and held the door open.

“Thank you,” she said gloomily.

“It’s no problem, Emily,” I said, leaning over to give her another kiss. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

She kissed me back this time, but I could tell that her heart wasn’t in it. I gave her a little smile and then went around to the driver’s side of the car, got in, and tried to put my keys in the ignition.

“Uh, Emily?”

“What?”

I pulled her keys out of the ignition and held them up in front of her.

“Are
these
the keys that you’ve been looking for?”

She stared at them in disbelief.

“But I put them in my bag when I got out of my car this morning,” she finally said. “I
remember
doing it.”

“You were pretty stressed this morning,” I reminded her.

“I know,” she admitted, “but I specifically made a point of putting them in my bag so I’d know where they were.”

“Did you come back out to your car for anything?”

“I didn’t even have time to go to the
bathroom
, much less come back out to my car . . .”

“Look,” I said. “It was your first day, you were nervous, you had a lot on your mind . . .”

“I didn’t leave them in the car,” she insisted.

“Well, obviously you did,” I said, giving them a little shake.

She stared at me, perplexed, until she finally let out a long sigh of resignation.

“It’s not a big deal, honey. Don’t worry about it.”

She looked worried about it.

“Come on,” I said, handing her the keys so she could put them in her purse and using mine to start the car. “Let’s get back to the house and you can put your feet up and relax for a while. I’ll cook you dinner. The store I was at today had porterhouse steaks on sale.”

“Really?” She looked at me gratefully.

“Really. And I got some baking potatoes and some of those snow peas that you like.”

“Thank you,” she said, giving me an actual smile for the first time. “You’re the best.”

“Yes, I am.” I smiled back. “Let’s make sure that’s the one thing that we take away from today.”

Emily’s stress level didn’t get any better as the week went on. She rose early every morning, left while I was still asleep, and stayed up late at night working on stuff she needed for school the next day. When I got home each evening, it was invariably to find her sitting on the couch with papers or projects spread all over the coffee table. One of the things that seemed to be the most challenging for her was the fact that she had to submit lesson plans—online—for every single subject that she taught during the day.

“I know exactly what I want to do,” she complained on Tuesday evening. “But it takes me two hours just to get it all submitted the way it’s supposed to be. It’s such a waste of time.”

“Can I do something for you?”

“No,” she said, pinching the bridge of her nose and sighing. “I have to do it myself.”

“Is there anything I can do to help you?” I asked.

“Figure out what we’re going to have for dinner,” she said unhappily.

I took her car into town and picked up some burgers, but from then on I started buying stuff before I left whatever store we were working at. Ray was really good about waiting for me and if we were working at a pharmacy or something instead of a grocery store, he didn’t mind stopping somewhere if I needed to pick something up. I found myself looking for bargains during the day, however, and planning out menus for several days at a time. It didn’t bother me to take on the shopping and the cooking—it made things easier for Emily, which I liked, and it gave me something to do to occupy my mind.

On Friday evening, after her first full week of school, Emily pointed to the end table next to the couch. “Have you seen the stack of papers that I left here?”

“No.” I shook my head.

“Well, where could they have gone?” she asked. “They were here when I left this morning.”

“Did you take them with you? Maybe they’re in your bag.”

“No,” she insisted. “I left them here so I could work on them this weekend.”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you sure you didn’t do something with them?”

“What would I have done with them?”

“I don’t know, but they were here when I left this morning and I need them.”

“Why don’t you look for them at school on Monday?” I suggested.

“Because I need to have them graded by Monday and they’re not at school!” she cried. “I remember leaving them here this morning.”

“Just like you remembered putting your keys in your bag on Monday?”

She looked like she wanted to slap me.

“Speaking of which,” I said. “I have something for you.”

I walked over to the kitchen counter and retrieved a small bag that I’d placed there earlier. I reached inside and pulled out a small, magnetic key holder.

“Look,” I said, holding it up and shaking it so she could hear the new key that I’d had made rattling around inside. “Now if you ever lock your keys in your car again you’ll have a spare.”

The look on her face didn’t change much, but she took a deep breath and managed to say in a fairly calm voice, “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“But I’ve got to find those papers.”

“What are they?” I asked. “Why are they so important?”

“I told you last night,” she said impatiently. “We had to give a writing assessment to put in their portfolios and I’ve
got
to have them.”

“They’re first graders. How did they even write anything?”

“That’s the point,” she said. “We need something to show growth. At the end of the year, we should be able to compare what they do then to what they’re doing now and show that they’ve improved.”

“Well, just have them do another one on Monday and put those in there,” I suggested.

“I’m going to get in trouble, Reid,” she said. “They’re supposed to be
done
by Monday.”

“Should you maybe go look at school and see if they’re there?” I suggested gently.

She sighed.

“I guess I have to,” she complained, reaching for her purse. “I’m going to have to drive all the way over there and then all the way back . . .”

“Wait,” I said. “Why don’t we go tomorrow morning? Hale and Anneka wanted us to go with them to Cary tomorrow and we could stop by on the way.”

“Why are we going to Cary?”

“There’s some kind of safety fair or something with bike rodeos and bouncy houses and—”

“I can’t go to a safety fair,” she said. “Reid, I’ve got
so
much to do! I was going to start working on those papers tonight and then finish them tomorrow morning and then in the afternoon I was going to do my lesson plans and then—”

“Hey, hey,” I interrupted, putting my hands on her arms. “You need to calm down. Everything’s going to be all right.”

Tears welled up in her eyes.

“Emily,” I said. “It’s only the first week of school and you’re already running yourself ragged. You can’t work seven days a week without a break.”

“I just don’t know how I’m supposed to get everything done,” she said, looking at me helplessly. “I’m so tired and I’ve got so much to do . . .”

“Look,” I said, steering her toward the couch. “I want you to lay down and put your feet up for a few minutes while I work on dinner. If you want to work on your lesson plans a little bit after dinner you can do that and then in the morning we’ll go to school to look for your papers. You don’t need to be going back out there right now.”

She looked at me uncertainly.

“And if you don’t want to go to the safety fair tomorrow,” I said, “that’s fine, but I really think that you need to do something besides schoolwork constantly.”

She thought about it for a moment.

“I guess if we weren’t gone too long . . .”

“We can come back whenever you want,” I said. I looked at her for a moment. “I just want you to be happy.”

“Thank you,” she said gratefully.

“Now,” I said. “Just lay here and relax and I’m going to go make dinner.”

“What are we having?” she asked, lying back on the couch.

“Pork chops and a salad and some garlic bread.”

“Thank you,” she said again.

By the time I finished making dinner, she was sound asleep.

Unfortunately the papers were not at school when we checked the next morning.

“Where could they be?” Emily cried after we’d searched her room high and low. “I don’t understand this! Where could they be?”

“Did Julie take them home?” I asked. Julie was her assistant.

“She shouldn’t have, but it wouldn’t surprise me if she did. She’s constantly trying to screw up everything I do.”

“What?”

“She tries to show me up all the time,” Emily said. “She likes nothing better than to act like she knows how to do my job better than I do. It would be just like her to show up Monday with all those papers graded because she thought I wouldn’t do it right or something.”

I looked at her skeptically.

“She’s terrible, Reid!” Emily insisted. “It’s only been one week and I’m already so sick of her trying to undermine everything I do in here.”

“Like what?”

“Like I ask her to go work at the stencil center and instead she goes over to newspapers.”

“Maybe she misunderstood you.”

“She didn’t ‘misunderstand’ me. I went over there and asked her very nicely if she would go to stencils where I’d asked her to be and she said, ‘I’ve been working with first graders for over twenty years. I think I know where my time is best spent.’ She thinks my stencil center is stupid. She said, ‘Before long, you’ll see just how ineffective it is to have them doing that stenciling.’”

“Well, if she has that much experience . . . ,” I ventured cautiously.

“It’s not like I just made it up or something!” Emily exclaimed. “It’s one of the things my teacher did when I was student teaching and it worked great! But if they don’t have an adult helping them it
is
going to be ineffective!”