John Saul: Shadows

She weighed her options, then made up her mind.

“Mr. Hodgkins, I can’t come right now. It’s the middle of the lunch hour rush, and one of the other girls didn’t come in. Max is already glaring at me, and if I take off, he’ll fire me. Can’t you put him in the library or something? Just for an hour?” Her voice had taken on a plaintive note, and she instinctively turned away from the dining area and the eyes of the women who had once been her friends.

Blessedly, the school principal seemed to understand. Almost to her surprise, she heard him agree. “All right. I’ll keep him in my office. But try to make it within an hour, would you? I’ve got a meeting with the head of the school board, and I don’t intend to be late.”

“Thanks, Mr. Hodgkins. I’ll get there within an hour, I promise.”

She hung up the phone and hurried toward the pass-through, where Annette was trying to cope with the backlog of orders. Max was hunched over the grill, his back to her.

“Trouble?” Annette asked.

Brenda nodded, then spoke to Max. “I’m going to have to take off for an hour after we get through lunch. It’s Josh …”

Max glanced sourly up from the griddle where he was tending to a dozen hamburgers. He shoved his spatula at one and flipped it with a violent slash of the wrist. “How come he always has problems on my time?”

Brenda took a deep breath, wanting to snap back that Josh was only ten years old, that all kids have problems, and that this particular problem was cutting into her day just as much as it was his. Unless, she reflected darkly, he was suddenly planning to pay her for the hour she would be gone. Now that would be a first. But she said nothing.

Finding this job hadn’t been easy; finding another would be even harder.

Annette, sensing her distress, smiled encouragingly. “Hey, take it easy. You can have a couple of my hours tomorrow night, and it’s not like the tips are heavy after lunch. Do what you have to do, and screw Max, right?”

“Right,” Brenda agreed, her lips twisting wryly as she picked up another batch of orders and started toward a table next to the window. But screwing Max wasn’t the answer, because Max wasn’t the problem.

Josh was, and right now she hadn’t the slightest idea what she was going to do about it.

At one-thirty, with all but two of the tables empty and reset for the after-school crowd of teenagers, Brenda took off her apron and hung it on one of the hooks at the end of the kitchen where the lockers were. Max’s perennially angry eyes fixed on her as she started for the door.

“You plannin’ to wear my uniform on your own time?”

“It’s only an hour, Max. It’s not like I’m taking the afternoon off to go dancing.” She glanced down at the pink nylon dress with a too-short skirt. “And if I were, I wouldn’t go wearing this crummy thing.”

“That ‘crummy thing’ cost me fifteen bucks,” Max growled. “An’ I don’t have to provide uniforms at all, you know. If that kid pukes on it—”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Max! Can’t you be a human being for even five minutes? Josh isn’t sick, he’s just—” She floundered, searching for the right words, but Max cut in before she found them.

“Yeah, yeah, I know. He’s just too smart for his own good, right? ’Cept it seems to me if he was so damn smart, he’d learn to keep himself out of trouble. You just get back here in an hour, understand?”

“Okay,” Brenda replied, taking his dismissal as tacit permission not to bother changing her clothes. She hurried out the back door, the midday heat instantly making her break into a sweat that caused the nylon dress to cling clammily to her skin, and slid behind the wheel of her nine-year-old Chevy.

The engine ground disconsolately when she turned the key, and Brenda swore silently. “Please, please,” she murmured, twisting the key over and over again, and resisting the urge to press the accelerator to the floor. “Just this once, don’t give up on me.”

Just as the battery was about to give out, the engine caught, coughed grumpily, then began chugging. Keeping her foot on the gas, Brenda reached back and cranked down the rear windows, then leaned over to the one on the front passenger side. It was permanently stuck in the closed position, but she always tried anyway, on the theory that miracles do happen now and then, and one of them just might befall her ruin of a car.

No luck.

She backed out of the parking space into the alley, and a moment later was on Main Street, heading out to the school. Eden Consolidated, a group of mock-adobe buildings was huddled on the edge of town. Beyond it was nothing but an arid expanse of desert, eventually broken by mountains dimly visible through the constant haze of smog that drifted out from Los Angeles, two hundred miles away.

Brenda drove slowly, wanting to take a few minutes to collect herself before she had to face Arnold Hodgkins. As tempting as it was to feel sorry for herself, she resisted. She suddenly had an image of herself in an old Bette Davis movie. What was the name of it? She couldn’t remember. The one where Bette was a waitress in a crummy café in the desert, and there wasn’t even a town around it, not even one as worn-out as Eden. And Davis had never had so much as a single romance, except with a poet who didn’t really care about her.

At least I’ve been in love a couple of times, Brenda reflected with the innate honesty and black humor that had gotten her through some of the worst moments of her life, even if they were rats. And I’ve got a couple of kids who definitely aren’t rats! In fact, one of them’s a genius, for all the good it does any of us right now. And we’re not starving, and we have a place to live, and things could be a lot worse.

Almost to her own surprise, she found herself humming as she pulled the car into the school parking lot and made her way to Arnold Hodgkins’s office. But her composure deserted her as she spotted her son slouched in a chair in the corner of the principal’s office, his large dark eyes, as heavily lashed and deep as his father’s, staring sullenly up at her.

“Well, look at you,” Brenda said. “Sit that way much longer, and you’re going to get a hunchback.”

“Who cares?” Josh replied, making no move to correct his posture.

“I do, for one,” Brenda told him. “And until you sit up properly, I’m not going to listen to your side of the story.”

Josh made a face indicating that he didn’t think she was going to listen to him anyway, but straightened up in the chair.

“It was Ethan,” he said. “He started it. All I was doing was reading Les Miserables , and he came up and grabbed the book away from me. He wouldn’t give it back, so I threw my milk at him.”

Brenda’s gaze shifted from Josh to Arnold Hodgkins. “What does Ethan Roeder have to say about it?”

The principal shrugged, and waved Brenda into a chair. “Just what you’d think — that he didn’t do anything. According to Ethan, Josh had no reason to throw a carton of milk on him.” He shook his head helplessly. “Unfortunately, I’m not sure what I can do, since the rest of the children all back up Ethan’s story.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Brenda broke in. “Ethan’s two years older than Josh, and at least twenty pounds heavier and three inches taller. And I don’t care what other problems Josh might have, he’s not stupid. He wouldn’t pick a fight with someone as big as Ethan!”

The principal’s hands spread in a gesture of frustration. “Mrs. MacCallum, try to calm down. I’m not taking sides — I’m simply reporting what I was told by the other children. Nor is it the first time there have been reports of Josh behaving with unprovoked violence.” He paused, then went on. “Unfortunately, this is not the only episode you and I need to discuss today.”