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Mason leaned forward to put his scissors down on the edge of my desk and crossed his ankle over his knee. I had his full attention. Maybe I’d said too much—he came here to help me with classroom duties, not to listen to me tell him how not okay his daughter was.
And what did I know, anyway?
“So you’ve always been a worrier,” he observed.
“I guess you could say that.”
“What kinds of things did you worry about back then?”
I inhaled, realizing I’d somehow made this about me, which wasn’t my intention. But it was too late to take it back. “I worried that it might have been my fault that my dad left, because my sister and I fought all the time. We drove him crazy. And I just thought—if only I could have listened better and been quieter when he was trying to take a nap, maybe he would still be around.”
Mason was quiet, so I continued
“I worried my dad loved my new half-sisters more than me and Jamie. And I worried about my mom, working all these late hours just to keep food on the table. I was one stressed out little kid, and my mom had no clue.”
Mason’s gaze was too intense, so I chose to look at his shoe instead, the one propped up on his knee. He absentmindedly ran his finger through the loop of his shoestring and said, “I wish you would have had someone to tell you back then that it wasn’t your fault.”
“I wouldn’t have believed them if they had,” I replied, meeting his gaze again.
He nodded. “Do you—do you think Finley might be pretending to be okay for my sake?”
I studied his face, trying to decipher whether he was ready to hear this or not—and debating whether I was the right person to say it. “I don’t know, Mason. I just know that it takes more than a few months to get over a parent who abandons you.”
He fiddled with his shoestring some more, scratching his chin with his other hand. Neither of us were cutting out leaves now. I had no idea what time it was—but I could guess it was almost time for the kids to return from music class. Mason seemed like he might have been on the brink of saying something, so I didn’t dare turn to look at the clock. Not now. “Thank you,” he finally said, looking up at my face. “For sharing your perspective, I mean.”
“I don’t want to step on your toes.”
“You’re not,” he quickly said. “Please, I have so many people trying to tell me what to do with Finley, and you’re someone whose opinion I actually respect. So I—” He paused, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “I just appreciate you opening up like that.”
“It’s good to talk about it sometimes.”
Mason pulled out his phone, distracted by a notification—an email, it looked like. “Hmm,” he said.
“What is it?”
“Got a job interview,” he mumbled into his fisted hand. “I’m not totally sure I’m going to go through with it.”
“Why not?”
He sighed. “It’s a remote position for an app developer on the West Coast?” Mason’s voice pitched upward in a question, like he was really unsure about this. “It’s not what I envisioned myself doing. They’re just the first company that’s actually responded to my application.”
“What’s the harm in doing the interview?”
He shrugged. “I’m afraid I’m going to end up saying yes when I really want to say no.”
My eyes widened. “I know exactly what you mean.”
“That’s how you ended up doing this fall festival thing, isn’t it?” he asked, nodding toward my chaotic festival map.
“Exactly.” I turned my chair toward my desk and grabbed a pencil, looking for a place on the map for the caramel apple stand. I still couldn’t believe he’d managed to find someone to sell them—I’d have to remember to thank his mom, too. I kept smiling as I erased and redrew a couple of rectangles, making space for my new vendor. “You know, most teachers are traditionally given just a single apple. Not an entire caramel apple stand.”
“Most teachers don’t—” Mason stopped abruptly, shaking his head.
“What?”
He ignored me.
“Say it,” I urged with a laugh, putting my pencil down.
