“Where should I begin?” she asked.
“At the beginning,” one of the little kids said, and they giggled again.
“All right, then. I’ll start at the beginning.”
She described her first day on Beaverbrook Lane as a mother of six in 1967. She told them about the kids who lived on the street back then, including her own children, and what they did for fun. Kick the can and baseball and tag, how they rode their bikes to school and to visit friends, how she and the other mothers would stand on their front porches at sunset with a cowbell to ring the kids home for supper.
Their eyes went wide as she described the freedom her own children had, almost sixty years earlier.
“Enjoying a nice visit with your grandkids?” An adult voice brought her back to the present with a jolt. It was the lady who lived across the street with her sister. She’d moved here from some country overseas.
But what was her name again? Valerie? Veronica? She couldn’t remember now, but she made very good banana bread. She’d brought a loaf over, after she first moved in. And now she was recently retired. She’d seen more of this lady lately, walking her little Yorkie and planting bulbs in the front flower bed.
“We’re not her grandkids,” the oldest Mondello girl said. “We’re her neighbors.”
“Shouldn’t you be in school at 1:00 p.m. on Tuesday afternoon?” the woman asked.
Oh dear.Lillian clutched the binoculars hidden beneath the blanket on her lap. She seemed to remember that this woman had headed the local teachers’ union, until she retired last spring.
“We go to the Beaverbrook Academy for Inquiring Minds,” one of the girls said.
The woman narrowed her eyes. “Thewhat?”
“Our moms are homeschooling us,” the youngest Cleaver boy said.
“Homeschooling?” The lady looked aghast.
“We were all kind of stressed out,” the oldest Mondello girl explained.
“Yeah,” her sister added. “So we’re dropping out. For a year. Just to see how things go.”
“I see.” She exchanged a glance with Lillian, who gave a shrug that saidDon’t blame me—I’m just the living history lesson.
“Are you ateacher?” one of the boys asked shrewdly.
“I am now a recently retired teacher,” the woman said in accented English. “How did you know this?”
“You have that look,” he said.
“And you look suspiciously like a third grader.” She raised an eyebrow. “I can spot them in the wild.”
“Iama third grader!” The little boy grinned with delight, as though the woman had just performed a magic trick.
Then he rose, jumped off the porch, and took the woman’s hand.
“You should come talk to my mom,” he said, pulling her down the sidewalk.
“Why?” The woman looked bemused, allowing the boy to tug her toward his house.
“Because our moms are pretty good,” the boy said. “But we need a real teacher.”
Chapter Forty-One
Kiersten
Kiersten surveyed the chaotic mess of her once and future dining room. Textbooks, crayons, Goldfish crackers, scissors, glue sticks, water bottles, and pencils lay strewn across the table.
Piper and Rosamund had gone to Costco for more snacks and supplies while Kiersten had stayed behind to clean up the classroom after sending the kids next door to interview Mrs. Landry. She needed to talk to Mrs. Landry herself, as soon as she found a spare minute.
