Page 109 of Teach Me Your Ways

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CECE

Isettled onto the living room floor with Sophie. The Lego castle was finished and sitting on an end table in the corner. It was risky to move it, so for now, it was part of our living room decor. When I had gotten home, I had to slip into Mom mode. I didn’t get to be sad or stressed out. Sophie needed me to be her mom, not the chick that got busted with the naughty professor in her bed.

I got the email I knew was coming about an hour ago. Dean Carver demanded a meeting. Shocker. I knew my mother suspected something had happened on the trip, but I was not about to tell her all the dirty details. And certainly not in front of Sophie. I knew there would be an interrogation after Sophie went to bed.

“Alright, I’ll be back in a couple hours,” Mom said with her purse over her shoulder. “We’ll have tacos for dinner.”

“Sounds good. Enjoy your flight.”

Mom was taking advantage of the good weather to get in a flight. She was a good flyer but she didn’t take unnecessary risks. Fall weather could be unpredictable. She typically stayed grounded until there was little risk.

“Alright, kid.” I smiled. “Let’s get started. We’ve got a project to do.”

I spread out the construction paper on the floor with scissors and glue on the coffee table. Sophie knelt beside me. I had picked up some old magazines from the thrift store which we were going to use for pictures. Her first official bit of homework was to make a collage about things she loved. It was a way for the teacher to get to know her new students and the students to get to know each other.

Sophie was a bit of an expert in collages. The three of us loved to scrapbook. We had a stack of them documenting damn near every moment in Sophie’s life. When Sophie had gotten old enough, she helped. And now we had all the supplies needed to make a killer collage.

“Did you have fun diving?” Sophie asked. She was doing her best to cut out a starfish. Her little pink tongue was poking out of her mouth as she concentrated on her duty.

“I did. And guess what?”

“What?” She looked up, her eyes filled with excitement.

“I found a chest underwater.”

Her eyes bulged. “A treasure chest!”

I laughed. “Well, it was a different kind of treasure. It had old tools.”

She stopped cutting. Her little nose wrinkled. “Tools. That’s not treasure.”

“To someone who likes old stuff, it is.”

“Where is it?”

“It’s at my school,” I said.

“But you found it.”

“I did but it doesn’t belong to me. It will probably go in a museum. Maybe some of it will be sold.”

“Will you be rich?”

I laughed again. “Nope. It’s not mine. I don’t get the money but I get the thrill of finding it. That’s worth it.”

She went back to cutting. I flipped through the magazines and pointed out a few things. She was the one doing the cutting. It was all about her learning cutting skills.

After she had several images cut out, I grabbed the poster board. “Alright, let’s get to gluing.”

I handed her a glue stick and watched as she carefully applied it to the back of a starfish before pressing it onto the board. She reached for a cutout of a sailboat, studied the board, and decided where she was going to put it. She was growing up so fast. Too fast.

“What’s next?” I asked.

“The fish!” she said, grabbing a picture of a clownfish from the pile. “This one’s my favorite.”

I nodded and watched as she went through the process of studying and gluing. As we worked, my mind kept drifting back to Grady. I was certain the look of hurt and betrayal was going to haunt me for the rest of my days. I wanted to believe that he’d understand, that he would see I had not meant to hurt him. But deep down, I knew it wasn’t that simple.