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Pushing buttons rapidly, he waited for Susan to pick up. Lesson to self: never call your teachers late at night. They morphed into something weird after eight o’clock. Or maybe he did….
CHAPTER SIX
“PSST, KELSEY!”
Kelsey glanced at Josie as the two of them walked through the playground, taking a shortcut to Josie’s house after school on Thursday.
“I thought you were only going on Fridays,” blond pigtailed Josie said, glancing toward the bushes on the far side of the baseball diamond.
“I am,” Kelse
y answered, also glancing at the shrubbery from which another call would be forthcoming if she didn’t change course. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to see her mom; she did. But she felt bad ditching Josie.
And she couldn’t get that Don guy out of her head.
“We were going to play The Sims.”
Josie was close to Kelsey’s size, just a little taller. Even if she told Josie about her mom’s boyfriend, the two of them together wouldn’t be enough to keep her safe if that man tried to hurt her or anything.
“I know,” she said, trying to think about the computer game with its own world, where she built a family and even got to be the mom if she wanted. Or a kid with a good mom who lived in the same house with the dad and took care of the kids like Josie’s mom did.
“Psst. Kelllseeey!”
“Just tell her you’ll see her tomorrow,” Josie said. “I already told my mom we were going to swing and stuff before we come home tomorrow.”
And that was something else. She kept having to make Josie lie to her mom about Kelsey having the secret job helping a teacher after school on Fridays to earn money for a new saw for her dad for Father’s Day. Kelsey had dropped his old one and broken it one day when Josie had been over to play, so her mom knew all about it. She had no idea what she was going to do after Father’s Day, if Josie’s mom ever said anything to Daddy about his new saw.
But it would be summer by then and maybe they’d all forget.
“Kelllllssssseeeeey.” Mom’s whisper was so loud it practically had spit in it.
Kelsey didn’t really know what to do. “I’m afraid to tell her no,” she said to Josie, stopping to stare at the bits of color she could see behind the bush. Her mom was wearing red and blue today. She must be in a good mood. “What if it hurts her feelings and she doesn’t come back?”
“Yeah.” Josie’s face got all scrunched, the way it did whenever they had a problem to figure out. “I forgot she gets upset so easy. Okay,” she said, sighing. “You better go.”
With a quick hug to her best friend, Kelsey ran off. “Tell your mom I was helping Jennifer with a math problem. I’ll be there by four-thirty,” she called, using yet another excuse on the list. It was getting harder and harder to make up new ones.
“’Kay,” Josie called, walking slowly in the opposite direction.
Kelsey tried not to wish that she could go with her.
“CAN I SPEAK with you a minute, Ms. Foster?”
Turning from the blackboard where she was writing the next day’s date and the cafeteria lunch menu, Meredith smiled at the woman standing in the doorway of her classroom.
She pulled her short red tunic jacket down over her navy slacks. “Ms. Hamilton, of course, please come in.”
Bonnie Hamilton, mother of eight-year-old Eric, had helped out in the classroom during all the holiday parties. She’d made some killer sugar cookies for Valentine’s Day.
“I’m sorry to bother you after school. I know you must be tired, but Eric has Cubs on Thursdays and I wanted a chance to speak with you in private.” Bonnie Hamilton looked closer to sixteen than twenty-seven in her tight-fitting jeans, sweater and cowboy boots, with her long blond hair hanging loose.
“No problem,” Meredith said, pulling an adult-sized chair away from the multipurpose table along the computer wall and motioning for the other woman to do the same. She hoped she wasn’t walking into more trouble. “I’m here for at least an hour after class most afternoons, just for this reason,” she told her visitor.
Eric’s dad, a farmer who’d married a woman half his age, obviously adored his wife as much as she adored him. People enjoyed just being around them.
Meredith smiled now, trying and failing to think of any problems Eric had been having. Either in school or out.
Not that she was looking for trouble.
