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Mr. Burke shook his head sadly while Hayley shot Kevin a look. “A lot of ’em don’t care as much as they should,” he said.
“My uncle got me this huge toolbox when I graduated from college,” Nick said, sipping his lemonade. “He said it’d come in handy when I had my own place.”
“Your uncle’s a genius,” Mr. Burke said.
Nick grinned. “That may be, but I’ve got more tools in that thing than I’ve bothered to count, and I only know what five of them do. If something breaks in the apartment, I just call maintenance.”
Mrs. Burke dabbed at her mouth with her napkin. “Do you sing professionally, Nick?”
Nick shook his head. “I teach high school math.”
“Ah,” she said. “If only you’d chosen a better subject.”
Nick took a few valuable moments to finish chewing. “What should I have chosen?”
“English,” she said promptly.
“Mom is the head of the English department at Purdue,” Hayley explained.
“I guess I’d be surprised if youdidn’tprefer English, then.” Nick’s smile didn’t seem to have much effect on Carolyn Burke. “I’ve got a buddy who could chat with you for hours. I tell him I’ll start reading more as soon as he learns how to split a bar tab in his head.”
“You don’t read,” she said drily.
“Not as much as English teachers would like me to, no.”
“I guess you have those word problems,” she said. “Jack has to buy fifty feet of carpet, but the carpet comes in twenty-foot rolls. I always end up thinking, ‘Who’s Jack, and why does he need that carpet, and what color is it?’”
“And after you answer all those questions, Jack’s still going to have to figure out how to buy his carpet.”
There was no reply. Hayley’s mother had probably told the story of Jack and his carpet dozens of times; her words had the well-polished feel of a line that earned polite laughter at parties.Nick was quickly getting tired of being polite—he’d been used as a buffer, a convenient friend, and now a punchline.
Mrs. Burke said, “Now I know where my freshmen get their attitude from.”
Nick dropped his fork and turned to face the woman. “What are you doing to retaliate?” he asked her.
“Excuse me?”
“In your freshman English class, what are you doing to retaliate against all the high school math teachers who’ve turned your students against you?”
She leaned back just a bit, as if to regard him from a better angle, and Nick saw Mrs. Burke’s daughter in the smile that played at the corners of the older woman’s mouth.
“I get some attitude from my kids too,” he said, “but it’s because they think math is hard or because they think it’s not worth their time. So I try to make it easier for the ones who struggle, and then I try to show everybody how paying attention in my class is going to help them in the long run, when they have to buy carpet one day. And in spite of my best efforts, a lot of the kids I teach would rather be down the hall in my pal Gavin’s class for his unit onRomeo and Juliet. I hear he does a really good job.”
It was hard to tell, but he thought he saw her smile grow a bit as she turned away to reach across the table for an Oreo. “Romeo and Julietmust’ve been hard on you,” she said.
“Oh God, yes,” Nick said. “I still have flashbacks.”
Kevin said, “Shakespeare’s kind of a big deal, buddy.”
“I never really cared for him much,” Mrs. Burke said, and Nick barely concealed a smirk. “Give me Hemingway or Steinbeck or Fitzgerald. But if anyone asks,” she told Nick, “I love Shakespeare.”
“And I love all those word problems,” Nick replied. “Though just between us, I’ve never had to buy carpet.”
Nick’s eyes met Hayley’s as he reached for his lemonade; she was looking at him with the sort of mildly stunned wonder heassumed superheroes and mass murderers got when they revealed their secret identities. He had surprised her, and he wasn’t completely sure she was happy about it.
At the moment, he wasn’t completely sure he cared.
“I’m glad you stayed for lunch,” Hayley said later. His arm was around her shoulders, and he was gingerly working his way down the front steps of her house.
