A Shocking Request

While she waited for Amy to finish in the bathroom, Jenna went to the dark kitchen to put on the kettle to make a cup of tea. As she leaned against the counter, she saw in her mind’s eye an image of Grant leaning against his counter tonight, looking at her. He’d had the oddest expression on his face, as if she were a stranger he had just met.

The teakettle whistled and Jenna shrugged as she turned to fill her teapot with boiling water. Men.

“Good morning, Catherine,” Jenna said cheerfully as she walked into the main office of the Starfish Academy the next morning.

“’Morning, Miss Cartwright.”

Jenna smiled as she passed Catherine’s desk on her way to the copy machine. Here at the Academy, every-thing was very informal between the teachers and administrators. Everyone on the staff called everyone else by their first name, even their principal, Grant. Everyone except Catherine Oberton who insisted on using the same titles the children used. She had been Grant’s secretary for more than a year, had known him for almost four, and still called him Dr. Monroe.

Jenna had punched her personal identification number and hit Print to make fifteen copies for her students as Grant came in from a rear door that led to the teachers’ workroom. There was a copier in there, too, but Katie McAllen was hogging it. She hogged it every morning.

“Good morning,” Jenna said to Grant.

He halted and looked at her with a deer-in-the-headlights stare. It was so funny that Jenna almost laughed.

“Grant?” she said. “You okay?”

He ran his hand down his red tie. Grant always wore a red tie, but this one had tiny flowers on it. “Fine, great.” He nearly tripped as he turned to pass her in the small room and the toe of his shoe caught on the corner of a box of paper. Jenna put out her hands to catch him—as if all one hundred and forty pounds of her was going to catch all one hundred and ninety pounds of six-foot-one Grant.

“Easy there,” she laughed, releasing her grip on his arm.

Grant’s face reddened. “Sorry. Excuse me.” He turned again to pass her, and this time made it successfully through the gauntlet.

Jenna turned to watch him retreat. What was going on with him? He was always so in control. Grant Monroe did not trip on boxes of paper. He never had a hair out of place. The man was a deity.

Grant walked into his glass-walled office, and Jenna turned back to the copier that was trying to eat her original. She punched Print again. She had to finish up and get to class. She could already see uniformed cherubs in blue and green kilts and white shirts with navy ties hurrying down the hall to make it to their rooms before the late bell rang.

Jenna walked through the main office and glanced at Grant. He was sitting at his desk, but his door was open. She walked behind Catherine’s desk and stuck her head in Grant’s office.

“You okay?”

He glanced up and his pen slid across the page, dissecting some school form that Jenna guessed did not need to be dissected with a black line. “Fine.”

“The girls okay?” she said slowly, watching him.

“Fine. Great.”

She didn’t believe him, but she had to get to class and she didn’t have time for twenty questions. “Okay then,” she said suspiciously. “Let me know if you or the girls need something.”

He had righted his pen and gone back to filling out the form, ignoring the black line that now cut the page into two nice triangles. “Sure thing,” he said, not looking up.

Jenna thought it was odd that he didn’t make eye contact with her. They had always been good friends, and after Ally died, they had seemed to grow closer. Grant wasn’t the kind of guy to cry on a friend’s shoulder or reveal his deepest, darkest fears, but he knew he could depend on her.

Jenna glanced over her shoulder as she exited the main office into the hallway, and caught him watching her….

As Jenna walked out of the front office, it was all Grant could do to keep himself from lowering his head to his desk and pounding his forehead on it. He couldn’t believe he had tripped over that box in the copy room while gawking at Jenna. He couldn’t believe he’d let her startle him like that. He balled up the form he had been filling out, tossed it into the waste can beside his desk and grabbed another from a file in the drawer to his left.

Grant hadn’t slept well last night in the chair in the den. His entire night had been riddled by strange dreams—Ally and Jenna on the beach calling him. Ally sitting beside him in front of the bonfire he had built for them. An anniversary celebration. But, when he had turned to her to offer a glass of celebratory wine, it had been Jenna beside him. The dream had been so real that he could still feel her warmth at his side. He could still smell that slightly flowery-musky fragrance she wore that permeated everything around her, her car, her house and even her classroom.

The dream had made him feel badly. Not so much because Ally was gone, but because he was dreaming of another woman. Never in all of the years of marriage to Ally had he dreamed of being with another woman and it scared him. He and Jenna had done nothing in his dream, but there had been feelings between them. Desires.

His face growing warm, he jumped up from his desk. The late bell had just rung. It would be time to do the morning announcements in a minute, he thought, pushing aside thoughts of Jenna and the smell of her.

“The morning announcements,” Catherine, his secretary said, appearing at his side out of nowhere.

Grant glanced at Catherine with her tight chignon and wire-frame glasses. She was wearing a slim, dark skirt that fell well below her knees and a white blouse that tied in a big bow beneath her chin. It looked like something his grandmother wore. Though Catherine was the age he was, she always seemed much older to him. She would have fit perfectly with Grandma Cora’s generation, had it not been for her flirtatious manner.

“Thanks, Catherine. Have you got those attendance numbers I need?”

She batted her lashes. The gesture was so overt it was almost funny. Almost. “Putting them on your desk, Dr. Monroe.” She used the title, as if he were a world-famous heart surgeon who had gone to medical school for a zillion years rather than a guy who had gone to a local university at night to get his doctorate in education administration, while balancing a teaching job, a family and a new baby in the household.

Grant read the morning announcements over the intercom as he always did, ending with a quote from someone famous. Sometimes the quotes were serious, sometimes they were funny. Sometimes they applied directly to the pursuit of knowledge, and sometimes they applied to life in general, but everyone seemed to appreciate them.

The announcements over, Grant left the front office and Catherine’s adoring eyes to walk the halls as he did each morning. The remainder of the day was spent tending to his duties and thinking about what Ally had said about dating Jenna. Attending a parent-teacher conference and thinking about Jenna. Sitting at his desk pretending to be diligently at work, while thinking about Jenna.

It was three o’clock and the school day was almost over when he strode out of his office, having no real purpose whatsoever except to change the scenery. Maybe if he took a walk, he could get Jenna out of his mind. Get what Ally had said out of his head. All day he’d heard his dead wife’s voice in the back of his head like a never-ending audiotape.

Date Jenna. I think you’ll fall in love with her and marry her…fall in love and marry her.

The idea was utterly absurd, Grant knew that. The trouble was that at the end of the videotape, Ally had made him promise he would give it a try. She had asked him to promise her that he would at least try one date. When he’d heard Ally’s words, he had had no intentions of making any promises, verbally or otherwise. But the second time he watched the tape after the girls went to bed, the promise had just popped out of his mouth. Without thinking, he had said, “I promise.”

So, a promise was a promise. Obviously, that’s what the dreams were all about. That was why he couldn’t stop thinking about Jenna. Because he had promised his wife. The logical answer to the problem was to ask Jenna out, have a nice evening and then go back to his den and tell his dead wife face-to-face that there was nothing between him and Jenna but friendship. No spark. Ally understood “the spark.”

Grant found himself passing the nurse’s office, passing the library headed straight for the kindergarten and first-grade wing. Headed straight for Jenna’s classroom as if she were a magnet.

He rounded the corner, and nearly fell over Jenna, who was on her hands and knees on the floor of the hall, lining up wet paintings of what appeared to be apples…or maybe roundish fire engines.

Grant made a noise in his throat, caught off guard. He had almost stepped on her.

“Whoa,” she cried, glancing up, smiling. Jenna was always smiling.

“What are you doing?” He slipped his hands into his pants pockets, not because he wanted them there, but because he couldn’t think of anything else to do with them. Suddenly his arms were long, gangly appendages that seemed to serve no purpose but to make him look and feel awkward in Jenna’s presence.

She began to crawl along the floor, spreading out the paintings along the wall. “We were doing watercolor painting this afternoon. Nice huh?”

He glanced over her shoulder. “Nice.”

“Hey, I called about that software again, but I’m not getting anywhere. The guy said teachers can’t place the orders, only ‘the brass.”’ She glanced up at him. “Think you’re considered the brass?”

Today, she wore her golden-red hair in a ponytail the way his girls often did. It was the best hairdo he could manage when Ally had first gotten sick. He had branched out to pigtails, doggy ears and doorknobs, though ponytails were still his best ’do. But somehow the ponytail didn’t look the same way on Jenna as it did on his girls. On Jenna, it was almost sexy.

He stuffed his hands deeper into his pockets. “I’ll take care of it tomorrow. Leave the number in my mailbox.”

“Great.” She scooted along the floor, sliding more paintings against the wall, her fingertips tinted with wet red paint.

Inside the classroom, Grant could hear the children lining up to be dismissed. He could hear Jenna’s assistant, Martha, giving last minute reminders. If Grant was going to get this over with, he was going to have to do it now. “Um…” he said.

She didn’t seem to hear him. “Amy has soccer tonight. We didn’t find those Cliffs Notes for Hannah, so if you want me to, I can track them down tonight. I have a few errands to run anyway.”