For the Sake of the Children

She stopped in the middle of stuffing some child gear into her oversize purse. “The asthmatic kids. The mold. Why didn’t you tell me about the mold?”

Her accusatory question caught him as off guard as Kate’s rendition of “Happy Birthday” had. Patrick rubbed at his eyes, struggling to figure out how to respond.

“I thought Vann—” No. That was a lie. He knew Vann well enough to realize that Vann wouldn’t have immediately offered up that information without asking him first.

“Yes?” Now her tone had an edge to it, cool and crisp.

“We should have. I should have. I’m sorry.”

“Is this a cover-up? Am I part of a bean-counting process?”

“No! No, of course not. We’re just trying to do due diligence—”

“If you’re trying to do due diligence, how about getting in professionals to eliminate the mold? Instead of tackling a job that’s beyond an amateur’s scope,” she added equably.

“Can I take you up on that offer to talk about this Monday? Because I am not up to it tonight. Consider it a birthday gift.” Patrick added that last bit as a joke, but it fell flat.

Dana scooped up Kate and slung the strap of her bag over her shoulder. “Fine. You know where to find me. I’ll be the one spending two hours every morning and two hours every afternoon doing useless asthma tests that don’t really tell you much of anything.”

She marched to the front door. Patrick followed her out, down the steps and to her car.

“Listen, if you want, we can talk about this now.”

“No, you’re right. I need a weekend to cool off.”

He took a step back. “Sure. Then okay. I’ll talk to you Monday. It was…nice having you here tonight. You and, um, Kate.”

He hadn’t intended to say those last words and he wasn’t sure where the sentiment had come from.

The words had the effect of arresting Dana as she put a sleepy Kate into her car seat. “If you mean that, then I’m glad.”

She slid behind the wheel of her car, gave him a brief, inscrutable smile and backed around.

Leaving Patrick standing there, wondering, had he meant what he’d said? And what if he had?

CHAPTER FIVE

T HE FIRST THINGS that greeted Patrick when he stopped in Dana’s clinic on Monday morning were a Christmas wreath on the door and a picture of Kate and Dana, prominently displayed on Dana’s spick-and-span desk. He lifted his gaze from the photo to see Dana’s cool expression. Her message could not be clearer had she shouted it from the rooftops: I’m a package deal .

Or maybe that was just him, not her at all. Maybe she didn’t even think about him as date material and she was simply pissed about the mold.

Dana didn’t spare him much of a glance as she finished up with a freckle-faced kid. She jotted down some numbers in a file and tapped on her keyboard to enter the same numbers into an Excel spreadsheet—his spreadsheet, he realized, the one that he’d devised to track all the asthmatic kids. “Okay, you’re good.”

“So why do I have to stop by here every day?” the boy asked. “My asthma’s not bad. I haven’t had an attack in, like, ages. This is embarrassing!”

“Uh…” Dana shrugged. “Beats me, kiddo. I just do what they tell me to do. It’s probably for tracking purposes.”

“Oh. Okay. But can you tell ’em that the other kids tease me? And I promise I’ll come if I need to, but I’ve got my inhaler.”

Dana fixed an eye on Patrick but continued to address the boy. “Don’t worry. I’ll tell ’em.”

The boy left. Once the door shut behind him, the silence in the room stretched to the breaking point. Patrick cleared his throat and leaned against the clinic counter.

“So. You wanted to talk. I’m here.”

“Thank you. I know you said the other nurse did this, but already I’m getting huge complaints from the teachers and the parents about pulling their kids out of class. The asthma kids.”

Patrick considered. He’d never heard complaints about how Nellie had done it. Maybe Dana was doing it in a different way. “It won’t kill them. It takes, what, five minutes per kid?”

“Right.” Dana reclined in her desk chair, crossing those fabulous legs of hers. She folded her arms over her chest. “That’s five minutes for me to do a peak-flow meter reading and to listen to their chest and to note the results. But it’s five minutes here and five minutes back to class. That’s fifteen minutes. Multiply that by two times a day, and that means that each of those students is losing thirty minutes of instruction a day.”

Patrick found himself nodding and froze. Was he agreeing with her just because she was so damn pretty? He had to remember that he’d had good reasons for asking for this, reasons that didn’t disappear because some kid felt embarrassed by the attention or an attractive nurse was questioning the task. “Well, can’t you do it at recess? Or during rotation?”

“You want parents to really get riled? Take away a kid’s recess. Besides, you requested this twice a day, remember? That means morning and afternoon.”

“We have to be certain the students aren’t—”

“You mean, you have to be certain the school isn’t making them any sicker,” she snapped. “Isn’t that the bottom line? Liability?”

Patrick shifted on his feet. On the bulletin board, the middle finger on the laminated hand still stuck up in an offensive gesture. It annoyed him, so he scooped up Dana’s stapler and crossed the room to the board. He rammed the stapler harder than he should have, fixing the fingers.

As he pounded the last staple in, the door flew open, sending the Christmas wreath askew. The principal stuck his head in, gasping for breath. Harrison’s eyes were wide, his tie flying. “Ms. Wilson! Ms. Wilson, come quick!”

“What’s happened?” Dana was on her feet, pushing past Patrick.

“One of our second-graders…on the monkey bars.”

Patrick dropped the stapler and pursued the two adults down the hall, out the back doors of the school. A kid’s high-pitched screams punctuated the dreary gray morning of early December.

Dana’s long legs had overtaken Harrison’s short, stubby ones. Harrison’s potbelly slowed him down more, and now Patrick pulled up even with the struggling principal.

“What happened? Did someone fall? Do we need to call an ambulance?”

But Harrison couldn’t get the words out. He bent over, palms on his knees, and sucked wind. “She’s…on…” Unable to say more, he pointed a finger toward the monkey bars.

High up, on the top rung of the ancient metal jungle gym that Patrick remembered the PTO putting in when Lissa and Mel were in elementary school, sat the source of the screams.

Patrick drew to a standstill beside Dana at the foot of the monkey bars, joining a crowd of small-fry onlookers. The girl had one hand on a rung, and was using the other hand to shoo away the angry buzzing yellow jackets swarming around her head.

“Honey, honey!” Dana called. “Are you stung?”

“Get ’em away! Get ’em away!” the girl shrieked.

“Are you stung?” Dana asked again.

But the girl couldn’t answer. Patrick heard Dana sigh. Without warning, Dana yanked a rung and began the climb to join the girl, whose head poked through the cloud of buzzing insects.

“Okay, sweetheart, no—no, don’t swat at them. That will just make them angrier,” Dana cautioned. She took the little girl by the shoulder. “Are you stung? Let’s get you down.”