Learning Curve

Emily pointed to a wire-handled shopping bag near the doorstep. “What’s in there?”

“Cookies and milk, just like old times.” Kay’s cheek brushed Emily’s with the scent of gardenia. “To celebrate your first day of school.”

“Oatmeal and butterscotch?”

“With extra chips.”

Kay did have her good points—a couple dozen of them, judging from the size of the bag. Butterscotch could fill in for chocolate, in a pinch. And oatmeal counted as nutrition. She could chew fast, shorten the visit and skip dinner. “Sounds perfect. Except for the milk. I don’t drink it anymore.”

“I remember. But it goes with the cookies.”

Of course. Just because neither of them would actually drink the milk didn’t mean that the afternoon snack of cookies would be offered without the appropriate beverage. It simply wasn’t done. After all, Kay Sullivan was the high priestess of family food rituals. She packed a picnic luncheon every Fourth of July, even when it rained. Spread coconut frosting on the Easter cake, which everyone scraped off. And labored over a jellied tomato aspic every Thanksgiving, though no one had yet worked up enough courage for even one taste. That, too, was tradition: the untouched aspic, trembling on the table in virginal apprehension.

“You know,” said Emily, “they drink tea with cookies in England.”

“I suppose they do.” Kay picked up her package. “It would be rather continental, wouldn’t it?”

“Come on, Mom,” Emily said as she unlocked her door. “Let’s live dangerously. I’ll put the kettle on to boil.”

She caught her mother’s quick, discreet appraisal of the empty walls and curtainless windows as they stepped over the threshold. “My goodness,” Kay drawled. “It’s so refreshing, the way you’re using all this natural light and the open floor plan.”

Emily bit back an excuse and led the way to the kitchen.

“It’s probably best not to invest in things that may be discarded. This is simply a temporary situation, after all.” Kay’s smile was a hopeful one. “Who could possibly know how long you’ll be here?”

Emily dodged the question and arranged the cookies on a paper plate in the center of the tiny kitchen table. She knew her parents didn’t understand her decision to dip into her savings to make the move out of their Seattle condominium.

A change of subject was called for, and Emily knew just the tack to take—her sister-in-law’s pregnancy. “How’s Susan doing? Getting rounder?”

Kay’s eyes went soft and dreamy at the mention of her first grandbaby. “Just imagine, my little Jack, a father.”

“Someone new for you to spoil.”

“I never spoiled you and Jack.”

“I was talking about Dad.”

Kay laughed. “Oh, yes. I’ll admit to plenty of spoiling there. Although it always seems to work in both directions.”

Emily turned to snatch the screeching kettle off the burner. Oh, how she wanted that for herself, that deep affection glowing beneath the patina of years spent rubbing along together. A husband might be a low-priority item on her list of short-term goals, but she intended to have her own glow one of these years.

She poured boiling water over tea bags in her two least chipped mugs, set them on a tray with some folded paper towels and paper plates and snuck a peek at the pig-shaped garage-sale clock before carrying everything to the table. Three o’clock—time to get this visit moving toward the finale. “So, let me give you the completely condensed version of my first day at school. It was great.”

Kay cautiously lowered herself into a plastic lawn chair. “That’s wonderful, Em. But then, you’ve always been able to find some degree of success in whatever you choose to do. All those different jobs—every last one of them.”

Emily sighed over the references to her short attention span and lack of commitment and then piled her plate with cookies and spooned three helpings of sugar into her mug. “Well, today, my successes included photocopying, collating and stapling.”

“My goodness.” Kay sipped her tea and managed to look impressed. “That sounds ever so productive.”

“It sounds as awful as it was. But it had its moments.” Emily wrapped her hands around her mug and leaned forward. “I wish you could have seen the students’ faces—all those expectations. I’m going to love it, I just know it. If I survive the planning, the teaching, the paperwork, the assignments for my university classes and all the extracurricular activities I plan to squeeze in.”

“Oh, you’ll survive. You thrive on hard work. You always have.” Kay smoothed a hand over the paper in her lap as if it were fine linen. “Now, when are you going to let me take you shopping and buy you something special to brighten up this place a bit?”

Emily blew on her tea to cool it. She wasn’t surprised by the shift in topic. Her mother was far more comfortable discussing homemaking than career planning. “Somehow I knew that’s where this conversation was heading all along.”

“Conversations are like the wind. They go where they will.” Kay rose from her seat. “Sometimes they’re wild and stormy, and sometimes they’re just as fickle as a little breeze, blowing every which way and never keeping to any one direction.”

“And sometimes they’re as steady and predictable as a trade wind.” Emily knew better than to assume that Kay’s meandering didn’t have an eventual destination. “Is that why you drove all this way out from the city this afternoon? Because you were looking for a fresh excuse to drag me out on a shopping trip?”

“Not entirely. I wanted to see for myself if my youngest chick was healthy and happy.” Kay leaned down and placed a kiss on her daughter’s head with a loud smack.

Emily smiled. “Definitely both.”

“It’s working out then?” Kay carried her mug to the sink. “This teaching assignment?”

“After just one day filling in at that naval base classroom in Naples, I knew I was meant to be a teacher.” Emily twisted her mug in a circle. “This is the one career that will make the best use of all my studies. And all my travels and experiences.”

She sipped her tea. “I wanted this assignment at Caldwell with Joe Wisniewski, and I did everything but hold my breath until I turned blue to get it.”

Kay found a dish towel to scrub over the counter. “How is The Wiz? Do they still call him that?”

“Yes, he’s still The Wiz.”

She watched her mother fussily fold the dish towel and then shake it out to start the process again. Emily was surprised to see a blush creep into her cheeks. “Mom?”

“Is he still a hunk?” Kay dropped the towel over the edge of the sink and faced her daughter. “He used to be. Is he still? A hunk?”

CHAPTER THREE

HUMILIATION ALERT. Did Kay know about Emily’s adolescent fantasies? Did she suspect they were the real reason for this student teaching assignment? Not that a tiny crush had anything to do with anything, Emily was quick to reassure herself.

“Well, is he?” asked Kay. “A hunk?”

“Oh, yes.” Emily sighed. “He’s definitely still a hunk.”

Kay slipped back into her seat and leaned forward in conspiracy mode. “Rumor had it he was carrying on with Ginny Krubek, all those years ago.”

“Ginny Krubek?” Emily frowned. “Wasn’t she the stylist at The Cow Lick?”

Kay nodded, and then broke a cookie in two and put half on her plate. “The Wiz came roaring into town on his motorcycle late that summer, looking like sin on wheels.”

“I saw him walk out of the post office one morning.” Tall and tanned, so dangerously different than everyone else on the street. “I remember he had a ponytail.”

“He had Ginny cut it off the second week of school.” Kay lowered her voice to a whisper. “That was the same week Patsy Velasco started telling anyone who’d take the time to listen that Wiz had a tattoo. Of course, plenty of people around this town had plenty of time to gossip over information of that nature.”

Gossip temporarily knocked Piaget off the list of priorities. “I never heard anything about tattoos,” said Emily.

“That’s what made Patsy’s news so interesting. She said it wasn’t exactly available for public viewing.”